![Human rights memorial Castle-Fortress Sonnenstein 118149461](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e0/Human_rights_memorial_Castle-Fortress_Sonnenstein_118149461.jpg)
The Sonnenstein Euthanasia Clinic (german: NS-Tötungsanstalt Sonnenstein; literally "National Socialist Killing Institution Sonnenstein") was a
Nazi
Nazism ( ; german: Nazismus), the common name in English for National Socialism (german: Nationalsozialismus, ), is the far-right totalitarian political ideology and practices associated with Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party (NSDAP) in ...
euthanasia
Euthanasia (from el, εὐθανασία 'good death': εὖ, ''eu'' 'well, good' + θάνατος, ''thanatos'' 'death') is the practice of intentionally ending life to eliminate pain and suffering.
Different countries have different eut ...
or extermination centre located in the former fortress of
Sonnenstein Castle
The Sonnenstein Castle is a castle in Pirna, near Dresden, Germany. It housed a mental hospital, which operated from 1811 to the end of World War II in 1945. During the War, it functioned as an extermination centre for the Nazi ''Aktion T4'' pro ...
near
Pirna
Pirna (; hsb, Pěrno; ) is a town in Saxony, Germany and capital of the administrative district Sächsische Schweiz-Osterzgebirge. The town's population is over 37,000. Pirna is located near Dresden and is an important district town as well as ...
in eastern Germany, where a hospital had been established in 1811.
In 1940 and 1941, the facility was used by the
Nazis
Nazism ( ; german: Nazismus), the common name in English for National Socialism (german: Nationalsozialismus, ), is the far-right totalitarian political ideology and practices associated with Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party (NSDAP) in Na ...
to exterminate around 15,000 people in a process that was labelled as
euthanasia
Euthanasia (from el, εὐθανασία 'good death': εὖ, ''eu'' 'well, good' + θάνατος, ''thanatos'' 'death') is the practice of intentionally ending life to eliminate pain and suffering.
Different countries have different eut ...
. The majority of victims were suffering from
psychological disorder
A mental disorder, also referred to as a mental illness or psychiatric disorder, is a behavioral or mental pattern that causes significant distress or impairment of personal functioning. Such features may be persistent, relapsing and remitti ...
s and
intellectual disability
Intellectual disability (ID), also known as general learning disability in the United Kingdom and formerly mental retardation,Rosa's Law, Pub. L. 111-256124 Stat. 2643(2010). is a generalized neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by signifi ...
, but their number also included inmates from the
concentration camps
Internment is the imprisonment of people, commonly in large groups, without charges or intent to file charges. The term is especially used for the confinement "of enemy citizens in wartime or of terrorism suspects". Thus, while it can simply ...
. The institute was set up after the beginning of the
Second World War
World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposin ...
as part of a Reich-wide, centrally coordinated and largely secret programme called ''
Action T4
(German, ) was a campaign of mass murder by involuntary euthanasia in Nazi Germany. The term was first used in post-war trials against doctors who had been involved in the killings. The name T4 is an abbreviation of 4, a street address of ...
'' for the "Elimination of
life unworthy of life
The phrase "life unworthy of life" (german: Lebensunwertes Leben) was a Nazi term, Nazi designation for the segments of the populace which according to the Nazi regime had no right to life, right to live. Those individuals were targeted to be m ...
" (''Vernichtung lebensunwerten Lebens'') or the killing of what the Nazis called "dead weight existences" (''Ballastexistenzen''). Today, the Pirna Sonnenstein Memorial Site (''Gedenkstätte Pirna Sonnenstein'') stands to commemorate the victims of these crimes.
The Nazi euthanasia facility at
Sonnenstein Castle
The Sonnenstein Castle is a castle in Pirna, near Dresden, Germany. It housed a mental hospital, which operated from 1811 to the end of World War II in 1945. During the War, it functioned as an extermination centre for the Nazi ''Aktion T4'' pro ...
also supported the personnel as well as the organisational and technical preparation of the
Holocaust
The Holocaust, also known as the Shoah, was the genocide of European Jews during World War II. Between 1941 and 1945, Nazi Germany and its collaborators systematically murdered some six million Jews across German-occupied Europe; a ...
