Over a few years, and two trips to Europe, I ran across a chain of connections that started with a Youtube program on Vienna and ends with a connection to Leon Jaworski, the special prosecutor of the Watergate era when I was in junior high student back in a farm town in Iowa.
From Vienna Architecture to the T4 Euthanasia Program
In the summer of 2014, our family had a three night stopover in Vienna on the way home from a ten day vacation at the northern Greece beach village of Afitos.
Youtube has tour guides (whether professional or home movies) to nearly any city one can imagine, and I looked for video on Vienna. This led me to a
really incredible, 90 minute BBC documentary on Vienna called City of Dreams by Harvard professor (and now Dean of Arts and Sciences) Joseph Koerner. City of Dreams skips back and forth in a history of the past century, but one of the several Viennese geniuses it focuses on is
Otto Wagner, the fin-de-siecle Art Deco architect. Koerner's documentary begins and ends at his
Church on the Lemoniberg [alternately known as Kirche am Steinhof].
The church is on a hilltop four miles south of city center, but accessible by one direct bus. But the one weekly English tour of the church fell outside of our trip. However, there
was a two hour German tour of the Otto Wagner hospital campus that the church is part of, and that
did fit our schedule, so my 14 year old daughter and I made the excursion and she braved the German ;language tour (on which we joined about a dozen very dour, retired Austrians who were on excursion on that drizzly day.)
The Lemoniberg church, reflecting the Art Deco architecture of Otto Wagner, was as fantastic and memorable as promised.
But we learned something unexpected on the tour.
On the hospital campus, we also saw a small dwarf rose garden that was a
symbolic memorial to the extermination/euthanasia of mentally handicapped children at the hospital in 1939/1940. And there was a small museum room in one of the art deco hospital buildings on campus, dedicated to the memory of that event.
The genocide of mentally handicapped persons was the
Nazi T4 program of 1939/1940.
What was the T4 Program?
Ostensibly, a German officer had a severely handicapped baby in early 1939, and wrote Hitler that provisions for euthanasia of the baby were lacking. By October 1939, the T4 law had been written and signed, allowing the direct mass euthanasia of "hereditarily deficient" persons in Germany and Austria. The T4 program followed very active prior involuntary sterilizations programs in Germany...as in the U.S., and elsewhere. (In the U.S., legal involuntary sterilization on medical grounds was memorialized by a turn of the century Supreme Court case).
In Germany, the euthanasia and cremations that were explicitly the "T4" program exceeded 70,000 persons but the program was actually scaled down due to civil protest by 1941. However, euthanasia of the disabled never stopped. Some of the techniques learned were used in the concentration camp exterminations in 1942 and later.
And the Name..."T4"
The
T4 program was named for an administrative building located in Berlin... "
T4" stood for Tiergartenstrasse 4, building's street address. This locaiton is a few blocks south of the Reichstag/Brandenburg Gate; is near Postdam Place; is near the present outdoor Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe; and is near the Sony Center shopping complex. Most directly, the present day 1963 Berlin Philharmonic concert hall was later built on the nazi building's site.
The Tiergatenstrasse 4 Memorial to the T4 Program
Today, at the address and next to the Berlin Philharmonic Hall, there is an abstract memorial plaza consisting of a blue glass wall on a concrete plaza. Also, there is a very detailed series of information plaques, running like a desk 30 feet long.
From T4 to Leon Jaworski
Some of the senior leaders of the T4 program were prosecuted for crimes against humanity and executed in 1948. Brock, the head of the program, was executed as part of the main Nurenberg Trials.
In a separate prosecution of T4 staff at
Hadamar, a hospital north of Frankfurt, of the prosecutors was a young U.S. attorney named
Leon Jaworski.
Then 40 years old, he was a Texan whose parents were German speaking immigrants. In the
Watergate era, Jaworski would be named the Special Prosecutor - only twenty five years later.
. Remarkable to remember that Nixon's election in 1968 was
only two decades later than Jaworski's trials in Allied courts amid the ruins of WW2.
The Nurenberg and Harmadan trials in the ruins of Germany were only as distant in time from the Watergate era, as the interval between Obama's and Clinton's second terms.
____
From T4 to Bonhoeffer to Washington
In Berlin, in addition to the Tiergarten Memorial, there is
a museum about the T4 program at the Karl Bonhoeffer Nervenklink, which is at the Karl Bonhoeffer U Bahn station on the north side of Berlin. Karl Bonhoeffer was head of Psychiatry at the Charite' hospital in the 1920s/1930s. His son Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a minister, a pacificist executed by the Nazis. There is a memorial to Dietrich Bonhoeffer in the Berlin section of Prenzlauerberg at Zionskirche, where he worked in the 1930s.
In
September 2013 in Washington DC, I heard a book reading at the Politics and Prose bookstore by Fritz Stern, a German born Columbia University historian who wrote a biography of Bonhoeffer with his wife Elizabeth Sifton. Sifton, in turn, was the daughter of Reinhold Neibuhr, an American theologian under whom Bonhoeffer studied on a six month stay in New York City in the mid 1930s. Fritz Stern died in May 2016 at age 90. Sifton had a career as a well known book editor.
The Bonhoeffer family house is a ecumenical Peace Institute; it is located in an upper middle class 1920s neighborhood on the West side of Berlin, not far from the 1936 Olympic Stadium.
Other Memorials to the T4 Program
As noted above, there is (1) the outdoor blue-glass-wall T4 memorial in central Berlin. About ten miles north, (2) there is the museum rooms at the 1880s-built psychiatric hospital campus, Karl-Bonhoeffer-Nervenklinik. There are also memorials at (3) the Hadamar center about an hour north of Frankfurt, and (4) a Brandenburg Gedenkstaette (memorial) near Berlin.
There are also two concrete buses that are artworks that memorialize the transport of patients to euthanasia centers. One is permanently installed at Ravensbruck, southwest of Munich, and an identical concrete bus has been transported to various locations in Germany associated with the T4 program. At one time the mobile concrete artwork bus was located near the Berlin Philharmonic, where the blue glass wall memorial now is found.
As shown in these memorials and museums, the T4 program was supported by propaganda, such as posters showing a disabled purpose and saying "Citizen! Such a person costs our society 70,000 Marks in his Lifetime!"
Movie
In Fall 2016, the German big screen drama Nebel im August (Fog in August), a movie about the T4 program, was released,
here. Youtube trailer,
here. Uncorrected autotranslation of German review,
here. The film is set at the children's hospital Irsee, a former Benedictine monastery near Kaufbeuren south of Munich (
here). In what could be a record for adaptive reuse, the monastery-turned-hospital has become a hotel and
conference center.
Second Movie
There is also a 2017 documentary, Action T4: Doctor Under the Nazis, which is half the story of T4 and half the biography of Julius Hallervorden, a German neurologist who studied the brains of the euthanized children. As of early 2019 it streams on Amazon or for free on
Youtube.
