Herbert Linden

Herbert Linden (born September 14, 1899 in Konstanz , † April 27, 1945 in Berlin ) was a German physician, senior government councilor , ministerial advisor and, from 1942, ministerial director in the Reich Ministry of the Interior and one of the main organizers of the institutional murders of Aktion T4 .

Herbert Linden was in charge of the planning and implementation of industrial mass extermination. He gave the secret murder administration executive power as the hospital clerk authorized to give instructions to the sanatoriums and nursing homes. At the same time, Linden acted with Werner Heyde , later Paul Nitsche, as chief appraiser of the murder administration central office T4 .

Shortly after the euthanasia stop on August 24, 1941, Linden was appointed Reich Commissioner for Hospitals and Nursing Centers and thus advanced to head of German institutional psychiatry.

Herbert Linden, of whom there is no known illustration, is one of the leading figures in the Nazi euthanasia campaign , along with Viktor Brack and Paul Nitsche. He evaded a court hearing in 1945 by suicide .

Origin and education

Linden was born in Konstanz in 1899 and graduated from high school in 1917. He was then called up for military service, where he served as a musketeer in various army regiments. From October 16 to November 1, 1918, Linden took part in the defensive battle in Champagne and the Meuse, for which he was awarded the Iron Cross 2nd class on November 5, 1918 . On March 2, 1919, Linden was discharged from the army and then took up medicine. On December 17, 1923 received his doctorate he became Dr. med. ; on January 17, 1925 he received his license to practice medicine . On November 23, 1925, Linden joined the NSDAP ( membership number 23,958).

Linden was an assistant doctor from 1925 to 1928, then assistant at the Hygiene Institute and from 1929 assistant at the Institute for Infectious Diseases, Heidelberg. From April 1, 1931, he worked as a research assistant in the Reich Health Office in Berlin, before moving to the Reich Ministry of the Interior on November 1, 1933, initially as an assistant worker for the advisory service. Here he was given a permanent position on December 1, 1933, and in the summer of 1934 was promoted to senior government councilor and advisor for the insane in Department IV (health care and people care). His direct superiors were Arthur Julius Gütt , later Fritz Cropp , and from 1939 State Secretary for Health Leonardo Conti .

Linden was often committed to the National Socialist racial hygiene . He commented on the Nuremberg race laws and was active on the Advisory Board for Population and Race Policy of the Ministry of the Interior. Linden also played a leading role in preparing the illegal sterilization of colored occupation children, which was also illegal under the laws of the time , and was a member of the Reich Committee for the Protection of German Blood from 1936 to 1937 . In September 1937, Linden supported the racial scientist Robert Ritter in financing his research on gypsy racial biology by the German Research Foundation , whereby Ritter's research through the production of scientific enemy images played a key role in preparing the genocide of the Roma and Sinti ( Porajmos ). In a lecture on the subject of forced sterilization given in the Reich Ministry of the Interior after 1935, Linden explained:

“Nobody who dealt with the implementation of the law will dispute that the application can be harsh in individual cases. Nevertheless, the purposeful implementation is necessary [...]. "

In his article on German population policy , written in 1938, Linden took stock of the previous National Socialist racial policy and programmatically called for its expansion.

Planning and execution of the Nazi institutional murders

As early as June 1935, Linden took part in a meeting of the Hereditary Biological Commission of the German Community Assembly, represented by Wilhelm Stemmler, who carried out an investigation into the costs of medical facilities that was important for the planning of "euthanasia" measures. a. Paul Nitsche and racial biologist Ernst Rüdin also visited - and which revolved around the subject of the hereditary inventory of the mentally ill (registration). Linden also carried out various inspection trips as a Berlin institution clerk, during which he made important contacts with later T4 superiors such as the Heidelberg professor of psychiatry, Carl Schneider .

From February 1939, Linden was significantly involved in the planning of child euthanasia; From the end of July 1939 at the latest, Linden was also involved in the preparation of adult euthanasia (" Action T4 "). Linden, who came from Baden, played a key role in the selection of the Grafeneck castle killing facility , as he inspected Grafeneck with Viktor Brack at the suggestion of Eugen Stähles . Shortly afterwards, Grafeneck Castle was confiscated for the T4 administration .

In 1940 Linden was present at the "test gassing" in Brandenburg . The registration forms prepared by Linden and sent by his superior Leonardo Conti , which were used to precisely record the sick for the purpose of later murder - and which were sent under the RMdI letterhead to give them official weight , were decisive for the process of the murders of the sick, which began in January 1940 to lend. The registration forms filled in by the prison doctors were forwarded to T4 experts - some of whom were appointed by Linden - who now decided on life and death based on the files. In cases of doubt, Linden acted with the medical director T4 (first Werner Heyde, then Paul Nitsche) as the chief expert - and thus, at least in theory, had the last word on each individual killing.

