Valentin Faltlhauser

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Kaufbeuren mental hospital on July 2, 1945, when American officers came to the institution
Irsee Abbey near Kaufbeuren

Valentin Faltlhauser (born November 28, 1876 in Wiesenfelden ; † January 8, 1961 in Munich ) was a German psychiatrist and involved in euthanasia crimes as a T4 appraiser and director of the Kaufbeuren sanatorium and the Irsee branch at the time of National Socialism . In addition to adults, minors were also murdered there in the children's department . Faltlhauser was one of the doctors who subordinated their scientific knowledge to Nazi race and health policy and alleged economic considerations and thus became criminals . Faltlhauser was indicted after the end of the war and sentenced to three years in prison, but the execution of the sentence was postponed and in 1954 he was pardoned.

School, university, regimental doctor

Faltlhauser, son of an estate manager, finished his high school career in Amberg with the Abitur . He then began studying law at the University of Munich , which he gave up after one semester. Faltlhauser switched to medicine because of his inclination and studied for two years in Munich. In 1899 he moved to the University of Erlangen . His focus was on nervous diseases. After completing his studies, Faltlhauser first became an assistant doctor and finally, from February 1904, an assistant doctor at the Erlangen District Mental Asylum. Faltlhauser his doctorate at the University of Erlangen Dr. med. , his dissertation was published in 1906. As a one-year volunteer , he did military service in 1899/1900 and 1903/04. From October 1914 to mid-June 1918, Faltlhauser took part in the First World War as a medical officer for the reserve and regimental physician of the Bavarian Reserve Infantry Regiment 20 .

Reform psychiatrist

Faltlhauser initially practiced his psychiatric work in a traditional custodial institution with very limited therapeutic options. This only changed when the psychiatrist Gustav Kolb , director of the Erlangen asylum, managed to implement his reformist ideas after the end of the war and, together with his senior physician Faltlhauser, to introduce an internationally recognized form of psychiatry with the concept of “open care ”. The concept of “open care” was based on outpatient care and the establishment of a social support network for chronically mentally ill people. From 1920 Faltlhauser exercised the function of care doctor in addition to his work as a senior physician, from May 1922 then full-time. P. 193 Faltlhauser was ultimately one of the leading reform psychiatrists and in November 1929 became director of the Kaufbeuren sanatorium and nursing home , where he also began to set up an "open care". P. 211f. In 1927, together with Kolb and Hans Roemer, he published The Open Welfare in Psychiatry and Its Border Areas . P. 185 As recently as 1932, in a textbook on psychiatric nursing, he preferred the treatment of the chronically ill and rejected euthanasia measures. However, Faltlhauser, who was considered a representative of open psychiatry, also pursued the segregation of the so-called " psychopaths " from the beginning : pp. 211f.

"[...] One of the most difficult questions that open care has to solve in psychopath treatment is the question of psychopath marriage. It is hardly exaggerated when I claim that 80% of psychopaths remarry a psychopath. It will be the duty of a welfare to prevent such intended marriages as far as possible, when they come to their knowledge. […] [Since even] tireless clarification [of no use here] may perhaps also be successful in encouraging incapacitation. "

Follower of Nazi ideology

After the seizure of power by the National Socialists , the concept of "open care" lost its importance. Control was the primary goal before treatment; the postulated “public health” took priority over the individual needs of the patients. Faltlhauser took over the racial and health policy objectives of the National Socialists. He founded a local group of the German Society for Racial Hygiene and became an employee of the Racial Political Office of the NSDAP . He was also an assessor at the so-called “ Hereditary Health Court ” in Kempten and decided on compulsory sterilization .

Faltlhauser was appointed to the “Reich Committee for the Scientific Assessment of Hereditary and Constitutional Ailments”, an institution that prepared child euthanasia . From September 6, 1940, Faltlhauser worked as a T4 expert . He processed registration forms from patients from sanatoriums and nursing homes and decided which of the patients should be classified as a "euthanasia case". Faltlhauser was directly involved in the euthanasia crimes. Faltlhauser also worked on a law on euthanasia (“Law on assisted suicide for the terminally ill”). This law was passed in October 1940 but did not take legal effect. P. 241f.