. It was one of six that were in operation in
Saxony
Saxony (german: Sachsen ; Upper Saxon: ''Saggsn''; hsb, Sakska), officially the Free State of Saxony (german: Freistaat Sachsen, links=no ; Upper Saxon: ''Freischdaad Saggsn''; hsb, Swobodny stat Sakska, links=no), is a landlocked state of ...
, and was—not least due to the number of victims—one of the worst sites of Nazi war crimes in
the state
A state is a centralized political organization that imposes and enforces rules over a population within a territory. There is no undisputed definition of a state. One widely used definition comes from the German sociologist Max Weber: a "stat ...
.
The methods of gassing prisoners at Sonnestein were later adopted at
Auschwitz
Auschwitz concentration camp ( (); also or ) was a complex of over 40 concentration and extermination camps operated by Nazi Germany in occupied Poland (in a portion annexed into Germany in 1939) during World War II and the Holocaust. It con ...
to exterminate inmates.
Early history
The former castle site and fortress was converted in 1811 into an institute for mentally ill patients who were assessed as curable. It had a good reputation due to its psychiatric reform concept. The
general practitioner and first director of this hospital was Ernst Gottlob Pienitz. Between 1855 and 1914 the institute was expanded with numerous extensions. From 1922 to 1939 the national nursing college (''Pflegerschule'') was moved to Sonnenstein.
In 1928,
Hermann Paul Nitsche was appointed as the director of the Sonnenstein Mental Institution (''Heilanstalt Sonnenstein'') which had now grown to over 700 patients. Under his tenure a systematic exclusion of chronically mentally ill patients began. As an advocate of
racial hygiene
The term racial hygiene was used to describe an approach to eugenics in the early 20th century, which found its most extensive implementation in Nazi Germany (Nazi eugenics). It was marked by efforts to avoid miscegenation, analogous to an animal ...
and
euthanasia
Euthanasia (from el, εὐθανασία 'good death': εὖ, ''eu'' 'well, good' + θάνατος, ''thanatos'' 'death') is the practice of intentionally ending life to eliminate pain and suffering.
Different countries have different eut ...
he carried out
compulsory sterilisation
Compulsory sterilization, also known as forced or coerced sterilization, is a government-mandated program to involuntarily sterilize a specific group of people. Sterilization removes a person's capacity to reproduce, and is usually done throug ...
s, questionable compulsory medical procedures and food rationing on patients with "hereditary" diseases. In autumn 1939, the institute was closed to the public in a decree by Saxon Interior Minister and set up as a military hospital and resettlement camp.
Systematic killing of patients
![Bundesarchiv Bild 183-H13374, Philipp Bouhler](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/17/Bundesarchiv_Bild_183-H13374%2C_Philipp_Bouhler.jpg)
As part of what later became the so-called
Action T4
(German, ) was a campaign of mass murder by involuntary euthanasia in Nazi Germany. The term was first used in post-war trials against doctors who had been involved in the killings. The name T4 is an abbreviation of 4, a street address of ...
, six death institutes were set up in 1940 and 1941 across the German Reich under the direction of the branches of the
Nazi Party
The Nazi Party, officially the National Socialist German Workers' Party (german: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei or NSDAP), was a far-right politics, far-right political party in Germany active between 1920 and 1945 that crea ...
, overseen by a specially-created control centre for the extermination programme, established at ''Tiergartenstraße'' 4 in Berlin. These institutes were responsible for gassing 70,000 mentally ill and mentally retarded patients from psychiatric institutions, old peoples homes, nursing homes and hospitals. One of these extermination clinics was located in Pirna-Sonnenstein under the direction of the doctor,
Horst Schumann
Horst Schumann (1 May 1906 – 5 May 1983) was an ''SS-Sturmbannführer'' (major) and medical doctor who conducted sterilization and castration experiments at Auschwitz and was particularly interested in the mass sterilization of Jews by means o ...