According to Hartheim statistics, 70,273 people were murdered in the six killing centers in Grafeneck, Sonnenstein , Brandenburg / Bernburg , Linz and Hadamar . A Viennese nurse who went to Linden in 1940 to protest against the mass murders put it:

"Dr. Linden, a small, inconspicuous man [,] was visibly surprised when I entered his house. He told me incredibly amiably about the wonderful times spent in Vienna [...]. "

To the admission that Linden should at least have the fatal injections administered on site, the latter replied: "But, but, people don't get any injections, that happens on a large scale!"

Reich Commissioner for Hospitals and Nursing Centers & Head of German Psychiatry

On August 24, 1941, Aktion T4 was discontinued in its previous form. Shortly after the stop - only for Hadamar and Sonnenstein - (concentration camp prisoners were now murdered in the other institutions, see: Aktion 14f13 ), Linden was appointed Reich Commissioner for the sanatoriums and nursing homes . Linden was now nominally head of German institutional psychiatry, although local institutional administrators such as Fritz Bernotat continued to play an important role and the psychiatric university clinics retained their autonomy.

As the Reich Commissioner for Hospitals and Nursing Centers, Linden coordinated the use of the hospital space vacated by the murders together with the murder administration at Tiergartenstrasse 4 and was also involved in the general planning for a “new psychiatry”. Linden also played a leading role in the resumption of the murders at the Hadamar extermination facility - but now through lethal injections - which took place in August 1942. Historian Peter Sandner put it:

"Undoubtedly [...] [Linden] was a key figure in the organization of euthanasia, yes, for the period from 1942 to 1944 one can even say: the key figure."

On June 2, 1944, Linden wrote to T4 lawyer Dietrich Allers :

"Everything must be done by the prison doctors to reduce the number of mentally ill patients."

T4 Reinhardt Network and Suicide

In the report by SS officer Kurt Gerstein it is mentioned that a “Ministerialrat Dr. Herbert Lindner ”stayed in the Belzec extermination camp in August 1942. How Linden was connected to Aktion Reinhardt is not known, but current historical research assumes the formation of a T4 Reinhardt network and thus a fluid prosopographical interweaving between the murder administration T4 and the historical actors of the Holocaust:

“There are many reasons for participating in the mass murder of the Jews after the“ euthanasia ”[...]. [...] The motives can be determined for the collective of offenders as a whole, but not for the individual T4 Reinhardt men. "

From July 1942 to 1944 or 1945 Linden was an honorary assessor at the People's Court and here - in all probability - committed countless judicial crimes. Linden committed suicide in Berlin on April 27, 1945, in the last days of the Second World War.

Removal of the grave slab and abandonment of the grave

In September 2014 it became known that Herbert Linden had been awarded a state sacrificial grave in the forest cemetery in Berlin-Zehlendorf in 1946 , whereby he enjoyed a permanent right of rest with accompanying victim status according to the law on the preservation of the graves of victims of war and tyranny . Two local researchers, who became aware of the grievance, demanded that the responsible Berlin building senator Michael Müller immediately abandon the grave, which the administration refused. Shortly afterwards, the district councilor Christa Markl-Vieto, who was also responsible for the Steglitz-Zehlendorf district , decided to stop looking after the linden grave, which the Berlin Senate protested sharply in the district. Finally, Markl-Vieto had the alleged victim grave of the Nazi perpetrator Herbert Linden removed at his own risk.

Fonts

• with Wilhelm Franke: German marriage legislation: law for the protection of the hereditary health of the German people of October 18, 1938, law for the protection of German blood and German honor v. Sept. 15, 1935, Reich Citizenship Law v. Sept. 15, 1935 with ordinances, appendix. Text output. Bertelsmann , Bielefeld 1935; illustrated text edition [around 1936]; explained text edition, 2nd edition [1937].
• with Arthur Julius Gütt and Franz Massfeller : Blood Protection and Marriage Health Act . Lehmanns, Munich 1936.
• German population policy, the basis of our racial future (= people and knowledge. Vol. 12). Stenger, Erfurt 1938.

