In late January 1945, as Soviet troops closed in on eastern Germany, Amanda Ratajczak was still killing patients. The ward supervisor at the Obrawalde psychiatric hospital administered the lethal injections herself, and on the 28th of January, she murdered two more women. The next day, the Red Army entered the facility and found roughly a thousand patients and staff left behind. Ratajczak was gone, but only temporarily.
Within weeks, Soviet forces captured her and brought her back to the hospital where she had worked for nearly three decades. During interrogation, she admitted to killing more than 1,500 patients with her own hands. On 25 April 1945, a Soviet military court sentenced her to death for war crimes. Two days after the war in Europe formally ended, Amanda Ratajczak was executed by firing squad.
Her story began in 1895, when she was born in the village of Eichberg, then part of the German Empire. In 1904, the Obrawalde sanatorium and nursing home opened near the town of Meseritz, now Miedzyrzecz in western Poland, less than nine miles from the German-Polish border. By 1915, Ratajczak was working there as a senior nurse in the women’s ward. She remained at the institution through the First World War, the collapse of the German Empire, and the redrawing of borders that left Meseritz inside Germany.
At some point, she also joined the Nazi Party. By 1939, Obrawalde was filling up. The facility housed about nine hundred people early that year, but more than two thousand patients were crowded inside by the end of December, with only three doctors responsible for their care. The outbreak of the Second World War had opened a new chapter in Nazi policy toward people with disabilities.
In October 1939, Hitler secretly authorized doctors to kill patients considered incurable. The order was backdated to 1 September 1939, linking the program directly to the start of the war. That program became known as Aktion T4, named for the Berlin address of its headquarters at Tiergartenstrasse 4. Hospitals filled out questionnaires about every person in their care, and reviewers in Berlin decided who would die.
Beginning in 1940, selected patients were loaded onto buses and transported to one of six killing centers in Germany and Austria. Most were gassed with carbon monoxide within hours of arrival. By August 1941, more than seventy thousand people had been murdered. Public knowledge of the killings grew, protests mounted, and Hitler formally ordered the centralized operation to stop that month.
But the killings did not end. They simply moved inside the hospitals themselves, where patients could be killed quietly, ward by ward, with drugs and starvation. Obrawalde was especially suited for this new phase. It was remote, overcrowded, and filled with patients whose families lived hundreds of miles away.
By late 1942, systematic killing was underway there, with doctors and nurses murdering patients through lethal doses of medication and deliberate starvation. Patients from at least twenty-six German cities were eventually sent to Obrawalde to be killed, making it one of the deadliest institutions in this decentralized stage of the program. At the center of the killings was Dr. Hildegard Wernicke, who supervised the women’s and children’s wards.
Working with the chief physician, Dr. Walter Grabowski, she reviewed patient records and selected people for death. Their names were passed to the senior nurses, including Ratajczak, who carried out the orders. Ratajczak personally administered lethal doses of morphine, scopolamine, and the sedative Veronal.
But her role extended beyond killing patients directly. Testimony from other nurses later showed that she also ordered her subordinates to take part in the killings. Not everyone was willing to comply. One nurse, identified only as Anna D.
, testified that she once refused to give a patient a lethal injection and was severely reprimanded by Ratajczak. Still, Anna participated in other killings, explaining that she had learned obedience and feared refusing orders. Another nurse, Berta Nitzsch, later described a specific killing in detail. In the autumn of 1942, a mentally disabled girl of about seventeen or eighteen was placed in an isolation room.
Wernicke ordered that she receive daily injections of morphine and scopolamine. According to Nitzsch’s testimony, Ratajczak administered most of the doses herself and ordered Nitzsch to inject the girl two or three times. The patient did not die immediately. She lingered for about two weeks under this treatment.
Evidence that emerged after the war indicated that from the spring of 1943 into 1944, Wernicke supplied Ratajczak and other nurses with the names of roughly six hundred patients selected for killing. Drugs were also hidden in food. On the children’s ward, Veronal was mixed into jam and given to patients until they lost consciousness. Once they were unconscious, Ratajczak injected them with morphine and scopolamine.
As the death toll rose, Obrawalde developed a system for disposing of bodies and concealing what was happening. A group of male patients, known as the grave gang, carried the dead to the morgue and later buried them in the institution’s cemetery. The killings were disguised with official paperwork. Doctors recorded false but plausible causes of death on certificates sent to relatives.
A diagnosis of stroke could hide a death caused by a drug overdose. Many victims were buried in mass graves, while some bodies were transferred to Frankfurt on orders to be cremated. A crematorium was under construction at Obrawalde, but it was never completed before the Soviets arrived. Most of the senior staff were preparing to flee westward by January 1945, but the killing continued almost to the end.
Ratajczak murdered the last two patients on 28 January, one day before Soviet troops seized the facility. Around a thousand patients and workers remained behind. Also among those who escaped were Grabowski, Wernicke, and the other physician, Theodor Mutsch. Inside Obrawalde, the Soviet forces confronted the surviving patients and the evidence of the killings.
A Soviet military commission arrived on 16 February and began reviewing the remaining records and investigating the murders. Survivors reported that between thirty and fifty patients had been killed daily over several years. Investigators found more than eight hundred ampoules of morphine and over two thousand ampoules of scopolamine, along with syringes and storerooms filled with patients’ clothing and shoes. The commission also reported finding crematorium facilities, an unfinished gas chamber, and two mass graves, each containing more than a thousand bodies.
Soviet investigators concluded that 18,232 patients had died at Obrawalde over three years, though the exact number of victims remains uncertain. Ratajczak’s flight proved temporary. Soviet troops arrested her in early March 1945 and returned her to the institution where she had worked for nearly three decades. She was led to a cell and ordered to demonstrate how patients had been killed.
The reenactment was filmed. During the investigation, she confessed to killing more than 1,500 patients herself. The exact number attributed to her varies among surviving accounts, with later sources giving higher figures. During her trial, she reportedly also confirmed the Soviet investigators’ figure of 18,232 deaths over three years.
On 25 April 1945, a Soviet military tribunal of the Sixteenth Air Army sentenced Ratajczak to death for war crimes related to the killings at Obrawalde. The same proceedings condemned Hermann Goltzke, a male orderly at the institution. On 10 May 1945, two days after the war in Europe officially ended, Amanda Ratajczak and Hermann Goltzke were executed by firing squad. Ratajczak was about fifty years old.
The Nazi euthanasia program served in many ways as a rehearsal for the regime’s later policies of mass murder. The methods developed during Aktion T4, including the use of gas chambers and purpose-built crematoria, were later adapted on a far larger scale during the Holocaust. The connection was visible in the personnel as well. A number of men who gained experience in the T4 program went on to play significant roles in the killing centers at Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka.
In that sense, T4 helped create a cadre of experienced staff and a set of techniques that were later used in the systematic murder of Europe’s Jews.