. His successors were Kurt Borm (code name "Dr. Storm"), Klaus Endruweit (code name "Dr. Bader"), Curt Schmalenbach (code name "Dr. Palm") and Ewald Wortmann (code name "Dr. Friede").
In spring 1940 the Berlin euthanasia department had a killing centre established in a screened-off part of the institute's land. In the cellar of a hospital building – Haus C 16 - a
gas chamber
A gas chamber is an apparatus for killing humans or other animals with gas, consisting of a sealed chamber into which a poisonous or asphyxiant gas is introduced. Poisonous agents used include hydrogen cyanide and carbon monoxide.
Histor ...
was installed and a crematorium attached. The complex of four buildings was surrounded by a wall on the sides facing the Elbe river and a car park - still largely in place today. On the remaining sides a high board fence was erected to hide what was going on inside.
At the end of June 1940 the extermination institute began operations. In the years 1940 and 1941 it had a total of about 100 employees: doctors, nurses, drivers, orderlies, office workers, police. Several times a week, patients were fetched from mental and nursing homes in buses and brought to the Sonnenstein. After passing the entrance gate to the institute, which was guarded by a police detachment, the victims were taken to the ground floor of Block C 16 where they were separated into reception rooms for men and women by orderlies. In another room they were presented one by one, usually to two doctors from the institute, who then fabricated a cause of death for the subsequent death certificate.
Following their "examination" the victims had to undress in another room under the supervision of nurses and orderlies. Next 20 to 30 people were taken down to the cellar under the pretext that they were going for a shower. There they were led into a gas chamber fitted out like a shower room with several shower heads in the ceiling. Then staff closed the steel door to the gas chamber. An institute doctor came down, opened the cock on a
carbon monoxide
Carbon monoxide (chemical formula CO) is a colorless, poisonous, odorless, tasteless, flammable gas that is slightly less dense than air. Carbon monoxide consists of one carbon atom and one oxygen atom connected by a triple bond. It is the simple ...
cylinder and watched the death process that, depending on build and endurance, took about 20 to 30 minutes.
After about 20 more minutes, the gas was extracted and the corpses collected from the gas chamber by "stokers" and cremated in two coke ovens supplied by the firm of
Kori from Berlin. Before cremation, selected patients were dissected by the doctor and any gold teeth removed. The ashes of the victims were dumped on the institute rubbish dump or simply shovelled over the bank of the River Elbe behind the building at night.
The Sonnenstein Registry Office (''Standesamt Sonnenstein'') sent families of the victims a death certificate with falsified causes of death and a standard "letter of condolence". Men and women of all ages and even children were killed at Sonnenstein, including those from the ''Katharinenhof'' in Saxony's
Großhennersdorf
Großhennersdorf is a village and a former municipality in Görlitz district, Saxony, Germany. Since 1 January 2011, it is part of the town Herrnhut. The Bundesstraße 178 connects Großhennersdorf with Löbau and Zittau.
The town was founded i ...
and from the Chemnitz-Altendorf State Institute. The patients killed at Sonnenstein came from the whole of Saxony,
Thuringia
Thuringia (; german: Thüringen ), officially the Free State of Thuringia ( ), is a state of central Germany, covering , the sixth smallest of the sixteen German states. It has a population of about 2.1 million.
Erfurt is the capital and larg ...
,
Silesia
Silesia (, also , ) is a historical region of Central Europe that lies mostly within Poland, with small parts in the Czech Republic and Germany. Its area is approximately , and the population is estimated at around 8,000,000. Silesia is split ...
,
East Prussia
East Prussia ; german: Ostpreißen, label=Low Prussian; pl, Prusy Wschodnie; lt, Rytų Prūsija was a province of the Kingdom of Prussia from 1773 to 1829 and again from 1878 (with the Kingdom itself being part of the German Empire from 187 ...