literature

• Götz Aly (ed.): Aktion T4, 1939–1945. The “Euthanasia” headquarters in Tiergartenstrasse 4. Edition Hentrich, Berlin 1989, ISBN 3-926175-43-5 .
• Götz Aly: The burdened. "Euthanasia" 1939–1945. A history of society. S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2013, ISBN 978-3-10-000429-1 .
• Sara Berger: Experts in Destruction. The T4 Reinhardt network in the Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka camps. Hamburger Edition, Hamburg 2013, ISBN 978-3-86854-268-4 .
• Henry Friedlander : The Road to Nazi Genocide. From euthanasia to the final solution. Berlin-Verlag, Berlin 1997, ISBN 3-8270-0265-6 .
• Ernst Klee : The dictionary of persons on the Third Reich. Who was what before and after 1945. Fischer-Taschenbuch-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2005, ISBN 3-596-16048-0 .
• Peter Sandner: Administration of the murder of the sick. The district association Nassau under National Socialism (= historical series of publications of the State Welfare Association of Hesse, university publications. Volume 2). Psychosocial, Gießen 2003, ISBN 3-89806-320-8 .

Remarks

1. ↑ Bundesarchiv BArch R86 / 409 Bd. 347, remnant files Linden
2. ↑ See Friedlander, Weg, pp. 90, 490; Sandner, 735. The NSDAP membership number. with Klaus Dörner (ed.): The Nuremberg Doctor Trial 1946/47. Verbal transcripts, prosecution and defense material, sources on the environment. Munich, 1999. Supplement, p. 118 f.
3. ↑ Sandner, 735
4. ↑ Bundesarchiv BArch R86 / 409 Bd. 347, remnant files Linden
5. ↑ Friedlander, Weg, p. 393 f.
6. ↑ Friedlander, Weg, p. 399 f.
7. ↑ BArch R 96 I - 7
8. ↑ Herbert Linden, German population policy - the basis of our racial future. In: People and Knowledge, Vol. 12, Erfurt, 1938
9. ^ Paul Weindling : "Mustergau" Thuringia. Racial hygiene between ideology and power politics. In: Medicine and Health Policy in the Nazi Era. Edited by Norbert Frei , R. Oldenbourg, Munich 1991 (= series of the quarterly books for contemporary history, special issue), ISBN 3-486-64534-X , pp. 81–97; here: p. 91
10. ^ Sandner, 248
11. ↑ Sandner, 311-313
12. ↑ Klee, 79
13. ^ Heyde indictment, p. 98 f.
14. ↑ Sandner, 398
15. ^ Henry Friedlander: The way to the Nazi genocide. From euthanasia to the final solution. Berlin 1997, ISBN 3-8270-0265-6 , p. 154.
16. ↑ Sandner, 373 and 386. If - as in the case of the Weilmünster state hospital - one of the prison directors refused to fill in the forms, Linden exerted considerable pressure to obtain the information. (Sandner, 390/391)
17. ↑ Sandner, 375
18. ↑ Sandner, 395. In addition, Linden received the responsible state medical officers from the regions in order to convey to them on behalf of the Reich Ministry of the Interior “[t] he initial information about the impending killing of the sick”. (Sandner, 385)
19. ↑ Quoted from: Götz Aly [Ed.], Aktion T4, 1939–1945. The “Euthanasia” headquarters at Tiergartenstrasse 4. Berlin, 1989, 71
20. ↑ Quoted from: Götz Aly [Ed.], Aktion T4, 1939–1945. The “Euthanasia” headquarters at Tiergartenstrasse 4. Berlin, 1989, 71
21. ↑ Sandner, 505
22. ↑ Sandner, 516 ff.
23. ^ Sandner, 609
24. ↑ Sandner, 627
25. ↑ Linden to Allers, June 2, 1944, BArch R96 / 3 RAG, Viktor Brack explained in his trial that Linden was "always there with all these things". (Sandner, 627)
26. ↑ http://www.ns-archiv.de/verendung/gerstein/gerstein-bericht.php <Historian Christopher R. Browning describes the Gerstein Report in a source review as "unquestionably problematic", because it is partly exaggerated, but in its central part Statements (testimony of murders in Belzec) as true and correct. http://hdot.org/en/trial/defense/browning/541.html (July 10, 2014)
27. ^ Sara Berger, Experts in Destruction: The T4 Reinhardt Network in the Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka camps. Hamburg, 2013, 395
28. ^ Standesamt Berlin-Zehlendorf, death certificate 977 of May 11, 1945. See Henry Friedlander, p. 90.
29. ↑ Andreas Kopietz: A lot of honor for a mass murderer in Berlin. In: Berliner Zeitung . 2nd September 2014.
30. ↑ Andreas Kopietz: Senate wants to continue looking after the Nazi grave. In: Berliner Zeitung . 5th September 2014.
31. ↑ Andreas Kopietz: Now grass should grow over the mass murder grave (comment). In: Berliner Zeitung . September 12, 2014