By August 1941, over 600 patients from the Kaufbeuren asylum were murdered in the gas chambers of the Nazi killing centers in Grafeneck and Hartheim . After the end of the T4 campaign, Faltlhauser used other methods of killing as part of the “decentralized euthanasia”: he had the patients starve to death or murdered with Luminal tablets and, in individual cases, with children with morphine - scopolamine injections. Between 1939 and 1945, between 1,200 and 1,600 patients, including about 210 children, died in the Kaufbeuren facility under these circumstances.

At a conference of the Bavarian institution directors on November 17, 1942 in the Bavarian Ministry of the Interior, Faltlhauser gave a lecture on his experiences with the administration of a fat-free special diet ("E-Kost"), which caused the "incapable of working" patients to starve to death within three months. During this conference, the Bavarian State Commissioner Walter Schultze called on the directors present to reduce the number of meals for "unable to work" patients. On November 30, 1942, Schultze finally signed the “ hunger food decree ”, which obliged the prison directors to “take the appropriate measures immediately.” Special Diet pp. 98–99 Faltlhauser, who had already introduced the fat-free special diet in Kaufbeuren, and also Hermann Pfannmüller - in 1930 senior physician and deputy director in Kaufbeuren under Valentin Faltlhauser - who had headed the Eglfing-Haar sanatorium since 1938 , were the protagonists of this measure. Pp. 227f., 429f.

Defendant after the end of the war

Faltlhauser was arrested by members of the US Army at the end of the war .

Four-year-old Richard Jenne was murdered on May 29, 1945 in the Kaufbeuren asylum under Faltlhauser's representative Lothar Gärtner. A doctor who had returned from captivity reported to the Americans about the killings beyond the end of the war. Two American officers and a photographer then inspected the institution on July 2, 1945, twelve hours after the last adult patient had died. Faltlhauser's deputy found her hanged.

A sister of the Kaufbeuren institution testified that she had to kill children on Faltlhauser's orders. As a rule, luminal tablets were given dissolved in tea, only in isolated cases by injections. The patients died after two to three days. Morphine-scopolamine injections are said to have only been given to particularly restless children in isolated cases. The dose was set by Faltlhauser himself. Pp. 227f., 306f. Ernst Lossa gained greater prominence when he was fourteen years old and murdered by two morphine-scopolamine injections on August 9, 1944 by order of Faltlhauser. His fate already aroused great interest among the American investigators, since he was not disabled.

Together with four other members of the prison staff in Kaufbeur, Faltlhauser was charged with involvement in euthanasia crimes before the Augsburg regional court . The subject matter of the proceedings comprised “participation in the 'euthanasia program' by transporting the mentally ill to the killing centers, as well as participating in the killing of adult and adolescent patients using luminal tablets, morphine-scopolamine injections and inadequate nutrition” . In July 1949, Faltlhauser was sentenced to three years in prison for inciting aiding and abetting manslaughter . After repeatedly postponing the execution of the prison sentence because of incapacity for prison, the then Bavarian Minister of Justice was pardoned in December 1954. After the war, Faltlhauser justified his behavior with a sense of duty, compassion and social consensus. As a civil servant, he was brought up to obey the respective orders and laws.

“In any case, my actions were not with the intention of a crime, but on the contrary permeated with the consciousness to act mercifully against the unfortunate creatures, with the intention of freeing them from a suffering for which there is no salvation with the means known today , to act as a true and conscientious doctor. "

Due to the decades of discussions about euthanasia, he assumed a social consensus and therefore did not doubt the justification of Hitler's “euthanasia” decree.

