User:Claireh0611/Am Spiegelgrund clinic

Leading Personnel
There were several people involved in the euthanasia practices occurring at Am Spiegelgrund Clinic. These people included Erwin Jekelius, Hans Bertha, Ernst Illing, Heinrich Gross, Margarethe Hübsch and Marianne Türk. Their roles at the clinic differed as some were the director of the clinic and others were scientists directly involved in the murder of hundreds of children. Overtime, some of these people left the clinic and new ones entered it. During World War II, the clinic was led by Ernst Illing and for two years by Heinrich Gross.

The head of the institution from 24 July 1940 to January 1942 was Erwin Jekelius, who in October 1940 was one of 30 participants in a conference about "Euthanasia" laws, which were never put into effect. The T4 program also used him as an expert to decide the fate of institutionalized patients. Jekelius was known for his ruthlessness in selecting children for death and for his brutality in handing out corporal punishments to the children under his care. In September 1941, the Royal Air Force dropped pamphlets detailing his involvement in multiple murders at Spiegelgrund which eventually led to his removal as the director of the clinic. He was arrested by Soviet forces in 1945, and in 1948, he was sentenced in Moscow to 25 years of hard labour for his crimes related to euthanasia. He died of bladder cancer in a Soviet labour camp in May 1952.

Succeeding Jekelius and presiding over the institution for the next six months was Hans Bertha, who was significantly involved in the T4 campaign from its conception in 1940. Bertha was never tried for his crimes despite documented evidence that he was involved in the murders of patients at Spiegelgrund and his close association with Jekelius and other war criminals. Bertha also used the patient murders for his "scientific" progress. According to the murderous Hartheim doctor Georg Renno, Bertha was particularly interested in epilepsy cases. When epileptic patients were murdered at Hartheim, for example, their brains were removed and given to Bertha for his research. After the war, he had an illustrious academic career in Graz.

On 1 July 1942, Ernst Illing took over as medical director of Am Spiegelgrund. He previously worked as a senior physician in the first children's division at the national institution at Brandenburg-Görden, alongside Hans Heinze, infamous for his involvement in the euthanasia program. Illing maintained his position until April 1945 when he was convicted of manslaughter. The following year, he was publicly hanged for his crimes.

Heinrich Gross, a psychiatrist and neurologist trained by Hans Heinze, became the senior doctor in charge of the Children's Ward in Pavilion 15 in 1940. At least half of all Spiegelgrund victims died under Gross' care. From July 1942 to the end of March 1943, he shared the responsibilities of the Children's Ward with Margarethe Hübsch and Marianne Türk. He was enlisted around then, but records indicate he had returned to the clinic by the summer of 1944. Gross experimented on both the living and the dead. He monitored the children's behaviour after "treatments" were administered and experimented on his victims' brains and spinal tissue, which were stored in formaldehyde in the basement. In 1950, Gross was brought to trial in Austria and convicted of manslaughter, though he never served his two-year sentence. Gross went on to become a highly successful speaker, expert witness and researcher, publishing 34 works between 1954 and 1978 based upon the experiments. He received an Honorary Cross for Science and Art in 1975, which was stripped in 2003. Nazi-era files uncovered in the mid-1990s reopened the case against Gross. The ensuing investigation provided compelling evidence of his involvement in the deaths of nine children, whose preserved remains contained traces of poison; however, by then, he was seen unfit to stand trial.

Margarethe Hübsch assisted Heinrich Gross when he was the senior doctor of the Children’s Ward in Pavilion 15. She was tried for murder alongside Ernst Illing and Marianne Türk between 15 and 18 July 1946. Unlike Illing and Türk, Hübsch was acquitted and released for lack of evidence. The national newspaper article detailing the trial claims that further testimony strongly suggested that she at least was aware of the killings, even if she did not commit them herself.

Marianne Türk shared responsibilities of the Children’s Ward with Heinrich Gross. During her trial, Türk confessed to "sometimes" giving injections, but she did not know the number of victims. She was sentenced to ten years in prison but initially served only two. She was granted probation for poor health in 1948 but resumed her sentence in 1952. After her release, she did not return to the medical field.

