On March 26, 1945, US Army units advancing toward Central Germany liberated Hadamar, a psychiatric clinic that had served as one of six killing facilities in the Nazi so-called "Euthanasia Program." The soldiers encountered catastrophic conditions. More than 500 patients were starved and weakened by systematic neglect and targeted malnutrition.
Although the US Army provided medical care and additional rations, for many patients the help came too late. Several died in the days and weeks following liberation as a result of inadequate care.
The US Army launched an investigation immediately after liberation. Key members of the hospital management still on site were taken into custody and interrogated. Among the staff arrested was Irmgard Huber, the head nurse of the hospital.
Irmgard Huber was born on June 9, 1901, in Reisach, then part of the German Empire. From 1914 to 1917, after leaving elementary school, she attended continuation school. From 1920 to 1925 she was an apprentice nurse at the institution Gaversee and passed her state examination, becoming a state licensed nurse.
In 1932, Huber began working as a nurse at Hadamar, a care facility for the mentally ill. One year later, Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Party came to power.
Many of Nazi Germany's racial policies were shaped by theories of eugenics, or "racial hygiene," a scientific movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that aimed to improve the genetic quality of a human population. Medical professionals implemented many of these policies and targeted individuals the Nazis defined as "hereditarily ill": those with mental, physical, or social disabilities. The Nazis claimed these individuals placed both a genetic and a financial burden upon society and the state.
Nazi authorities resolved to intervene in the reproductive capacities of persons classified as "hereditarily ill." One of the first eugenic measures they initiated was the 1933 Law for the Prevention of Offspring with Hereditary Diseases, known as the "Hereditary Health Law." The law mandated forcible sterilization for nine disabilities and disorders, including schizophrenia. As a result, 400,000 Germans were ultimately sterilized in Nazi Germany.
Eugenic beliefs also shaped Germany's 1935 Marital Hygiene Law, which prohibited the marriage of persons with "diseased, inferior, or dangerous genetic material" to "healthy" German "Aryans." Eugenics not only provided the basis for the Nazi compulsory sterilization policy but also underpinned the murder of the institutionalized disabled in the clandestine "euthanasia" program.
The Euthanasia Program was the systematic murder of institutionalized patients with disabilities in Germany. It predated the genocide of European Jewry, the Holocaust, by approximately two years and was one of many radical eugenic measures aimed at restoring the so-called racial "integrity" of the German nation. It sought to eliminate what eugenicists and their supporters considered "life unworthy of life." According to the Nazis, those individuals, because of severe psychiatric, neurological, or physical disabilities, represented both a genetic and a financial burden on German society and the state.
In the spring and summer months of 1939, a number of planners began to organize a secret killing operation targeting disabled children. They were led by Philipp Bouhler, the director of Hitler's private chancellery, and Karl Brandt, Hitler's attending physician. On August 18, 1939, the Reich Ministry of the Interior circulated a decree requiring all physicians, nurses, and midwives to report newborn infants and children under the age of three who showed signs of severe mental or physical disability.
Beginning in October 1939, public health authorities began to encourage parents of children with disabilities to admit their young children to one of a number of specially designated pediatric clinics throughout Germany and Austria. In reality, the clinics were children's killing wards. There, specially recruited medical staff murdered their young charges by lethal overdoses of medication or by starvation.
At first, medical professionals and clinic administrators included only infants and toddlers in the operation, but as the scope of the measure widened, they included youths up to 17 years of age. Conservative estimates suggest that at least 10,000 physically and mentally disabled German children perished as a result of the child "euthanasia" program during the war years.
"Euthanasia" planners quickly envisioned extending the killing program to adult disabled patients living in institutional settings. In the autumn of 1939, Adolf Hitler signed a secret authorization in order to protect participating physicians, medical staff, and administrators from prosecution. The authorization was backdated to September 1, 1939, to suggest that the effort was related to wartime measures.
The Führer Chancellery was compact and separate from state, government, or Nazi Party apparatuses. For these reasons, Hitler chose it to serve as the engine for the "euthanasia" campaign. The program's functionaries called their secret enterprise "T4." According to Hitler's directive, Führer Chancellery director Philipp Bouhler and physician Karl Brandt led the killing operation.
Under their leadership, T4 operatives established six gassing installations for adults as part of the "euthanasia" action. These were Brandenburg, on the Havel River near Berlin; Grafeneck, in southwestern Germany; Bernburg, in Saxony; Sonnenstein, also in Saxony; Hartheim, near Linz on the Danube in Austria; and Hadamar, in Hessen, where Irmgard Huber worked as a nurse.
Using a practice developed for the child "euthanasia" program, in the autumn of 1939 T4 planners began to distribute carefully formulated questionnaires to all public health officials, public and private hospitals, mental institutions, and nursing homes for the chronically ill and elderly. The limited space and wording on the forms, as well as the instructions in the accompanying cover letter, combined to give the impression that the survey was intended simply to gather statistical data.
The categories of patients were: those suffering from schizophrenia, epilepsy, dementia, encephalitis, and other chronic psychiatric or neurological disorders; those not of German or "related" blood; the criminally insane or those committed on criminal grounds; and those who had been confined to the institution in question for more than five years.
Secretly recruited "medical experts," physicians, many of them of significant reputation, worked in teams of three to evaluate the forms. On the basis of their decisions beginning in January 1940, T4 functionaries began to remove patients selected for the "euthanasia" program from their home institutions. The patients were transported by bus or by rail to one of the central gassing installations for killing.
