Viktor Brack

Viktor Brack as a defendant in the Nuremberg medical trial

Viktor Hermann Brack (born November 9, 1904 in Haaren ; † June 2, 1948 in the Landsberg War Crimes Prison ) was a German trained economist and political functionary during the Nazi era . As such, he was Oberdienstleiter of the Office II in the Chancellery of the Führer (KdF) and SS-Oberführer . As one of the main organizers of the Nazi murders , the so-called " Aktion T4 ", and of medical experiments in concentration campshe was sentenced to death in the Nuremberg Doctors Trial in 1947 and executed in 1948.

Life

Youth and vocational training

Brack's father was a doctor from Göttingen , his mother a Catholic Volga German from Saratow . After attending the secondary school in Bad Dürkheim and an upper secondary school in Ludwigshafen , the family moved to Munich in 1921 , where Brack passed the matriculation examination at the Luitpold secondary school in 1923. As early as 1922 he had joined the Reichswehr as a temporary volunteer and was part of a training unit under Eduard Dietl . According to his own statements, he was deployed as a member of the free corps during the march on the Feldherrnhalle during the Hitler putsch .

Brack first studied agriculture at the Technical University of Munich , after three semesters he switched to economics because of poor career prospects. In 1928 he graduated with a degree in economics. Brack's own statements about his professional activity between 1928 and 1932 are partly contradicting: For example, he claims to have continued to attend lectures at the Munich University, worked as a "high-speed driver" for BMW, worked as an engineer for a machine factory near Tübingen and as Chauffeur was employed for his father's sanatorium.

In 1934 Brack married Thea Ober. The marriage had four children.

Member of the NSDAP and the SS

On December 1, 1929, Brack joined the NSDAP ( membership number 173.388) and SS (SS number 1.940) . In 1930 he was commissioned by the later SS-Oberst-Gruppenführer Sepp Dietrich to motorize the 1st SS standard . In the same year Brack served Heinrich Himmler temporarily as a chauffeur. According to Brack's testimony in Nuremberg, his father had been an obstetrician during the delivery of one of Himmler's children; the families had been friends since then.

When Brack became unemployed in 1932, he found employment in the Munich party headquarters of the NSDAP, the Brown House . He worked as a staff leader for the Reich manager Philipp Bouhler . After taking power , Adolf Hitler commissioned Bouhler in 1934 to set up the Führer’s Chancellery (KdF) in Berlin . This relatively small office took care of Hitler's private affairs, processed petitions addressed to him and issued pardons. Bouhler took Brack with him to Berlin. From 1936 Brack was Bouhler's deputy and also chief service officer of Hauptamt II of the KdF, which was responsible for state and party affairs.

From April 1, 1938 until the end of the Second World War , Brack took over as Reichsfachamtsleiter the management of the German Cyclists' Association and the specialized office for cycling in the National Socialist Reichsbund for physical exercises and was also appointed leader of the professional association of German cycling. He thus united the top positions of German amateur and professional cycling in one person. In this role, Brack had false reports spread about the ominous death of racing cyclist Albert Richter ; whether he personally, however, as often assumed, ordered the killing of the judge cannot be proven.

Brack was regularly promoted in the SS: as early as 1932 to SS-Sturmführer , in 1933 with the omission of a rank to SS-Sturmhauptführer, 1935 to SS-Sturmbannführer , 1936 to SS-Obersturmbannführer , 1937 to SS-Standartenführer and finally on November 9, 1940 to SS-Oberführer .

Co-organizer of the T4 campaign

In the summer of 1939, Hitler verbally commissioned the Führer Chancellery (KdF) with the preparation and implementation of the so-called " Action T4 ", the mass killing of the mentally ill and disabled. The KdF had already been entrusted with the so-called child “euthanasia” . A written commission from Hitler to grant the "mercy death" is dated September 1, 1939, but was probably not issued until October 1939. The letter names Hitler's attendant Karl Brandt and the head of the KdF, Philipp Bouhler, as "euthanasia" officers. Bouhler largely transferred the management of Aktion T4 to Viktor Brack. Both took part in a meeting at which, presumably at the end of July 1939, several psychiatrists were involved in the “euthanasia” plans. These physicians, including Werner Heyde and Paul Nitsche , set up the system of T4 experts who were convened by the T4 central office and who had to decide on the selection of the patients to be killed. Brack was responsible for the selection and recruitment of staff both during the preparation and during the implementation of Action T4 . He also participated in October 1939 on the determination of Castle Grafeneck to grafeneck and was in January 1940 at a "trial gassing" in Brandenburg present. Several cover organizations were founded to cover up the KdF's responsibility for the “ destruction of life unworthy of life ”. Brack used the code name Jennerwein when he worked for these front organizations.