Stumbling blocks for three victims of Nazi euthanasia in front of the Irsee Monastery

One of the leading psychiatrists who tried to solve the crimes of Nazi "euthanasia", the long-time director of the Kaufbeuren district hospital , Michael von Cranach , does not consider all three arguments to be conclusive. The so-called “Führer authorization” had no legal force, the specific sequence of the killings spoke of the mockery of the argument of pity and there was no social consensus.

Faltlhauser died in Munich in 1961 at the age of 84.

bibliography

Fonts

  • Casuistic contribution to Huntington's chorea. Inaugural dissertation, Erlangen 1906
  • Mental health care: A teaching u. Handbook for nurses of the mad . Add. with Ludwig Scholz. 4th edition, Halle 1939. (first edition 1923)
  • Open care . Add. with Hans Roemer and Gerhard Kolb. Berlin 1927
  • The economic indispensability and economic structure of open mental health care in the present with special consideration of care in the city. in: Zeitschrift für psychische Hygiene 5, 1932, p. 89f.
  • Inheritance and race care. 2nd revised edition, Halle 1937. (first edition 1934)

literature

Web links

Note the source search: Strikingly often in the literature - even more so when links - the name incorrectly with Falthauser and not folding L indicated houses.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b half a year each; In 1900 he was released as a medical corporal in the reserve and in 1904 as a junior doctor in the reserve. See Bavarian Main State Archives IV ; Digitized copy (war ranking 3279, image 455) from ancestry.com, accessed July 29, 2019
  2. ↑ Ulrich Pötzl: Dr. Valentin Faltlhauser - Reform Psychiatry, Hereditary Biology and Destruction of Life , in: Michael von Cranach , Hans-Ludwig Siemen (Hrsg.): Psychiatry in National Socialism - The Bavarian Hospitals and Nursing Institutions between 1933 and 1945 , Munich 1999, p. 385f.
  3. ↑ Bavarian War Archives , War Rankings No. 3279
  4. ↑ a b Euthanasia in Kaufbeuren (PDF; 2.3 MB), in: Antifaschistische Nachrichten 12/2003
  5. ↑ a b c d see literature Astrid Ley: Zwangssterilisation und Ärzteschaft
  6. ↑ Valentin Faltlhauser: Die open Irrenfürsorge , Berlin 1927, p. 275
  7. ^ Ernst Klee: Das Personenlexikon zum Third Reich , Frankfurt am Main 2007, p. 144.
  8. ↑ a b c see literature Ernst Klee: "Euthanasia" in the Nazi state
  9. ↑ Heinz Schott and Rainer Tölle: History of Psychiatry. Disease teachings, wrong ways, forms of treatment , Munich 2006, p. 543
  10. ↑ see web link Petra Schweizer-Martinschek: Medical experiments on handicapped children as part of the Nazi "euthanasia program"
  11. ↑ see literature Robert J. Lifton: The Nazi Doctors - Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide
  12. ↑ Close-up of Richard Jenne, the last child killed by the head nurse at the Kaufbeuren-Irsee euthanasia facility. , USHMM, accessed February 10, 2012.
  13. ↑ Procedure Ser. No. 162 - Judicial and Nazi crimes ( Memento of the original from September 25, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www1.jur.uva.nl
  14. ↑ a b Cf. Michael von Cranach: The attitude of institutional psychiatry. In: Maike Rotzoll, Gerhard Hohendorf u. a. (Ed.): The National Socialist “euthanasia” campaign “T4” and its victims. History and Ethical Consequences for the Present. Paderborn u. a. 2010, p. 85.
  15. ↑ Faltlhauser in his defense in 1948, quoted in: Doris Nauer: Kirchliche Seelsorgerinnen und Seelsorger im Psychiatrischen Krankenhaus ?. Critical reflections on theory, practice and methodology of hospital chaplains from a pastoral theological perspective , Lit.-Verlag, Münster 1999, p. 45
personal data
SURNAME Faltlhauser, Valentin
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German psychiatrist and euthanasia offender
DATE OF BIRTH November 28, 1876
PLACE OF BIRTH Wiesenfelden
DATE OF DEATH January 8, 1961
Place of death Munich