(e.g. from the
Provincial Mental Sanatorium Kortau
The Provincial Mental Sanatorium Kortau (german: Provinzial-Heil- und Pflege-Anstalt Kortau) was a psychiatric hospital in Kortau, East Prussia (Kortowo, Poland). Founded in 1886, it was located about 2 km south of the town center of Alle ...
) and parts of
Bavaria
Bavaria ( ; ), officially the Free State of Bavaria (german: Freistaat Bayern, link=no ), is a state in the south-east of Germany. With an area of , Bavaria is the largest German state by land area, comprising roughly a fifth of the total lan ...
. Until 24 August 1941, when Adolf Hitler, probably for internal political reasons, issued the "Euthanasia Stop" order,
a total of 13,720 mentally ill and mentally retarded people were gassed under Action T4 at Pirna-Sonnenstein.
Precursor to the "Final Solution"
In addition, in summer 1941 more than one thousand inmates from concentration camps were executed at Pirna-Sonnenstein as part of
Action 14f13
Action 14f13, also called ''Sonderbehandlung'' (special treatment) 14f13 and Aktion 14f13, was a campaign by Nazi Germany to murder Nazi concentration camp prisoners. Also called ''invalid'' or ''prisoner euthanasia'', the sick, the elderly and t ...
. At the time the camps did not have their own gas chambers. The scale of prisoner transportation to Sonnenstein is still not fully known. Records show transportations from the concentration camps of Sachsenhausen, Buchenwald and Auschwitz. The mass gassing of almost 600 inmates from the Auschwitz concentration camp at the end of July 1941 marked the transition to a new dimension in war crime.
In the first half of 1942
extermination camps
Nazi Germany used six extermination camps (german: Vernichtungslager), also called death camps (), or killing centers (), in Central Europe during World War II to systematically murder over 2.7 million peoplemostly Jewsin the Holocaust. The v ...
for Polish and European Jews were established, especially in East Poland, under
Operation Reinhard
or ''Einsatz Reinhard''
, location = Occupied Poland
, date = October 1941 – November 1943
, incident_type = Mass deportations to extermination camps
, perpetrators = Odilo Globočnik, Hermann Höfle, Richard Thomalla, Erwin L ...
, that were able to draw on the experience gained under
Action T4
(German, ) was a campaign of mass murder by involuntary euthanasia in Nazi Germany. The term was first used in post-war trials against doctors who had been involved in the killings. The name T4 is an abbreviation of 4, a street address of ...
. About a third of the employees at the Sonnenstein Death Institute were deployed during 1942 and 1943 to the extermination camps of
Bełżec
Belzec (English: or , Polish: ) was a Nazi German extermination camp built by the SS for the purpose of implementing the secretive Operation Reinhard, the plan to murder all History of Jews in Poland, Polish Jews, a major part of the "Fina ...
,
Sobibor
Sobibor (, Polish: ) was an extermination camp built and operated by Nazi Germany as part of Operation Reinhard. It was located in the forest near the village of Żłobek Duży in the General Government region of German-occupied Poland.
As an ...
and
Treblinka
Treblinka () was an extermination camp, built and operated by Nazi Germany in occupied Poland during World War II. It was in a forest north-east of Warsaw, south of the village of Treblinka in what is now the Masovian Voivodeship. The camp ...
.
Traces removed
![Bundesarchiv Bild 183-1992-0728-500, Dresden, Ärzteprozeß](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b3/Bundesarchiv_Bild_183-1992-0728-500%2C_Dresden%2C_%C3%84rzteproze%C3%9F.jpg)
During the summer of 1942 the euthanasia institute of Sonnenstein was dissolved and the gas chamber and crematorium dismantled. After careful removal of the traces of the crime, the building was used from the end of 1942 as a military hospital by the Wehrmacht. In the so-called Dresden Doctors' Trial in the summer of 1947 some of the participants in the killings at Sonnenstein were held to account. The Dresden jury sentenced to death
Hermann Paul Nitsche, who from spring 1940 was one of the medical directors in charge of the extermination of patients in the German Reich, as well as two of the Sonnenstein nurses.
