Horst Schumann
Horst Schumann (* 1. May 1906 in Halle an der Saale , † 5. May 1983 in Frankfurt am Main ) was a physician at the Aktion T4 and Action 14f13 as well as in the Auschwitz concentration camp in human experiments for sterilization by X-rays involved.
Childhood and youth
Horst Schumann was born as the third child of the general practitioner Paul Schumann, who works in Halle adS. His parents' marriage ended in divorce when he was five years old. Since his father's second marriage, with which he stayed, also failed, he was practically raised by his older sister. From 1917 he lived in a private pension in Halle and attended the humanistic high school here .
At the age of 14, Schumann was already used as a volunteer reporter by government troops in clashes between workers' and Reich defense units that took place after the Kapp Putsch of March 1920. The lack of security in an intact parental home and his refuge in militant and camaraderie armed groups in his early youth suggest that the young Schumann was shaped in radical directions:
“I was maybe 13 years old when my father took me to the mutilated bodies of rural police officers who were victims of communist hordes. My father said to me roughly: This is how it will be for us when they come to power! "
Around 1922 he joined the “ Kampfbund Oberland ” and was also registered for a few months as a member of the “ Deutschvölkische Freedom Party ”. In 1925 he passed his Abitur and began studying medicine in Leipzig .
Professional and political career
During his student days, Schumann joined the NSDAP on February 1, 1930 ( membership number 190.002), like his father, who was a member of it before 1930. Schumann also became a member of the Corps Budissa , in which his father was already an old man . After completing his physics course , he continued his studies in Innsbruck and finally completed his studies in Halle in June 1931.
In 1932 he joined the SA . In the same year he received his license to practice medicine and from July 1933 worked as an assistant doctor in the surgical department of the University Clinic in Halle. His 20-page dissertation , submitted in 1933 , dealt with the "question of iodine absorption and the therapeutic effect of so-called iodine baths".
In November 1933 Schumann married Frieda Meye, with whom he had two sons and remained connected for ten years. In the following year he took up a post at the municipal health department, where he was appointed medical officer a few years later . On this basis, the young doctor began to systematically expand his career. He became SA standard doctor , deputy district chairman of the NS-Ärztebund , chairman of the amusement disciplinary court, district director of the NSDAP public health office and appraiser of the hereditary health court in Halle. Here he participated in compulsory sterilizations due to the " Law for the Prevention of Hereditary Diseased Offspring " of July 14, 1933 and was thus confronted for the first time with the National Socialist doctrine of the "extermination of hereditary offspring".
Action T4
Even before he was drafted into the Air Force at the beginning of World War II , Schumann had participated in military courses and reserve exercises in 1937 and 1938. After two months of inspections, he was assigned to the head of the office, Viktor Brack, in the Führer Chancellery (KdF), who was responsible for carrying out the T4 campaign . In contrast to his former classmate Werner Kirchert , Schumann decided, after the one-week period of reflection, to take on the task of carrying out the so-called " euthanasia " that Brack had explained to him. In his interrogation in the late 1960s, Schumann said:
“In September or October 1939 I was called by the Fuehrer's office for a special assignment. I reported to the KdF. There Brack [...] presented the principle of the planned euthanasia campaign to me. He pointed out that the intended action was based on an order from the Fuehrer and, on this or another occasion, sent me the letter of September 1, 1939 to Reichsleiter Bouhler and Dr. med. Brandt shown. Brack has sworn me to secrecy and pointed out to me that it was a secret Reich matter. "
Schumann's first assignment was the construction of the first in Württemberg located grafeneck for the mentally ill and the disabled. On January 18, 1940, the first transport of 25 men from the Eglfing-Haar sanatorium and nursing home arrived in Grafeneck near Munich, where they were murdered in the gas chamber . Before Schumann was transferred to the Pirna-Sonnenstein killing center at the end of May or beginning of June 1940, 1,239 patients were killed by carbon monoxide gas in Grafeneck under his direction . Before they were killed, the patients were checked by the prison doctors Schumann, Günther Hennecke and - from April - Ernst Baumhard ; some of them were given tranquilizers. The examination, which lasted from a few seconds to a minute, was used to "check the factual and personal correctness of the patients presented". In addition, conspicuous license plates were noted that were later used to falsify the cause of death. The prison doctors operated the manometer that let the carbon monoxide gas flow into the gas chamber. If no further movement was detected in the gas chamber, the gas supply was stopped after about 20 minutes. According to a publication by the State Center for Civic Education in Baden-Württemberg, the doctors dulled and commented on the gassings with remarks such as "Now they are falling."
