Deportations of Hessian Jews under National Socialism began in 1940

2023-10-19 11:03:15

The Holocaust began in Giessen. With an action that the authorities called “transferring mentally ill Jews”. 126 Jewish patients who were taken from Hessian sanatoriums and nursing homes such as the “Krüppelanstalt” Bathildisheim in Arolsen to a collection camp in Gießen were deported from there to Brandenburg an der Havel on October 1, 1940. There they were probably gassed immediately upon arrival in a euthanasia murder center.

The patients had to strip naked, an eyewitness reports of the procedure in the institution there. They were told that they should bathe and be cleaned of vermin before being moved to another building. Every time the bathroom was full, the door was locked. “There were installations on the ceiling of the room in the form of showers through which gas was let into the room,” the witness remembers. “After about 15-20 minutes, the gas was let out of the room because the spy had determined that all of the people were no longer alive.” SS men then broke out the gold teeth of the dead.

One can certainly say that the later mass killings in Auschwitz and other death camps were rehearsed in the euthanasia killing sites in Brandenburg or in Hadamar in Hesse. Jewish patients were the first to be gassed during the euthanasia murders. They were separated from non-Jewish patients, concentrated in collection centers such as in Gießen or Heppenheim and from there transported to euthanasia centers and killed. Later, non-Jewish patients were also systematically murdered before the Nazis officially stopped their euthanasia program on Hitler’s orders following protests from Münster Bishop Clemens August Graf von Galen. In fact, disabled people, especially children, continued to be secretly murdered afterwards.

Posthumous publication of decades of research

The educator and journalist Monica Kingreen wanted to point out the euthanasia murders of Jews as the first phase of the Holocaust in her book about the deportation of Jews from Hesse. Unfortunately, she was unable to complete her work; Kingreen died in 2017, leaving behind a manuscript that was extensive and full of facts, but not ready for printing. The archivist Volker Eichler, who was an employee of the Hessian Main State Archives for many years and who knew Kingreen not least from the Commission for the History of the Jews in Hesse, processed her estate and titled it “The deportation of the Jews from Hesse 1940 to 1945. Personal testimonies “, photos, documents” published.

In this book, the state-ordered deportations and the associated atrocities become just as tangible for readers as the fears and suffering of the victims and their relatives, says Astrid Wallmann, President of the Hessian State Parliament, in her foreword. According to Dietfrid Krause-Vilmar, the former head of the Fritz Bauer Institute in Frankfurt, Kingreen left behind a valuable and unique manuscript, a “workpiece” of her decades of research into the deportations in Hesse organized by the Gestapo as well as the Suffering of the persecuted people.