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

for everything being correctly done.”
    “What do you mean by ‘correctly done’? How were the families notified?”
    “Well, they were told the patient had died of a heart attack or something like that. And they received a little urn with the ashes. But for our records, as I told you, we always had to have these four attestations, otherwise it … it couldn’t be carried out. Well, in this case the mother of a child who had been brought from that particular institution had written to say that she hadn’t received a candle she had sent the child as a present shortly before it died. That’s why I had to go there: to find the candle. When I arrived, the Mother Superior, who I had to see, was up in a ward with the priest and they took me up to see her.
    “We talked for a moment and then she pointed to a child – well, it looked like a small child – lying in a basket. ‘Do you know how old he is?’ she asked me. I said no, how old was he? ‘Sixteen,’ she said. ‘He looks like five, doesn’t he? He’ll never change, ever. But they rejected him.’ [The nun was referring to the medical commission.] ‘How could they not accept him?’ she said. And the priest who stood next to her nodded fervently. ‘Just look at him,’ she went on. ‘No good to himself or anyone else. How could they refuse to deliver him from this miserable life?’ This really shook me,” said Stangl. “Here was a Catholic nun, a Mother Superior, and a priest. And they thought it was right. Who was I then, to doubt what was being done?”
    “If these people in this mental hospital for children knew what was happening to their patients, then others must have known too: it was known, wasn’t it?”
    “This was the only time I heard anyone ‘outside’ speak of it,” he said stiffly.
    According to a letter dated May 16, 1941, from the County Court in Frankfurt to the Minister of Justice, Gürtner (actually to his deputy), the Euthanasia Programme had become common knowledge. The children of Hadamar, where one of the “institutes” was located, were in the habit of shouting after the blacked-out buses, “Here are some more coming to be gassed.” “The patients are taken to the gas chamber in paper shirts,” the letter continues. “The corpses enter the furnace on a conveyor belt, and the smoke from the crematorium chimney is visible for miles. At night, Wirth’s experts, picked by the Berlin Gestapo … drink themselves to oblivion in the little Hadamar Gasthof where the regular customers take care to avoid them.”
    Frau Stangl too – on the whole a woman of exemplary honesty – confirms that she had been aware of what was going on. “I read – or I may have heard in Church – Graf Galen’s sermon, and I remember even talking to my husband about it when he came on leave. But at that time of course, I neither knew he was stationed at Hartheim, nor, even if I had known, would it have meant anything to me. I never knew that Schloss Hartheim was one of those places until after the war. I can’t remember what my husband replied when I discussed Graf Galen’s sermon with him, though I can recall that he never initiated any talk about that. But then, of course, he wouldn’t have; it was simply part of his personality, his discipline, never to discuss at home things to do with the service. After the war he told me what he told you too now; about the nun, the priest, and the poor little sixteen-year-old idiot boy in the little basket.”
    We cannot possibly know now how many nuns and priests, perhaps particularly affected by the sadness and hopelessness many people feel who work continuously in mental institutions, came at that time to agree – quite possibly in an agonizing conflict of morals – that euthanasia represented a release, the chance of an eternal and far happier life for these particular patients. But we do know now that at least some of their superiors did not share the attitude of the nun and priest Stangl