On the evening of January 30, 1933, in Berlin, only hours after Adolf Hitler had been appointed Chancellor of Germany, his supporters marched through the Brandenburg Gate carrying torches. Within six months, every rival political party had been banned or dissolved, and Germany had become a one-party dictatorship. The Nazis promised not merely a new political order but a biological one. They presented Germans as a master race whose blood purity had to be preserved, and they claimed the nation was being weakened from within by those they considered racially inferior or genetically unhealthy.
Jews and Roma faced persecution that ultimately led to their systematic murder, while millions of Slavs were targeted for displacement, exploitation, and death. The regime also turned on Germans it deemed unfit for the national community, including those with mental and physical disabilities. The persecution of these people would not have been possible without the participation of the medical profession. German doctors joined the Nazi Party in greater numbers than almost any other occupation, and many nurses became supporters of the regime as well.
Within a few years, some of them helped carry out the regime’s racial policies and even participated in killing their own patients. One place where this happened was the Meseritz-Obravvalde psychiatric hospital, located at the far eastern edge of Germany. There, a senior physician selected patients for death while the nursing staff carried out many of the killings. Two women stood at the center of this system: Hilde Wernicke and Helene Wieczorek.
Both would eventually pay a heavy price for their crimes. Gertrud Emma Hilde Wernicke was born on November 11, 1899, in the town of Schleswig in northern Germany, into the family of an army officer. She left the girls’ secondary school in Mainz in 1919 after receiving her Abitur, the examination qualifying her for university admission. Wernicke studied medicine in Frankfurt, passed her first state examination in 1924, and received her doctorate from the University of Marburg two years later.
From 1929 onward, she spent her entire career as a leading physician at the Meseritz-Obravalde sanatorium and nursing home. In May 1933, four months after Hitler took power, she joined the Nazi Party and later became the head of the local branch of the National Socialist Women’s League. Helene Wieczorek was born in 1904 and worked as a head nurse, or Oberschwester. She met Wernicke at the Meseritz-Obravalde sanatorium and nursing home, where both had initially come to care for patients.
Obravalde, as it was often called, opened in 1904 as a hospital near the town of Meseritz, today Międzyrzecz in western Poland. Germany had lost the First World War, and in November 1918 the German Empire collapsed, replaced by the Weimar Republic. Most of the territory of the former Province of Posen was transferred to the re-established Polish state, while Meseritz remained part of Germany. The new German-Polish border lay only a few kilometers to the east, placing the hospital on Germany’s eastern frontier.
The debate over killing the mentally ill had not begun with the Nazi seizure of power. In 1920, during the democratic Weimar Republic, a prominent lawyer named Karl Binding and a professor of psychiatry named Alfred Hoche published a short book arguing that the state should be permitted to kill incurably ill and severely disabled patients, whom they described as “lives unworthy of life. ” The book was widely circulated. So when Adolf Hitler came to power in January 1933, the argument for killing patients was already waiting for him.
In July 1933, only six months after the Nazis took power, a law was passed imposing compulsory sterilization on those deemed genetically ill. These procedures were authorized by special hereditary health courts, where two doctors and a judge made their decisions behind closed doors. Around 400,000 people were sterilized in Nazi Germany. The idea that certain groups of people did not deserve to live had become so entrenched that schoolchildren were given arithmetic problems asking them to calculate the cost of keeping a disabled person alive.
German society was being gradually prepared to accept the killing of its most helpless members. In March 1939, the city of Berlin began talks with the Obravalde sanatorium and nursing home. Berlin’s asylums were overcrowded, while Obravalde had plenty of space and lay far to the east of the capital. The two sides agreed that Berlin would send its mentally ill patients there and pay for their care.
Around 900 patients were living at Obravalde at the beginning of 1939, and by the end of that year the number had grown to more than 2,000 patients cared for by only three doctors. Thousands of mentally ill people were now far from anyone who knew them. While Obravalde was filling up, Nazi Germany began killing people with mental and physical disabilities. In October 1939, Hitler signed a directive authorizing doctors to grant so-called mercy death to patients judged incurable.
The order was backdated to September 1, 1939, the day the Second World War began. Hospitals filled out forms about everyone in their care, and evaluators in Berlin reviewed the forms and decided who would die. Those selected were gathered by bus and transported to one of six institutions equipped with gas chambers. The operation became known as T4, after its headquarters at Tiergartenstrasse 4 in Berlin.