In January 1940 the killing of the sick began in the gas chambers of the Brandenburg and Grafeneck institutions. On April 3, 1940, Brack gave a lecture at the German Community Day : 30 to 40 percent of the approximately 300,000 mentally ill in the German Reich were "asocial" or "unworthy of life" elements. These are now being transferred to “primitive accommodation”, which means that higher mortality is to be expected. Brack asked the approximately 200 representatives of the municipalities to calm the population down and to prepare for the arrival of urns. Despite extensive efforts to keep Operation T4 secret, rumors kept leaking out: On December 19, 1940, Himmler informed Brack in writing that the true purpose of the Grafeneck killing center had become known.

Under the name “ Sonderbehehandling 14f13 ”, the T4 campaign was probably extended to the prisoners in the concentration camps at the end of March 1941. Brack was probably the liaison between Himmler and the front organizations of Aktion T4 . On April 23, 1941, Viktor Brack and Werner Heyde spoke to the Reich Minister of Justice at a meeting of the Attorneys General and Presidents of the Higher Regional Courts. They presented Aktion T4 , showed Hitler's letter from 1939 and mentioned that Hitler had refused to pass a formal law on "euthanasia" for reasons of foreign policy.

Transfer of personnel and technology to Aktion Reinhard

On August 24, 1941, Aktion T4 was discontinued in its previous form on Hitler's orders. In fact, the killing of disabled people through systematic malnutrition and drug overdoses continued until the end of the war . This second phase of Nazi euthanasia became known as “ Aktion Brandt ”.

Probably more than 100 members of the T4 staff were transferred to the Aktion Reinhardt extermination camps in Poland by the summer of 1942 . This group of people included Christian Wirth , Franz Stangl , Irmfried Eberl and Erich Hermann Bauer . The gas chambers used in Aktion Reinhard, as well as the methods used to deceive the victims, largely corresponded to the practices in Aktion T4.

Numerous connections to Aktion Reinhard can be proven for Brack: as early as September 1941 he visited Odilo Globocnik in Lublin. On December 14, 1941, he spoke with Himmler, presumably about the planned murder of European Jews with the help of poison gas. In April 1942, Brack and Bouhler met Globocnik in Berlin. According to statements by Josef Oberhauser , Brack stayed in Lublin again in May 1942 to discuss with Globocnik the relocation of further T4 personnel. On June 23, 1942, Brack Himmler reported on the transfer of personnel to Lublin.

X-ray castration experiments

As early as March 28, 1941, Brack personally presented Himmler with a "report on the experiments relating to X-ray castration ". The report Brack came to the conclusion "that is possible under the current state of the X-ray technology and research it readily perform mass sterilization by X-rays." About a year later, in the previously mentioned letter of 23 June 1942 made Brack Himmler again attentive to his suggestions: “In around 10 million European Jews, I feel that there are at least 2-3 million men and women who are very fit for work. In view of the extraordinary difficulties which the workers question is causing us, I take the position that these 2-3 million should be raised and preserved in any case. However, that only works if you make them incapable of reproduction at the same time. ” In July 1942, Himmler decided to have attempts at forced sterilization carried out in Auschwitz. From autumn 1942, Horst Schumann , previously a doctor at Aktion T4, carried out experiments on x-ray castration in the Birkenau women's camp .

In August 1942 Brack left the Fuehrer's office and joined the 7th SS Volunteer Mountain Division “Prinz Eugen” as a Untersturmführer of the Waffen SS . Later he was assigned to the V SS Mountain Corps, probably as an orderly officer. In November 1944 he was reassigned to the Führer’s office. According to Werner Best , Brack was a member of a commission headed by Bouhler, which in January 1945 was looking for German soldiers who were fit for the front in Denmark .

Defendant in the Nuremberg medical trial

Viktor Brack at the Nuremberg Doctors Trial

In April 1945, Brack and other members of the Fiihrer's office, including Werner Blankenburg and Albert Bormann , flown out to Bavaria. There he was arrested by the Americans on May 20, 1946, was imprisoned in Traunstein , and then interned with his cousin Reinhold Vorberg in the Moosburg camp. As one of three non-doctors, Viktor Brack was indicted in the Nuremberg doctors' trial after the end of the war . His participation in "Aktion T4" was likely to have been decisive for the selection of Brack as a defendant: after Philipp Bouhler's suicide, he and Karl Brandt were considered to be the highest-ranking person responsible for Nazi euthanasia.

In interrogations prior to the medical trial, Brack tried to deny his proposals for x-ray castration. When the American interrogator presented him with documents, he broke down crying. He tried to downplay his own role in Aktion T4: An organizational scheme drawn by Brack shows him in a position apart from the decision-making lines. In court he also pleaded that the moral principle of compassion and humane considerations had spoken in favor of Nazi euthanasia. In March 1947, Philipp Bouhler's personal adjutant Karl Freiherr Michel von Tüßling wrote an affidavit in defense of Viktor Brack, in which he also outlined Brack's relationship with Hitler's private secretary Martin Bormann .