After the doctors' trial, the crimes committed were rarely mentioned in Pirna. During the time of
East Germany
East Germany, officially the German Democratic Republic (GDR; german: Deutsche Demokratische Republik, , DDR, ), was a country that existed from its creation on 7 October 1949 until its dissolution on 3 October 1990. In these years the state ...
, the story was repressed and largely concealed for four decades. On the Sonnenstein site a large factory was built that was kept shielded from the public; the firm used the buildings of the death centre.
Number of victims
Self-portrait by , who was murdered at Sonnenstein">Elfriede Lohse-Wächtler, who was murdered at Sonnenstein
According to surviving internal T4 statistics, in the Sonnenstein Euthanasia Centre in 15 months between June 1940 and 1 September 1941 a total of 13,720 people were executed in the gas chamber:
These statistics only cover the first phase of ''Action T4'', that was ended by an order from Adolf Hitler on 24 August 1941.
[''Euthanasie-Stop'' order by Adolf Hitler dated 24 August 1941.] After the temporary interruption of Action T4, a further 1,031 concentration camp prisoners from
Buchenwald
Buchenwald (; literally 'beech forest') was a Nazi concentration camp established on hill near Weimar, Germany, in July 1937. It was one of the first and the largest of the concentration camps within Germany's 1937 borders. Many actual or su ...
,
Sachsenhausen
Sachsenhausen () or Sachsenhausen-Oranienburg was a German Nazi concentration camp in Oranienburg, Germany, used from 1936 until April 1945, shortly before the defeat of Nazi Germany in May later that year. It mainly held political prisoners ...
and
Auschwitz
Auschwitz concentration camp ( (); also or ) was a complex of over 40 concentration and extermination camps operated by Nazi Germany in occupied Poland (in a portion annexed into Germany in 1939) during World War II and the Holocaust. It con ...
were executed in Sonnenstein under the code name "Special treatment 14 f 13". One of the best-known victims was the Dresden artist,
Elfriede Lohse-Wächtler
Elfriede Lohse-Wächtler (born ''Anna Frieda Wächtler''; 4 December 1899 – 31 July 1940) was a German painter of the avant-garde whose works were banned as "degenerate art", and in some cases destroyed, in Nazi Germany. She became mentally il ...
. Likewise the church solicitor
Martin Gauger
Martin Gauger (August 4, 1905 Elberfeld – July 14, 1941 Pirna) was a German jurist and pacifist from Wuppertal, Rhenish Prussia. He was a member of the Kreisau Circle which sought to overthrow the Nazi regime in Germany during the Second Worl ...
, who came from Buchenwald concentration camp, was murdered in Sonnenstein under ''14f13''.
Establishment of the memorial centre
After the death centre closed in 1941, the Adolf Hitler School (''Adolf-Hitler-Schule Gau Sachsen''), a Reich Administration School and a Wehrmacht military hospital were established on the site and lasted until 1945. Following the end of the Second World War, it became a refugee camp, quarantine camp for released members of the Wehrmacht, part of the Landrat office and a police school. These remained until 1949, with the exception of the police school which lasted until 1954.
From 1954 to 1991 a large part of the site was used by a continuous-flow machine manufacturer to build aircraft turbines. In 1977 the ''Pirna District Rehabilitation Centre'' was established in the castle area. In 1991 this grew into a workshop for handicapped people under the sponsorship of the workers' charity, ''Arbeiterwohlfahrt''.
Not until autumn 1989 did its historic events gradually sink into the public consciousness in the town. On 1 September 1989, the 50th anniversary of the start of the Nazi extermination programme, a small exhibition about
Action T4
(German, ) was a campaign of mass murder by involuntary euthanasia in Nazi Germany. The term was first used in post-war trials against doctors who had been involved in the killings. The name T4 is an abbreviation of 4, a street address of ...
by the historian
Götz Aly
Götz Haydar Aly (; born 3 May 1947) is a German journalist, historian and political scientist.