Involvement of Hans Asperger
There are dueling opinions on the question of Asperger’s involvement with the Nazi eugenics program or if he was aware of the euthanasia program occurring at Am Spiegelgrund. During World War II, Asperger worked as a doctor in the University of Vienna Pediatric Clinic, which was in close proximity to Am Spiegelgrund. Herwig Czech attempted to dissect Asperger’s involvement with the clinic. Czech found that Asperger signed his diagnostic reports with “Heil Hitler,” and his name was present in the patient files of mentally deficient children who were sent to Am Spiegelgrund. One notable patient of Am Spiegelgrund whom Asperger had a great involvement with was Herta Schreiber, a three-year-old child who had experienced mental and physical delays after having encephalitis. In his diagnostic report of Schreiber, Asperger wrote:

“Severe personality disorder (post-encephalitic?): most severe motoric retardation; erethic idiocy; seizures. At home the child must be an unbearable burden to the mother, who has to care for five healthy children. Permanent placement at Spiegelgrund seems absolutely necessary.”

While it is not confirmed that Asperger was aware of the euthanasia happening at Am Spiegelgrund, it is notable that he called for Schreiber’s “permanent placement;” he did not expect her to ever return to her family or society. Czech’s opinions are refuted by those of Ketil Slagstad, who stated that while Asperger’s involvement should be examined according to the circumstances at the time, it is not disputable that he sent patients to Am Spiegelgrund, and the diagnosis “Asperger’s syndrome” should only be used when there is awareness of Asperger’s past.

Authors with differing opinions give Asperger’s devout Catholicism and his lack of membership to the Nazi party as reasons that he was not associated with the medical and racial eugenics occurring at the time. Instead, he was reported to have been more involved with the diagnoses of disabled patients and was said to have “protected” children from Nazi eugenic policies; his diagnoses were described as “prescient” as opposed to “thin research.” Asperger was not personally involved in any euthanasias and “was cleared of wrongdoing after the war.” It is described that in a draft of a speech Asperger was preparing, his colleague Josef Feldner stated that it was “...a bit too Nazi for your reputation.”

Experimentation and Child Euthanasia
Deputy-führer of the Third Reich Rudolf Hess once said that “National Socialism is nothing but applied biology.” This idea provides context to Hitler’s Darwinian ideas of how to promote the spread of what he believed to be the superior race. Inspired by Darwin’s discovery of evolution by natural selection, Nazis coined several terms for those they deemed unfit. For example, the terms Lebensunwertes Leben, which translates to “life unworthy of life”; unnütze Esser, meaning “useless eater”; and Ballastexistenzen, which means “ballast lives,” to name a few. To strengthen the Nazi regime and Germany as a whole, utilizing euthanasia to select against individuals who would not produce strong and productive offspring was seen as a merciful gesture.

The children who were sent to centers such as Am Spiegelgrund were selected on the basis of medical questionnaires. Physicians were bribed to report children with conditions such as mental retardation, cerebral palsy, Down syndrome, any deformities, bed wetting, learning disabilities, along with many other things that would lower their ability to strengthen Hitler’s superior race. If a child had any sort of mental or physical condition, their questionnaire would be sent to Hitler’s Chancellery, who would recommend “special treatment” despite having never met the children.

Alois Kaufmann, a victim of Am Spiegelgrund, compared the Nazi’s approach to child euthanasia to a predator-prey relationship. According to Kaufmann, every two to three weeks, the weakest children would be plucked from the group, never to be seen again. The children that were picked first were “the bedwetters or harelips or slow thinkers.”

The children who lost their lives at Am Spiegelgrund often died by overdose of depressants such as morphine, scopolamine, and barbiturates, gassing by carbon monoxide, which was a common Nazi tactic, exposure, and starvation. Once the children died, fake death certificates were fabricated, and the victim’s families still had to pay a fee for the special treatment they believed their children were receiving during their time at Am Spiegelgrund.