Free Cruel World by Lynn H. Nicholas Page B

Democratic Party of Germany in Exile
SRD     
Streifendienst (Hitler Youth Police)
SS     
Schutzstaffeln (Protection Squads; a vast elite organization headed by Himmler that included racial, security, combat, and many other branches, and that eventually became a state within a state in Nazi Germany)
STO     
Service de Travail Obligatoire (Department of Obligatory Labor–France)
Todt Organization     
German Public and Military Works Organization
UNRRA     
United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration
Untermensch     
Subhuman
Volk     
Nation-race
Volksdeutsche     
Ethnic German
Volksgemeinschaft     
National-racial community
VoMi     
Volksdeutsche Mittelstelle (Liason Office for Ethnic Germans Abroad)
 
Waffen-SS     
Combat branch of SS
Wartheland/gau     
Area in western Poland annexed to Germany in 1939
WEL     
Wehrertüchtigungslager (War Preparation Camps)
Wehrmacht     
German Army
ZAL     
Zwangsarbeitlager für Juden (Forced Labor Camp for Jews)

Prologue
    Just before lunch on May 29, 1945, three weeks after the formal end of the Second World War in Europe, Sister Wörle, head nurse of the children’s wards at the Kaufbeuren-Irsee Mental Institution near Munich, approached the bed of four-year-old Richard Jenne and put him to death by lethal injection. She had plenty of experience, having, as she readily stated to her interrogators, previously so injected “at least 211 minors.” The time of death was 13:10. Richard, classified as a “feebleminded idiot,” had been taken to the hospital some months before and put on a diet carefully calculated to bring him to the brink of starvation. By May 29 he had reached the desired state of weakness and was ripe for Sister Wörle’s visit. The death certificate, intended for dispatch to Richard’s parents in the town of Ihringen in the German state of Baden, did not mention the injection, but listed the cause of death as typhus.
    The American troops who had occupied the picturesque town of Kaufbeuren in the hilly, blossom-laden countryside of Swabia on April 26 were unaware of Richard’s demise, and indeed would not discover his body and those of a number of other victims of Sister Wörle and her colleagues for five more weeks. The Americans had arrested the Nazi director of the institution but, put off by a large sign warning of typhus in the hospital, had not ventured inside, where routine continued as usual. On July 2, two medical officers finally entered the premises. What met their eyes was beyond belief: some 1,500 disease-riddled patients confined in the most squalid conditions, among them a ten-year-old boy who weighed twenty-two pounds, and a stifling morgue filled with bodies that had not been buried and that could not be disposed of quickly, as the shiny new crematorium, finished in November 1944, had been closed down. 1
    Richard Jenne was probably the last person to be put to death by the Nazi extermination machine, which in performing this act had come full circle. For it was in this institution, and a network of similar ones, that basic training, using German nationals, had been provided for those who would run the death camps so recently liberated by the Allies. Richard was not alone in his death: millions of other children were deliberately murdered in the Nazi era. Tens of thousands would die of conflict-inducedstarvation in Leningrad, Athens, the Netherlands, and other war zones. Others did not survive the unprecedented forced transfers of populations engendered by Nazi racial policy and carried out under the most primitive conditions. Thousands of teenaged Hitler Youth died in battle, and children of all involved nations were sterilized, perished during evacuations, died of war-borne diseases, or succumbed as forced laborers. They wasted away in concentration, refugee, and disciplinary camps, and died in the bombings of cities and in the Nazi revenge burnings