Target the Vulnerable (6 Pics)

 

Katharina Detzel was arrested in 1907 for sabotaging a railway as part of a political protest, and was declared insane and confined in the Heidelberg Psychiatric Clinic in what looks like a case of a motivated and opinionated woman being declared 'mad' by a male-dominated legal and medical system. It is possible she was also a back-street abortionist. Over the next 15 years, she wrote a play, protested on behalf of her fellow patients, made figures from bread dough, and attempted to escape numerous times - including by whittling keys out of wood. Her greatest creation was this man-dummy, which she danced with and sometimes pummelled, in what appears to us now to be a clear case of her creating an avatar to 'provide' her with an equal partner, which in her institutionalised state, was far beyond her reach. Ms Detzel was a patient in Heidelberg Psychiatric Clinic when junior doctor Hans Prinzhorn (1886-1933) began work at the institution. Dr Prinzhorn was both a psychiatrist and an art historian, and he pioneered both the use of art as a diagnostic & therapeutic tool for 'the insane', and appreciation of their creations as art in its own right. He published "The Artistry of the Mentally Ill" in 1922 to publicise and encourage both approaches, which are recognised today as revolutionary interdisciplinary approaches, from which this picture was taken. Ms Detzel was released from the asylum and lived with her daughter sometime in the early 1930s, but in about 1939, she was arrested for theft and, likely based on her previous record, was again confined in an asylum. She was murdered in 1941 as part of the Nazi social-cleansing program called "Aktion T4".

[Picture: A propaganda poster telling the viewer that a "hereditary defective" will cost 60,000RM (roughly, €900,000 in 2021) in care over their life - and reminding the viewer "that is your money too" - implying it is wasted.] The Nazis were the carriers of a large complex of social and political neuroses, a majority of them based on wilfully irrational conspiracist thinking. Some, however, were based on an extreme reading of then-current scientific thinking, the imposition of which in most cases rapidly outpaced the original understanding as the Nazis integrated the ideal into their irrational mindset. This was the case with eugenics. Racist and classist understandings of the 'benefits' of a eugenics-based social policy became common currency in Europe and North America in the early 20th century. Reducing the birthrates of 'undesirable' people - however a society decided to apply that label, and increasing the birthrate of 'desirable' people - an equally subjective term, led to a range of "positive measures" - for example, encouraging "desirable" people to have more children - and "negative measures" - such as the sterilisation of the "undesirable". In Nazi Germany, eugenics became a scientific justification for actions against one of Nazism's foes - those Germans who were not worthy of being part of the "Volkgemeinschaft" (People's Community, the idealised happy-clappy Germany Nazism claimed it was both protecting & building) – the “lebensunwertes Leben” – “life unworthy of life”. This was presented as a sympathetic, humane measure - ending the suffering of the disabled and mentally ill - and a few distraught parents of severely-disabled children were harnessed by the regime and presented as tragic victims of circumstance, for whom euthanasia was a release for their beloved and benighted children.

[Picture: Hitler's order authorising the euthanisia of those considered 'incurable'.] The Nazis started with widespread sterilisation of those ‘unworthy’ (which included black people, in one of the few definite anti-black policies of Nazism). This was followed by action against German newborns, who were to be classified as healthy or defective and were to be killed if defective, it is unclear how many infants were killed, but it may have reached 5,000 by 1941. The Nazis had to use both deception and threats against many parents to hand over their children for murder. They then turned their attention to the euthanasia of those already living, pitched as a "humane" act which served the continuance of the 'clear' superiority of the German Volk - and saved a load of money to boot. The Nazi programme of euthanasia made great use of intensely racialised and classist imagery in its propaganda - the "hereditary defective" in such works were often indistinguishable from the caricatures of Jews elsewhere, creating a unified "unideal" foe for this social cleansing campaign to free the Volk of. However, in practical terms, the campaign took in virtually anyone who might be in some way considered medically or psychologically defective in the eyes of any doctor. The understanding of such things in the 1930s/40s meant this took in a huge range – including women who suffered postnatal depression, the autistic, people with dementia, schizophrenics, the bipolar, those with Down Syndrome - all were at risk of being murdered. Hans Asperger (1906-1980), after whom the syndrome on the autistic spectrum is named, is known to have referred two children to a centre that conducted T4 murders, and debate rages as to his level of awareness. Dr Herbert Linden (1899-1945), one of the architects of T4 and head of the programme's central office, was reported (by SS officer Kurt Gerstein (1905-1945)) to have said that those killed by his programme must be cremated - 'in case we are succeeded by a generation who does not understand us very well'.

