Walter Schmid-Sachsenstamm

Walter Schmid-Sachsenstamm (born December 11, 1891 in Cilli ; † April 7, 1945 in Klagenfurt ) was an Austrian psychiatrist and medical director of the Klagenfurt regional hospital and participant in the T4 campaign .

Life

After the handover of power to the National Socialists in April 1933, Schmid-Sachsenstamm became a member of the NSDAP and in 1938 the SS .

From 1938 to 1942 he was medical director of the regional hospital in Klagenfurt , his successor was Kurt Meusburger. Afterwards he was head of the health department in Klagenfurt as the state medical director from 1942 to 1945. He is referred to as the "driving element in the Klagenfurt euthanasia event".

In the National Socialist "Kärntner Gau Hospital", euthanasia was carried out in various ways under the director Schmid-Sachsenstamm. In a first phase, as part of the T4 campaign, patients were selected, brought to the Nazi killing center in Hartheim and gassed there . This began with a visit to a medical commission headed by Werner Heyde , which recorded the mentally and severely physically ill in lists. Based on the medical files, they selected the sick to be deported without ever having seen them. On the basis of such a list, the first death transport with about 230 patients left for Hartheim on June 29, 1940. While doctors and nurses were still unsure what would happen to the deportees at this first selection, this soon changed: In July 1940, the Klagenfurt primary physician Meusburger was summoned to Berlin and inaugurated by the killing operation; Word of this quickly got around among the staff and the, in some cases, alarmed public. Further death transports followed on August 25, 1940 (260 women), on March 24, 1941 (132 psychiatric and geriatric patients) and on July 7, 1941 (111 patients, including 25 children from the Tainach institution ).

After the T4 campaign had to be ended in 1941 due to public displeasure - the Münster bishop Clemens August Graf von Galen had spoken out against the killing of physically and mentally handicapped people in a sermon that became known throughout Germany - the SS Reichsärzteführer Leonardo Conti visited on July 7th 1941 the Klagenfurt psychiatry and recommended u. a. "Not to save with morphine". Since then, the killing of patients, even if their physical condition was still satisfactory, increased significantly. In this phase, the procedure was as follows: The lists of the sick to be killed first went to Berlin for assessment and then came back to the hospital director Schmid-Sachsenstamm; he handed them over to the primary physician Franz Niedermoser , who then commissioned the hospital staff to carry out the killings as part of visits. It was Niedermoser's job to find reliable hospital staff who could be assumed not to talk about the matter. He also had no problem in finding suitable personnel, since the perpetrators of the murders were supposedly protected by a statutory ordinance, which, however, did not exist. However, the staff had to undertake to maintain confidentiality.

Schmid-Sachsenstamm worked for the Reichsstatthalter in Carinthia from 1942 and was Gauamtsleiter for public health. In 1944 the Gauleiter initiated proceedings against Schmid-Sachsenstamm and his wife for food card fraud. Schmid-Sachsenstamm was, however, only a confidante of his wife's action, but in the opinion of the Gauleiter, nevertheless jointly responsible for this illegal food procurement. He committed on 7 April 1945, his wife and his mother in a villa on Kreuzbergl because of this economic offense suicide .

literature

• Nadja Danglmaier, Helge Stromberger: Places of National Socialist violence in Klagenfurt. Dealing with regional history in secondary schools. ( Places of National Socialist violence in Klagenfurt )
• Gerhard Fürstler, Peter Malina: "I was only doing my job ": On the history of nursing in Austria. Facultas Verlag, Vienna 2004, ISBN 3-85076-619-5 .
• Ernst Klee : The dictionary of persons on the Third Reich . Who was what before and after 1945 . 2nd Edition. Fischer-Taschenbuch-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2007, ISBN 978-3-596-16048-8 .
• Herwig Oberlerchner, Helge Stromberger: The Klagenfurt Psychiatry in National Socialism. In: Psychiatry and Psychotherapy. 7, 2011, pp. 7-10, doi : 10.1007 / s11326-011-0148-7 .
• Helge Stromberger: The doctors, the nurses, the SS and death. Carinthia and the produced death in the Nazi state. Drava Verlag, Klagenfurt 2002, ISBN 3-85435-106-2 .
• Winfried Süss: The “People's Body” in War: Health Policy, Health Conditions and the Murder of the Sick in National Socialist Germany 1939–1945. Oldenbourg Verlag, Institute for Contemporary History, Munich 2003, ISBN 3-486-56719-5 .

Individual evidence

1. ^ ^{A b} Ernst Klee: Das Personenlexikon zum Third Reich , Frankfurt am Main 2007, p. 544
2. ↑ Fürstler, Malina, 2004.
3. ↑ Danglmaier, Stromberger, p. 65 ff.
4. ↑ Oberlechner, Stromberger, 2011, p. 9.
5. ↑ Süss, 2003.