Grafeneck Castle

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Grafeneck Castle, 2010
Grafeneck Castle, 2007

Grafeneck Castle is a castle near Gomadingen , in the immediate vicinity of the main and state stud Marbach , about 25 kilometers southeast of Tübingen between Engstingen and Münsingen . In National Socialist Germany it was used as a Grafeneck killing facility . Over 10,000 people were killed in 1940.

history

Initially there was a high medieval castle complex here. The dukes of Württemberg built a hunting lodge around 1560.

Duke Carl Eugen von Württemberg used the property as a summer residence and expanded it into a baroque palace with an opera house and numerous pleasure buildings between 1762 and 1772. The opera house was later moved to Ludwigsburg and the palace was given up.

In the 19th century, individual buildings were demolished and the castle was used by the forestry office. In 1928, the Samaritan Foundation bought the castle, set up a home for the handicapped and in 1930 opened its own cemetery. According to instructions from the Württemberg Ministry of the Interior, the institution was relocated to Reutte Monastery in Upper Swabia when the Second World War broke out.

The first murders in the Third Reich as part of Operation T4 , the so-called euthanasia , began here on January 18, 1940, in a gas chamber disguised as a shower room, which was located in a "garage". The prison doctor let carbon monoxide flow in. The bodies were cremated in the crematorium. In December 1940, after the events in the institution became public, the killing institution was closed at Heinrich Himmler's instigation , and the murders of the sick continued in the Hadamar killing institution . Industrial killing began in Grafeneck and the method was then continued in the other institutions and in concentration camps.

The house was later used to house children from the Kinderlandverschickung .

Today Grafeneck Castle is an institution for disabled people and social psychiatry. It houses the Grafeneck Memorial and has been a documentation center since October 2005. The garage was demolished in the 1960s.

literature

  • Verena Christ: Grafeneck perpetrator. Four doctors as defendants in the Tübingen "euthanasia" trial 1949 , Steiner, Stuttgart 2020 (Contubernium, Volume 88), ISBN 978-3-515-12516-1 .
  • Walther-Gerd Fleck: Grafeneck and Einsiedel. 2 pleasure palaces of Duke Carl Eugen von Württemberg . Stuttgart 1986.
  • Franka Rößner: "In the service of the weak". The Samariterstiftung between consent, compromise and protest 1930 - 1950 , Senner, Nürtingen 2011, ISBN 3-922849-29-6 .
  • Günter Schmitt : Burgenführer Schwäbische Alb , Vol. 2: Alb Mitte-Süd: Hiking and discovering between Ulm and Sigmaringen . Biberacher Verlagsdruckerei, Biberach an der Riß 1989, ISBN 3-924489-45-9 , pp. 133-142.
  • Thomas Stöckle: Grafeneck 1940. The euthanasia crimes in Southwest Germany, 3rd edition, Silberburg-Verl., Tübingen 2012, ISBN 978-3-87407-507-7 .

Web links

Commons : Schloss Grafeneck  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Footnotes

  1. ↑ Brigitte Templin and Ingaburgh Klatt: " Erase my eyes ..." - Life and violent death of the four Lübeck clergy during the National Socialist era. Special print: Publisher Burgkloster zu Lübeck / Office for Culture of the Hanseatic City of Lübeck, Lübeck 1994, pp. 51–53 (Letter from Regional Bishop Theophil Wurm to Reich Minister of the Interior Frick on the euthanasia of mentally handicapped people from July 19, 1940)
  2. ↑ "euthanasia" crimes in southwest Germany - Grafeneck 1940 , accessed on September 10 2018th
  3. ↑ Norbert Frei : Introduction. In: Norbert Frei (Hrsg.): Medicine and health policy in the Nazi era. R. Oldenbourg Verlag, Munich 1991 (= writings of the quarterly books for contemporary history. Special issue), ISBN 3-486-64534-X , p. 7–32, here: p. 28.
  4. ↑ Kurt Nowak : Resistance, Approval, Acceptance. The behavior of the population towards "euthanasia". In: Norbert Frei (Hrsg.): Medicine and health policy in the Nazi era. R. Oldenbourg Verlag, Munich 1991 (= writings of the quarterly books for contemporary history. Special issue), ISBN 3-486-64534-X , pp. 217–233, pp. 235–251, here: p. 242.
  5. ^ Grafeneck - Past and Present , accessed on February 16, 2018.

Coordinates: 48 ° 23 ′ 33.4 "  N , 9 ° 25 ′ 46.7"  E