Chełm Lunatic Asylum

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The asylum Chełm was a psychiatric hospital in the town of Chelm east of Lublin in Lublin Region .

During the Second World War , after the German occupation, she was in the Generalgouvernement . On January 12, 1940, about 440 patients in the psychiatric institution were murdered by SS units. From 1940 the institution was continued as a fictitious institution. Under the terms of asylum Chelm , asylum Chelm or local police Chelm II with the identical address PO Box 822, Postal Lublin , the created central office T4 false death certificates and held an exchange of letters with relatives or care funders murdered Jewish patients. To this end, a Nazi special registry office was set up in Chełm at the end of 1940 - the actual seat of which was in Berlin - to conduct correspondence with relatives and welfare organizations.

Sick murders on January 12, 1940

On January 6, 1940, the psychiatric institution was visited by SS members and the patient list checked.

On January 12, 1940, an SS unit appeared in the morning and asked the care personnel to leave the clinic within ten minutes. Only ten employees should stay. In the afternoon, the staff was allowed to take the patients out of the house. Those who resisted were thrown out the window. Around 300 men, 124 women and 17 children were shot dead in front of the entrances.

The bodies were placed in makeshift mass graves the following day . In the spring of 1940, Polish residents were forced to bury them deeper.

The whole asylum complex was confiscated and later used as an SS barracks and military hospital.

Fictitious institution for concealment and enrichment

In order to conceal the fate of the Jewish mentally ill patients and disabled people who were brought to the Nazi killing centers in closed transports and murdered as part of the T4 campaign from summer 1940 and murdered, the institution was fictitiously continued. Under this name, the Reichsvereinigung der Juden (Reich Association of Jews) was billed for care costs, falsified death certificates from a Nazi special registry office were sent and inquiries from relatives were answered.

Due to an order from the Reich Ministry of the Interior dated August 30, 1940, Jewish mentally handicapped persons in the Reich were sent to central collection institutions (Gießen, Egelfing-Haar, Heppenheim, Andernach, Düsseldorf-Grafenberg, Hamburg-Langenhorn, Berlin-Buch, Bunzlau, Am Steinhof in Vienna and Wunstorf ) relocate. From there, they were brought to the T4 killing centers in closed transports operated by the charitable ambulance company (Gekrat for short) and murdered there. It was doubly disastrous for her to be Jewish and disabled.

After the institutions involved were initially unable to provide any satisfactory information about the whereabouts of the transferred patients in response to queries from relatives and the Reich Association of Jews in Germany, the Gekrat responded to the deportation of Jews to Nisko in 1939 and the deportation of the Stettiners in February 1940 Jews in Lublin pretended that the patients had also been transferred to the East, to the Chełm insane asylum, which has now been murdered and used as barracks.

Death certificates and expressions of mourning with falsified information on the cause, time and place of death, as well as other letters with the place of dispatch in Lublin, were sent from the T4 headquarters by courier service. In contrast to murdered “Aryan” patients, whose time of death was usually predated by 6 days up to 4 weeks, this period for Jews was regularly predated by up to three quarters of a year - in extreme cases even up to a year and a half - and the relatives received accordingly late first news of the “death” of the patient.

The letters contained in the letterhead specifying asylum Chelm , asylum Chelm or local police Chelm II , giving the address PO Box 822, Postal Lublin . The file number of these letters from Chełm generally began with an X and a serial number (in contrast to the regular killing centers, where, for example, A stood for Grafeneck or D for Sonnenstein).

A case study for the veiling is Rosa Katz from Bremen, who was brought to the old prison in Brandenburg an der Havel , which was used as a killing facility .

After the war, Viktor Brack and other T4 officials asserted during their trials that the Jewish mentally handicapped had been transferred to the Generalgouvernement. Post-war historians also frequently used the representation due to the forged documents and assessed them as true.

See also

literature

  • Henry Friedländer: The origins of Nazi genocide: from euthanasia to the final solution , 1995, ISBN 0-8078-2208-6 , p. 276 ff.
  • Wolfgang Neugebauer: Jews as Victims of Nazi Euthanasia in Vienna 1940-1945 , published in On the History of Nazi Euthanasia in Vienna , 2002, Ed. Eberhard Gabriel, Wolfgang Neugebauer, ISBN 3-205-99325-X , p. 101 f .
  • Rael Strous: Extermination of the Jewish Mentally-Ill during the Nazi Era - The "Doubly Cursed" , 2008, Isr J Psychiatry Relat Sci Vol 45 No 4, pp. 247-256.
  • Artur Hojan, Cameron Munro: Overview of Nazi “euthanasia” program in occupied Poland (1939–1945).

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Gelsenkirchen center: Nazi medical murders in Poland.
  2. ^ Robert Kuwalek: Liquidation of the Psychiatric Hospital in Chełm , 2006, Holocaust Education & Archive Research Team, accessed June 10, 2016.
  3. ↑ Artur Hojan, Cameron Munro: Overview of Nazi "euthanasia" program in occupied Poland (1939-1945).
  4. ^ Rael Strous: Extermination of the Jewish Mentally-Ill during the Nazi Era - The "Doubly Cursed" , 2008, p. 250.
  5. ↑ Wolfgang Smitmans: Rosa Katz. 2012
  6. ^ Henry Friedländer: The origins of Nazi genocide: from euthanasia to the final solution , 1995, ISBN 0-8078-2208-6 , pp. 276 ff.

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