Life and career
Aly was born in Heidelberg, Baden-Württemberg. He is a patrilineal descendant of a Mixed Turkish-Kurdish convert to Christianity name ...
was held, at the initiative of several townsfolk interested in bringing the subject to light. The exhibition generated a lot of public interest. As a result, there was a citizens' initiative to create a suitable memorial site to the victims of the Nazi euthanasia crimes at Sonnenstein. In June 1991 a society for the site was formed, the ''Kuratorium Gedenkstätte Sonnenstein''.
Based on searches of the archives and archaeological investigations carried out from 1992 to 1994, the cellar rooms used for the exterminations in Haus C 16 were reconstructed in 1995 and arranged as a memorial centre (today building ''Schlosspark 11''). The exhibition is located in the attic of the same building. On behalf of the Saxon Memorial Foundation, a permanent exhibition to remember the victims of political tyranny was created to document the crimes. It was opened to the public on 9 June 2000.
The memorial centre today
Today the site is part of the memorial known as "Vergangenheit ist Gegenwart" ("The Past is the Present") created by Berlin artist Heike Ponwitz. All the boards carry a motif of the Sonnenstein Fortress based on a painting by the
Electorate of Saxony
The Electorate of Saxony, also known as Electoral Saxony (German: or ), was a territory of the Holy Roman Empire from 1356–1806. It was centered around the cities of Dresden, Leipzig and Chemnitz.
In the Golden Bull of 1356, Emperor Charles ...
court painter
Bernardo Bellotto
Bernardo Bellotto (c. 1721/2 or 30 January 172117 November 1780), was an Italian urban landscape painter or ''vedutista'', and printmaker in etching famous for his ''vedute'' of European cities – Dresden, Vienna, Turin, and Warsaw. He was ...
(1721-1780). Each board takes a theme connected with Nazi euthanasia war crimes, such as ''collective transport,'' ''letter of condolence,'' ''special treatment'' or ''bathroom.''
The project is the result of a competition to erect a memorial for the 15,000 victims of Sonnenstein.
References
Sources
* Böhm, Boris: ''Geschichte des Sonnensteins und seiner Festung'', publ. by Kuratorium Gedenkstätte Sonnenstein, Pirna, 1994
*
* Kuratorium Gedenkstätte Sonnenstein e.V. u. Sächsische Landeszentrale für politische Bildung (pub.): ''Nationalsozialistische Euthanasieverbrechen in Sachsen. Beiträge zu ihrer Aufarbeitung''. Dresden, Pirna 1993 and 2nd heavily amended edition of 1996; 2004, . (
Collection of individual articles.)
* Kuratorium Gedenkstätte Sonnenstein e.V. (publ.): ''Von den Krankenmorden auf dem Sonnenstein zur "Endlösung der Judenfrage" im Osten''. Pirna, 2001.
* Frank Hirschinger: ''Zur Ausmerzung freigegeben.
Halle und die Landesheilanstalt
Altscherbitz 1933-1945''. Böhlau, Cologne, 2001, .
* Daniela Martin: ''"... die Blumen haben fein geschmeckt". Das Leben meiner Urgroßmutter Anna L. (1893-1940)'' Schriftenreihe ''Lebenszeugnisse - Leidenswege'', Heft 21, Dresden, 2010; .
* Thomas Schilter:'' Unmenschliches Ermessen. Die nationalsozialistische "Euthanasie"-Tötungsanstalt Pirna-Sonnenstein 1940/41.'' Gustav Kiepenheuer Verlag, Leipzig, 1998. 319 pages, .
''Other bibliography see main article:''
Action T4
(German, ) was a campaign of mass murder by involuntary euthanasia in Nazi Germany. The term was first used in post-war trials against doctors who had been involved in the killings. The name T4 is an abbreviation of 4, a street address of ...
External links
Pirna-Sonnenstein Memorial SiteKuratorium Gedenkstätte Sonnenstein e.V.Art project ''Denkzeichen''
{{Authority control
Aktion T4 euthanasia centres
Nazi eugenics
Pirna