Within hours of their arrival at such centers, the victims were murdered in gas chambers. The gas chambers, disguised as shower facilities, used pure, bottled carbon monoxide gas. T4 functionaries burned the bodies in crematoria attached to the gassing facilities. Other workers took the ashes of cremated victims from a common pile and placed them in urns to send to the relatives of the victims. The families or guardians received such an urn, along with a death certificate and other documentation listing a fictitious cause and date of death.
In the first phase of the killing operations between January and August 1941, around 10,000 men, women, and children were asphyxiated with carbon monoxide in Hadamar's gas chamber, which had been made to look like a shower room. The victims murdered at Hadamar psychiatric hospital were brought in by train and grey buses.
The victims were sent before physicians such as Adolf Wahlmann, who identified each person with different-coloured sticking plasters for one of three categories: murder; murder and removal of brain for research; and murder and extraction of gold teeth. When in the summer of 1941 the staff celebrated the cremation of their 10,000th patient, they celebrated with beer and wine.
Since the crematorium ovens were often filled with two corpses at a time, the cremation process was less than perfect, which often resulted in the thick, acrid smog that hung over the town. Because the program was secret, T4 planners and functionaries took elaborate measures to conceal its deadly designs.
Even though physicians and institutional administrators falsified official records in every case to indicate that the victims died of natural causes, the "euthanasia" program quickly became an open secret. There was widespread public knowledge of the measure. Private and public protests concerning the killings took place, especially from members of the German clergy.
Among these clergy was the bishop of Münster, Clemens August Count von Galen. He protested the T4 killings in a sermon on August 3, 1941. In light of the widespread public knowledge and the public and private protests, Hitler ordered a halt to the Euthanasia Program in late August 1941.
According to T4's own internal calculations, the "euthanasia" effort claimed the lives of 70,273 institutionalized mentally and physically disabled persons at the six gassing facilities between January 1940 and August 1941. However, Hitler's call for a halt to the T4 action did not mean an end to the "euthanasia" killing operation. Child "euthanasia" continued as before.
Moreover, in August 1942, German medical professionals and healthcare workers resumed the killings, although in a more carefully concealed manner than before. More decentralized than the initial gassing phase, the renewed effort relied closely upon regional exigencies, with local authorities determining the pace of the killing.
Using drug overdose and lethal injection, already successfully used in child "euthanasia," in this second phase as a more covert means of killing, the "euthanasia" campaign resumed at a broad range of institutions throughout the Reich. Many of these institutions also systematically starved adult and child victims. Hadamar was no exception.
From August 1942 to March 24, 1945, approximately 4,420 persons died at Hadamar. Resident physicians and staff directly killed the majority of these victims, among whom were German patients with disabilities, mentally disoriented elderly persons from bombed-out areas, "half Jewish" children from welfare institutions, psychologically and physically disabled forced laborers and their children, and German soldiers and foreign Waffen-SS soldiers deemed psychologically incurable.
The medical personnel and staff at Hadamar killed almost all of these people with lethal drug overdoses and deliberate neglect. Irmgard Huber not only played a role in selecting patients for murder and in falsifying death certificates, but she also controlled the supply of drugs used to overdose patients.
The Euthanasia Program continued until the last days of World War II, expanding to include an ever wider range of victims, including geriatric patients, bombing victims, and foreign forced laborers. Historians estimate that the Euthanasia Program, in all its phases, claimed the lives of 250,000 individuals.
On March 26, 1945, on their way to Central Germany, US Army units reached the town of Hadamar and liberated the town and the institution. When American soldiers arrived at the institution, they came upon catastrophic conditions. Over 500 patients were starved and weakened by systematic neglect and targeted malnutrition.
Although the US Army provided medical care and additional rations to the patients, for many the help came too late. Several of them died in the days and weeks following liberation as a result of inadequate care. Hadamar was one of the first major murder sites to be liberated by the US Army.
The obvious traces left by the murder of the ill led to the first US Army investigation, which began immediately after liberation. The key members of hospital management still on site were taken into custody and interrogated. Witnesses were also questioned about the murders and evidence was seized.
Irmgard Huber, then head nurse of the hospital, was among the staff arrested by the Americans. Her claims that she never killed patients were corroborated by co-workers and witnesses, and she was released. However, she did not escape justice.
The evidence gathered during the investigation led to a first trial in October 1945. It was conducted in a US military court in Wiesbaden against the staff members who undertook the killings. Huber was rearrested and tried with six others. Among them were Alfons Klein, the former director of the Institute, as well as two male nurses, Heinrich Ruoff and Karl Willig.
The three, Klein, Ruoff, and Willig, were all sentenced to death and went to the gallows on March 14, 1946. Because of his advanced age, chief physician Adolf Wahlmann received a life sentence, which was eventually commuted. For serving as an accomplice to murder, Irmgard Huber received 25 years in prison. It is believed that she avoided the death penalty only because she was a woman.
In 1947, Huber was also among the 25 persons tried at a later German-convened Hadamar trial, which was able to try German nationals who had participated in the murder of thousands of their fellow citizens. As accomplice to murder in at least 120 cases, Huber was sentenced to eight additional years in prison. Wahlmann was also convicted in the second trial and sentenced to death. However, due to his poor health, his death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment.
In the early 1950s, however, American authorities bowed to Cold War political pressure and issued amnesties and clemencies for many convicted Nazi perpetrators. Despite her proven role in numerous murders, Irmgard Huber was released from prison in 1952. For the rest of her life, Huber lived as a free woman in the town of Hadamar until 1983, when she died at the age of 82. There were no tears shed for Irmgard Huber.