Free Into That Darkness: From Mercy Killing to Mass Murder by Gitta Sereny

more?”
    “Oh no, never.”
    That patients were sent to these institutions only to die without delay was confirmed by Franz Suchomel. He, a Sudeten German, was mobilized into the SS – he says he doesn’t know why (Dieter Allers was to tell me later more about the method of recruiting for T4), and was first sent to the “institute” at Hadamar as an assistant in the photographic laboratory. Or so he said at our first meeting: later, in one of several letters replying to specific additional questions, he changed this and said that he had been assigned to work at T4 in Berlin. (The truth is that he worked in both these places.) “The institutes”, he said, “were designated from A to F. Hartheim was C; Hadamar was E; Sonnenstein, also called die Sonne , was F. They gave me a dark-room and told me to develop photos for the archives. In the four institutes where gassings took place patients never stayed for more than a few short hours. Certainly nobody ever got out.” (There were in fact six where gassing took place, but only four were operational at any one time. And this does not take into account the eleven “special” hospitals where children were “put to sleep” by injections.)
    Suchomel said at his first meeting with me that the psychiatrist Professor Heyde had his office next to his dark-room at Hadamar. This man, who was sentenced to death in absentia by a German court in 1946, escaped and practised in Flensburg in Germany under the name of Sawade until 1959, when he gave himself up. He committed a slightly mysterious suicide: he was found strangled, lying on the floor, with a noose attached to the central heating pipes – in Limburg prison in 1963. According to Suchomel, “He was the head of the whole thing, he developed it.” In a subsequent letter he says, “Heide [ sic ] had a flat at Tiergartenstrasse 4, next to my office. He was the top expert in the mercy-killing business. He only stayed at his flat when he had official business in Berlin. He was, I was told, an authority in his field.… I know that there was a research institute into mental illness in Strasburg; he may have run that. That’s where the brains of selected mental patients were sent for research purposes.” And Dieter Allers too talked a great deal about the scientific purposes of the Euthanasia Programme. “People have completely misunderstood: now it is constantly being misinterpreted. Just look at the world now: don’t you think something very much like this will have to happen?”
    Stangl was in fact intellectually and emotionally considerably more affected by the whole euthanasia issue than the other people I have talked to who were directly involved with the programme.
    “You were speaking earlier about having many doubts and many discussions about the rights and wrongs of the euthanasia programme. Can you elaborate a little on this?” I asked him.
    “Strangely enough,” he said, “you see there was somehow more freedom to talk there than I had had in Linz. Of course, we couldn’t talk to anyone outside, but amongst ourselves we discussed the fors and againsts all the time.”
    “And did you get to the point where you convinced yourself you were involved in something that was right?”
    “Of course, I wasn’t ‘involved’ in that sense,” he said quickly. “Not in the operational sense.”
    I reformulated my question. “Did you get to the point where you convinced yourself that what was being done was right?”
    “One day,” he said, “I had to make a duty visit to an institution for severely handicapped children run by nuns.…” (“What the devil,” said Allers, “was he doing going to a place like that? He had no business going to any of the hospitals: his job was death certificates.”) “It was part of my function,” said Stangl, “to see that the families of patients – afterwards – received their effects: clothes and all that, and identity papers, certificates, you know. I was responsible