In the medical trial, which lasted from December 9, 1946 to July 20, 1947, the verdicts were pronounced on August 20, 1947. For Brack, the verdict was " death by hanging ". The sentence was on 2 June 1948 war criminals prison Landsberg enforced .

A co-organizer of the mass murder

"Brack and his co-workers invented factory-style mass murder ."

- Henry Friedlander

When Viktor Brack joined the NSDAP in 1929, the party was a splinter party, which had 12 of 491 seats in the Reichstag, but was able to record an increase in votes in the state elections of the year. In the résumés from the 1930s, Brack claimed that he had been a National Socialist since 1921, after the family had moved from the Bavarian Palatinate to Munich "under the pressure of the French occupation". He did not join the party in order to better promote the movement's goals at the university. With similar arguments he tried to explain his membership in the Tannenbergbund , which was close to Erich Ludendorff .

In the Fuehrer's Chancellery (KdF), Brack initially processed petitions to Hitler and was able to achieve success in the interests of those seeking help. This is borne out by statements from exonerating witnesses who Brack's defense attorney brought up at the Nuremberg medical trial. The most prominent witness was the Nobel Prize for Medicine Otto Warburg , whom Brack enabled to continue his research in 1941 when Warburg threatened to be fired because of his father's Jewish origins.

The KdF party agency was commissioned to carry out the T4 campaign for reasons of secrecy, because at no time during the Third Reich was the killing of the sick or disabled under criminal law. In addition, the KdF was already concerned with petitions from relatives in which Hitler was asked to grant an alleged "mercy death" for the sick. Together with Werner Heyde and Herbert Linden from the Reich Ministry of the Interior, Viktor Brack can be counted among the leading figures in the implementation of the T4 campaign. Himmler did not turn to the Philipp Bouhler named in Hitler's letter, but to Brack when he learned in December 1940 of problems with secrecy in the vicinity of the Grafeneck killing center .

About 70,000 patients were murdered in Aktion T4, in the extermination camps of Aktion Reinhardt about 1.7 to 1.9 million mostly Polish Jews. Brack was not involved in the transfer of personnel and equipment only to the Operation Reinhard in a leading position: On 25 October 1941, turned Ehrhard Wetzel from the Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories to the Reich Commissioner for the Ostland , Hinrich Lohse : Under the subject "your report of October 4, 1941 with regard to the solution to the Jewish question ” , Wetzel announced, “ that Oberdienstleiter Brack from the Führer’s office has agreed to assist in the construction of the necessary accommodation and the gassing apparatus. ”In conclusion, Wetzel stated: “ There are no concerns about the situation when those Jews who are unable to work are eliminated with Brack's tools. "

The X-ray castration experiments in Auschwitz, which Brack helped to organize, turned out to be unsuitable. Bracks representative in the KDF, Werner Blankenburg , reported on April 29, 1944, Himmler, "that a castration of the man is quite impossible in this way or requires an effort that is not worthwhile." The number of victims of attempts to X-castration Auschwitz is not exactly known. The prisoners who survived the experiments had to struggle with the most severe physical and emotional consequences.

Fonts

• Daily solutions for company roll calls . Berlin: The construction, 1936

literature

• Henry Friedlander : Viktor Brack - party man, SS man and murder manager. in: Ronald Smelser , Enrico Syring (ed.): The SS: Elite under the skull. Paderborn, 2000. ISBN 3-506-78562-1 .
• Alexander Mitscherlich , Fred Mielke: Medicine without humanity. Documents of the Nuremberg Doctors' Trial. 16th edition. Fischer-Taschenbuch-Verlag, Frankfurt / Main, 2004. ISBN 3-596-22003-3 .
• Götz Aly : The burdened. "Euthanasia" 1939–1945. A history of society . S. Fischer, Frankfurt / Main 2013 ISBN 978-3-10-000429-1 .

Web links

• Literature by and about Viktor Brack in the catalog of the German National Library
• Documents from the Nuremberg medical trial on Brack (partly in English)
• Documents on human experiments (castration using X-rays)
• Biography and pictures of Brack (Italian)