Before taking up his position as the new head of the Sonnenstein killing center, Schumann completed a multi-week psychiatric training course with Professor Werner Heyde , the medical director of Aktion T4, at the Würzburg University Clinic .
Under Schumann's leadership, 13,720 patients and over 1,000 concentration camp prisoners were killed in the gas chamber of the Sonnenstein killing center between June 1940 and August 1941. After Operation T4 ceased in August 1941, Schumann was assigned to the Todt Organization from December 1941 to April 1942 and sent to the Eastern Front , where he was deployed to set up an emergency hospital in Minsk . In the spring of 1942 he returned to Pirna without having to work here after partial dismissal of the staff.
Action 14f13
Shortly before the official termination of Aktion T4, Schumann was appointed as an appraiser for a medical commission, which was commissioned under the code name "14f13" or " Aktion 14f13 " to select prisoners in the concentration camps who were unable to work or who were considered terminally ill. So he came to Auschwitz for the first time on July 28, 1941. Here he selected 575 prisoners who were brought to the Nazi killing center in Sonnenstein for gassing. He carried out further selections in the Buchenwald, Dachau, Flossenbürg, Groß-Rosen, Mauthausen, Neuengamme and Niederhagen concentration camps.
Sterilization attempts in Auschwitz concentration camp
In the autumn of 1942, Schumann received an order from the Führer’s office to test the effectiveness of sterilization using X-rays on prisoners at Auschwitz . It was about the search for an efficient method to prevent the reproduction of hereditary diseases and racially undesirable people through sterility. On behalf of the Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler , a number of doctors were involved in developing and testing various methods for this. For example, Professor Carl Clauberg , who was also in Auschwitz concentration camp, developed a method for non-surgical mass sterilization by injecting a chemical preparation specially developed for this purpose into the fallopian tubes, which caused severe inflammation. This led to the coalescence and thus to the obstruction of the ovaries .
On November 2, 1942, Schumann began working in Block 30 of the Auschwitz-Birkenau women's infirmary. After sterilizing around 200 Jewish men, he also turned to irradiation of female test subjects after the experimental station was moved to Block 10 of the main camp in February 1943. The testicles of the men and the ovaries of the women were irradiated. In order to find the optimal radiation dose , Schumann experimented with different radiation strengths and irradiation times. For a large part of the test victims, the radiation resulted in burns and purulent inflammations, especially in the abdomen, groin and buttocks, which were not only painful but also often resulted in death. In order to control his experiments, he had the ovaries removed from irradiated women by inmate doctors, especially Władysław Alexander Dering . Some of the young women died as a result of these operations. As a result, X-ray irradiation proved unsuitable as a rapid method for mass sterilization. Schumann described in his work "On the effect of X-rays on the human reproductive organs", which he sent to Himmler in April 1944, as a conclusion that the conventional operative castration method was safer and faster and therefore stopped his experiments in Auschwitz that same month. However, after he was transferred to the Ravensbrück women's concentration camp, he started a new series of experiments with children of Sinti and Roma .
After divorcing his first wife, Schumann married the office worker Josefa Pütz on September 11, 1944, whom he had met in the Nazi killing center in Sonnenstein. From this marriage there were three children.
War use, imprisonment and escape
In January 1945 he came to the Western Front as a troop doctor, where he was taken prisoner by the Americans, from which he was released in October 1945.
He moved with his wife to Gladbeck and duly registered with the local residents' registration office on April 15, 1946. Initially as a sports doctor in the service of the city of Gladbeck, he opened his own practice in 1949 with a refugee loan. In July 1950 he became a miners' surgeon for the Ruhrknappschaft, although his name was already mentioned in Eugen Kogon 's early work " Der SS-Staat ". An application dated January 29, 1951 for a hunting and fishing license to be issued to the city of Gladbeck finally led to his being exposed as a person wanted by the Tübingen public prosecutor because of the required police clearance certificate . However, the hesitant investigations made it possible for Schumann to flee abroad on February 26, 1951. After three years as a ship's doctor, the German authorities received the first time on 25 February 1954, the German Consulate General in Japanese Osaka-Kobe an indication of Schumann. He had applied for and received a German passport there. Schumann's trail then led to Egypt in 1955 and in the middle of the same year to Sudan , where his wife also followed him.
In the weekly newspaper “ Christ und Welt ”, whose editor-in-chief was the journalist and former SS-Hauptsturmführer Giselher Wirsing , an article appeared on April 16, 1959 about a “second Albert Schweitzer ” in Li Jubu, a place on the border between Sudan, Congo and French Equatorial Africa , and thus unintentionally led to the unmasking of Schumann. Schumann was able to evade an arrest warrant by fleeing via Nigeria to Ghana , where he established and managed a jungle hospital in Kete Krachi .