In less than two years, more than 70,000 people were killed in these institutions. The mass killing of patients did not remain a secret for long. Families received urns of ashes and letters of condolence containing details that did not match what they knew about their relatives. By the summer of 1941, Catholic and Protestant clergy were openly condemning the killings in their sermons and written protests, some of which were directed straight at Adolf Hitler.
In August 1941, Hitler ordered a halt to the gas killings, but the murders moved inside the hospitals themselves, where they could be carried out quietly, ward by ward, using drugs and starvation. Many institutions continued killing their patients, but Obravalde was better suited for it than most because it was remote, overcrowded, and full of patients whose families were hundreds of kilometers away. In the end, patients from at least 26 German cities were sent to Obravalde and killed there. Hilde Wernicke was one of the main perpetrators.
She was responsible for the women’s and children’s wards, and it fell to her to examine every new arrival before recording one of two results. A classification of “fit for work” gave a patient time, but “incurable patient” and children were marked for death from the start. Between 1943 and 1944, Wernicke selected around 600 people in this way. In early 1944, while she was killing her patients, the Nazi regime awarded her the War Merit Cross, a decoration for service away from the front.
Wernicke did not act alone. The nurses working under her supervision actively participated in the killings. Among them was head nurse Helene Wieczorek, who oversaw the women involved in these crimes and carried out injections with her own hands. She would later be charged with responsibility for the deaths of several hundred people.
The patients Wernicke selected were not killed in the open wards. Instead, they were taken to separate rooms set aside for that purpose, away from the sight of others. There they were given barbiturates, a sleeping drug that stops breathing if the dose is large enough. Sometimes it was injected, but more often it was mixed with food.
Patients who realized what was happening resisted, and it might take three staff members to hold one down. Among those who worked in those rooms were ward supervisor Amanda Ratajczyk and male nurse Hermann Golke, along with 21 other nurses who later became known by the horrifying nickname “Sisters of Death. ” The staff initially carried the bodies themselves, and later a work group of male patients formed for the task became known as the “cemetery gang. ” Most of the naked bodies were buried in mass graves, but some were cremated in Frankfurt on their orders.
Construction of a crematorium to handle the large number of dead had begun, but the project was not completed by the end of the war. Doctors filled out death certificates with plausible causes, stroke being a common one, and each was sent to the family of the deceased. By January 1945, the Red Army, the armed forces of the Soviet Union, was approaching the region, and Wernicke and Wieczorek did not wait to be liberated. They fled together westward to the town of Wernigerode in the Harz Mountains of central Germany.
Soviet forces reached the hospital on January 29, 1945, and found around 1,000 patients still alive and mass graves containing at least 10,000 people who had been killed there. In March 1945, former ward supervisor Amanda Ratajczyk was arrested. She confessed to killing more than 1,500 patients, the last of them on the day before liberation, and on May 10, 1945, two days after the war in Europe ended, she was executed by firing squad alongside male nurse Hermann Golke. Hilde Wernicke and Helene Wieczorek were arrested in Wernigerode on August 10, 1945, and taken to Berlin.
Their trial before the regional court there began with news cameras recording the proceedings. During the trial, Wernicke defended herself without any visible remorse. She told the court that her task had been to identify patients capable of simple work from the large number entering the institution and to exempt them from killing. According to Wernicke, only mentally ill patients considered incurable and those suffering from the most severe physical illnesses were selected for mercy death.
She claimed that for them, death in the true sense of the word was a release. Wieczorek’s defense was different. According to her, she had initially refused to kill patients, but the hospital director, Walter Grabowski, told her that resistance was futile, that her years of service to the state bound her to her duty, and that the law permitted ending the suffering of those with incurable diseases. During her testimony, Wieczorek claimed that Grabowski had repeatedly threatened the nurses with the Gestapo, the secret police of Nazi Germany.
She told the court, “I only did my duty and carried out everything according to the instructions of my superiors. Director Grabowski always threatened us with the Gestapo. He told us the Gestapo would take us by the necks if we did not do what he wanted. ” Despite her defense, the truth was that the Nazi mass murder program depended on people willing to carry it out, and at Obravalde, no nurse who refused to participate was punished or persecuted by the Gestapo.
The court believed neither of them. On March 25, 1946, both women were convicted of murder in several hundred cases and sentenced to death. The Berlin Court of Appeal upheld the verdict on August 24, 1946. The sentence was carried out on the morning of January 14, 1947, at Plötzensee Prison in Berlin, where both women were executed by guillotine.
Helene Wieczorek was 42 years old, and Hilde Wernicke was 47.