Individual references and comments

1. ↑ The information on Brack's origin and training according to Friedlander: Brack, page 89f. Friedlander refers to three, in detail contradicting résumés from the years 1932 to 1934 in Brack's SS files and his statements at the Nuremberg medical trial.
2. ^ Association of German Cyclists and Berno Bahro: "SS Sport. Organization, Function, Meaning". Ferdinand Schöningh, Paderborn et al. 2013, p. 151.
3. ↑ Renate Franz: The forgotten world champion , Cologne 1998, p. 128 ff.
4. ↑ Brack's SS career with Friedlander: Brack, pp. 90–94, and Axis Biographical Research ( Memento of the original of July 11, 2015 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. 
5. ↑ Hitler's letter in a facsimile (Nuremberg Document PS-630)
6. ↑ Thomas Vormbaum (Ed.): "Euthanasia" in front of the court. The indictment of the public prosecutor at the OLG Frankfurt / M. against Dr. Werner Heyde et al. Of May 22, 1962. Berlin 2005, (Heyde indictment) p. 98 ff.
7. ^ Heyde indictment, pp. 138 ff.
8. ^ Heyde indictment, pp. 153 ff.
9. ^ Heyde indictment, p. 133.
10. ↑ On the speech at the community day see Ernst Klee: What they did - What they became. Doctors, lawyers and others involved in the murder of the sick or Jews. Frankfurt / Main, 1986. 12th edition 6/2004, page 89f and: State Center for Civic Education Baden-Württemberg
11. ↑ Himmler's letter in a facsimile (Nuremberg Document NO-018)
12. ↑ As early as 1939, the term “ special treatment ” was a euphemism for “execution” that was customary at the Gestapo . 14f13 is the file number used by the “Inspector of the Concentration Camps at the Reichsführer SS”, see Hedye-Anklage, p. 317 f.
13. ↑ Brack's appointments with Himmler on January 13 and March 28, 1941. See: Heinrich Himmler: Heinrich Himmler's 1941/42 service calendar. Commented and introduced by Peter Witte, Michael Wildt, Martina Voigt, Dieter Pohl, Peter Klein, Christian Gerlach, Christoph Dieckmann and Andrej Angrick (= Hamburg contributions to social and contemporary history; sources; volume 3) Hamburg, 1999. p. 107 and 141.
14. ↑ On the justice conference see Ernst Klee: What they did . P. 248 ff.
15. ↑ Friedlander: Brack, p. 95.
16. ↑ Himmler's service calendar, p. 290.
17. ↑ Friedlander: Brack, p. 95 and affidavit ( Memento of the original from March 4, 2016 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. (English) of Mrs. Bracks. 
18. ↑ Oberhauser's statement in: Adalbert Rückerl: Nazi extermination camps in the mirror of German criminal trials. Munich, 1977. p. 137.
19. ↑ ^{a b} Letter from Brack to Himmler dated June 23, 1942 in the facsimile ( memento of the original from July 11, 2015 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. (Nuremberg Document NO-205) 
20. ↑ Brack's report of March 28, 1941 (Nuremberg Document NO-203) - Brack had appointments with Himmler on the same day and on May 19, 1941. Service calendar Himmler, pp. 141 and 157.
21. ↑ service calendar Himmler, S. 480th
22. ↑ Ernst Klee: Auschwitz, Nazi medicine and its victims . Frankfurt 2001 (new edition). P. 439.
23. ↑ Friedlander, Brack, p. 96 f.
24. ^ Nuremberg Trials Project: Affidavit concerning Brack's work in the state chancellery statement by Werner Best of January 25, 1947, p. 2.
25. ↑ Ernst Klee: What they did , p. 67.
26. ↑ Udo Benzenhöfer : Nürnberger Ärzteprozess: The selection of the accused. Deutsches Ärzteblatt 1996; 93: A-2929–2931 (Issue 45) (PDF, 258 kB)
27. ↑ Brack's interrogation on September 13, 1946, quoted in: Henry Friedlander: Der Weg zum NS-Genozid. From euthanasia to the final solution. Darmstadt 1997, p. 321 ff.
28. ↑ The organizational scheme drawn by Brack on January 27, 1947 in the facsimile ( memento of the original of June 9, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. . The current state of research at the Documentation Archive of the Austrian Resistance (PDF; 28 kB) 
29. ↑ Friedlander, Brack, p. 94.
30. ^ Document Viewer - Affidavit concerning Brack's position and actions in the German regime . In: Nuremberg . March 21, 1947. Retrieved May 3, 2017.
31. ↑ Friedlander, Brack, p. 93.
32. ↑ on Friedlander's résumés: Brack, p. 89 f.
33. ↑ Affidavit ( Memento of the original from December 17, 2015 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. (English) by Otto Warburg, Bracks appointment with Himmler on June 21, 1941 see: Dienstkalender Himmler, p. 178 
34. ↑ Wetzel's letter in a facsimile ( memento of the original from January 26, 2014 in the web archive archive.today ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (Nuremberg Document NO-365) 
35. ↑ Blankenburg's letter in the facsimile ( memento of the original of September 2, 2006 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (Nuremberg Document NO-208) 
36. ↑ On the experiments and the consequences for the prisoners: Klee, Auschwitz, Nazi medicine and its victims. Pp. 436-447.