In 1961 his academic degree was revoked in Germany.
A reporter for the Daily Express discovered the Schumann couple in Ghana in 1962. A German extradition request from the previous year was ignored by the Ghanaian President Kwame Nkrumah , who counted Schumann among his friends. Only after his overthrow in February 1966 was Schumann arrested by the new rulers and taken into custody for extradition on March 7, 1966. On November 17, 1966, he was extradited to Germany and taken into custody in the Butzbach Penitentiary in Hesse .
Schumann divorced his second wife, who had already returned to Germany with his family in 1965, in September 1969.
The process
The trial against Schumann began on September 23, 1970 before the Frankfurt am Main regional court and, due to the numerous and sometimes dubious reports on his inability to stand trial, turned into a judicial scandal . Finally, on April 14, 1971, the proceedings were temporarily suspended because the defendant was unable to stand trial due to high blood pressure . On July 29, 1972, he was released from prison. Schumann spent the rest of his life in Frankfurt-Seckbach, where he died in 1983.
literature
- Ernst Klee : What they did - what they became. Fischer-Taschenbuch-Verlag, Frankfurt 1986, ISBN 3-596-24364-5 .
- Ernst Klee: Euthanasia in the Nazi state. The destruction of life unworthy of life. S. Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt 1983, ISBN 3-10-039303-1 .
- Thomas Schilter: Inhuman discretion. The National Socialist "euthanasia" killing center in Pirna-Sonnenstein 1940/41 . Kiepenheuer, Leipzig 1999, ISBN 3-378-01033-9 .
- Thomas Schilter: Psychiatry crimes in the Third Reich. Horst Schumann's career. In: International journal for the history and ethics of the natural sciences, technology and medicine. Issue 1, 1998.
- Stanisław Kłodziński : Sterilization and castration by X-rays in the Auschwitz camp. Crimes of Horst Schumann. In: International Auschwitz Committee, ed., Inhuman Medicine. Anthology, Vol. 1, Part 2, Warsaw 1969
- Robert J. Lifton : Doctors in the Third Reich. Stuttgart 1988
- Alexander Mitscherlich , Fred Mielke: Medicine without humanity. Fischer, Frankfurt 1978, ISBN 3-596-22003-3 .
- Hans-Joachim Lang : The women from Block 10. Medical experiments in Auschwitz. Hoffmann & Campe , Hamburg 2011, ISBN 978-3-455-50222-0
- Unknown man . In: Der Spiegel . No. 39 , 1970 ( online - Sept. 21, 1970 ).
- Action T 4 . In: Der Spiegel . No. 17 , 1971 ( online - 19 April 1971 ).
- Retired . In: Der Spiegel . No. 51 , 1972 ( online - 11 December 1972 ).
- The murderers are still with us. Nazi doctors: From euthanasia to mass extermination (IV) . In: Der Spiegel . No. 28 , 1988 ( online - 11 July 1988 ).
Web links
Individual evidence
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↑ Klee, What they did , p. 98;
Angelika Ebbinghaus , Karl Heinz Roth : Short biographies on the medical process. In: Klaus Dörner (Hrsg.): The Nuremberg Medical Process 1946/47 - indexing volume for the microfiche edition . Saur , Munich 2000, pp. 71–156, here p. 146 f. ( limited preview in Google Book search). - ↑ a b State Center for Civic Education Baden-Württemberg: "Euthanasia" in the Nazi state: Grafeneck in 1940 (PDF; 1.0 MB)
- ↑ Hans-Joachim Lang: The women of Block 10. Medical experiments in Auschwitz. Hamburg 2011, pp. 132–143.
- ↑ Bruno Baum mentions in “Resistance in Auschwitz” a doctor named Klodzinski, without a first name, as a resister in a concentration camp in the vicinity of Cyrankiewicz . Only in the adult Ed. 1962, p. 82.- Three more titles by Kłodziński zu Schumann can be found in the literature list of: The Auschwitz-Birkenau State museum in Oswiecim, ed., Auschwitz. Nazi death camp. Krakau 1996, ISBN 8385047565 , p. 317. (Later also published as TB) - See also the Polish Wikipedia
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Schumann, Horst |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | German doctor, involved in Action T4 and in human experiments in Auschwitz concentration camp |
| DATE OF BIRTH | May 1, 1906 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Halle on the Saale |
| DATE OF DEATH | May 5th 1983 |
| Place of death | Frankfurt am Main |