[Picture: Hartheim Euthanasia Centre, where 18,000 people were gasssed.] The Nazi state did care about one kind of mentally ill and disabled person with special focus, however - those wounded in World War One - via the Nationalsozialistischekriegsopferversorgung (NSKOV), National Socialist War Victim's Care organisation, which administered special pension supplements for the war wounded, and ran treatment and retraining centres from which much propaganda hay was made about the regard and care Nazism had for these "first citizens", contrasted with the supposedly negligent attitude of Weimar Germany. After World War Two began, this Nazi approach found even more brutal form in the occupied territories – some of the first massacres conducted by German forces were of the inhabitants of asylums in Poland - the Nazi state was not going to 'waste resources' looking after them. These mass-murders prompted the development of gassing the mentally ill and disabled, and effective mass-cremation methods of their remains, for efficiency and morale-maintaining purposes. These methods were in turn developed for T4 inside Germany, and formed an easily-scaled system which the SS decided was the most effective tool to systematise the massacre of Europe’s Jewish population, after the mass shootings of the early part of the war had proven too wearying on the morale and discipline of troops. Some Aktion T4 facilities even became directly looped into the Holocaust system, moving from gassing the ‘hereditary defective’ to Jews, Communists and other ‘social undesirables’ with little friction.

[Picture: the crematorium at Hadamar Euthanasia Centre expels the remains of some of the 15,000 people who died there.] In Germany, the programme received a great deal of criticism from an array of areas, including the towns were killing centres were located (some towns suffered rains of ash filled with human hair) and the Catholic Church, but continued until 1941, when Adolf Hitler rescinded the national programme. However, within the chaotic internal politics of Nazi Germany, local party and medical leaders retained the option to use these measures, and many did maintain sub-national policies of registering and murdering ‘the defective’. As the war turned against Nazi Germany, this policy seems to have also been expanded to allow the en-masse murder of the elderly, with Hamburg's old peoples homes being emptied in 1943 after strategic bombing of that city. Similarly, in June 1944, 500 older women from Stettin - described as "broken" by bombing - were murdered using the T4 facilities of the Meseritz-Oberwalde Asylum

[Picture: The last victim of state-sanctioned involuntary euthanasia in "Nazi Germany" - Richard Jenne, murdered in a city that had been occupied by US forces for three weeks.] It is due to the continuance of T4 as "standard medical procedure" in many parts of Germany that the last known direct victim of Aktion T4 was a child called Richard Jenne who was killed on 29 May 1945 (Germany surrendered on 7 May 1945), in the children's ward of the Kaufbeuren-Irsee euthanasia centre in Bavaria, Germany, more than three weeks after American troops had occupied the town. He was 4. Kaufbeuren-Irsee had became a national centre for the murder of "defective" children in the latter days of the war, under Dr Valentin Faltlhauser (1876-1961), who had 'invented' a process of starving children to death (via meals designed to not provide enough nutrients) rather than "needlessly" wasting lethal injection supplies. Falklhauser had his centre signposted with warnings about Typhus, meaning US forces in the city did not enter the hospital until July 1945, allowing him to continue his work. Dr Faltlhauser was arrested by US forces and spent 3 years in prison, on release he was stripped of his license to practice medicine. It is likely that when Falklhauser was released in 1949, German children who had survived T4 were still dying of medical conditions exacerbated by time spent on his deadly diet. About 200,000 people were killed by Aktion T4, a small foretaste of the slaughter of the Holocaust, but this action against some of the most vulnerable of German society, based on the ease with which the mentally ill and disabled could be depicted as unworthy of life, was the foundation of that ziggurat of murder.