http://www.the-times.co.uk/
March 21 2000 EUROPE
Nazi doctor 'killed 772 children'
FROM ROGER BOYES IN BERLIN
AUSTRIA will be confronted with one of the most grisly episodes from its
Nazi past today when an 84-year-old doctor said to be known as The Scythe
stands in the dock accused of killing mentally and physically handicapped
children.
It will be the first significant Nazi trial in the country since 1972, when
two Auschwitz architects were in court , and, given the age of the
criminals and the witnesses, is likely to be the last.
Much hinges on the stooped figure of Heinrich Gross who would, according to
witnesses, stride into his Vienna clinic wearing polished boots and his
crisp Wehrmacht colonel's uniform and point to the child patients marked
down for euthanasia.
Austria faces up to the Hitler years only reluctantly and many citizens
cling to the myth that the country was a victim rather than enthusiastic
collaborator of Nazi Germany. This inability to tackle the past has helped
the rise of the right-wing populist Jörg Haider, who in his early career
flattered Waffen SS veterans and praised Hitler's employment policies.
Professor Gross, a psychiatrist, joined the SA Brown Shirts in 1933, the
Nazi party in 1938 and the Wehrmacht in 1943. After the Second World War he
became a stalwart member of the ruling Austrian Socialist Party.
About 688,000 Austrians were members of the Nazi party and the postwar
Socialists quickly realised that they could not rule without the help of
these ex-National Socialists. With political protection, Professor Gross
rose to be one of the best paid forensic doctors and, helped by his
clinic's unique collection of pickled brains, a respected scientist.
Professor Gross says he remembers nothing about the Nazi years, many of
which were spent working at the Spiegelgrund clinic, the children's section
of Vienna's neurology institute. Nowadays he falls asleep in the middle of
conversations and seems to lack concentration. When the trial begins his
lawyer will plead that he is unfit to testify.
But it is difficult to shrug off the evidence that derives in large part
from the Nazi mania for collecting and storing scientific information.
Professor Gross took photographs of the children he treated. The records
are precise: 772 children died in his clinic and the professor signed the
death certificates of 238.
The preserved brains, kept in jars of formaldehyde in the basement,
revealed traces of the powerful sleeping drug Luminal. Some of these
brains, firmly identified, have been buried in a cemetery by relatives.
Did Professor Gross order the injection of fatal doses of the drug? He
denies it and says he opposed the Nazi programme of euthanasia for the
mentally and physically handicapped. The death certificates bearing his
signature give lung infection as the main cause of death. Survivors make
clear why: drugged children were put out on the balconies in the middle of
winter.
The most damning evidence will come from survivors. Alois Kaufmann, 67, was
sent to the clinic as a ten-year-old in 1943 after a school psychologist
had designated him as "asocial". He identified Professor Gross as being the
feared doctor known as The Scythe.
Doctors were determined to do their bit for the war effort by researching
the effects of cold and malnutrition on the human body.
"They would take all the bedclothes away and put the children - even babies
- naked on the balcony to check how long it would be before they got
pneumonia and died," Herr Kaufmann says. It was common to duck children in
ice-cold water and then wrap them up like mummies, again to test their
resistance to cold.
When Professor Gross entered the ward "we had to remain silent," recalls
Herr Kaufmann. "We had to stand in a line and he would point at certain
children, jabbing his finger - 'You, you, and you'. Then, you won't believe
this, he would smile or pat the children on the heads or even give them
sweets. The next day these children would have disappeared."
The children had been taken to Pavilion 17, the death ward. The first to go
were bed-wetters, those with harelips and "slow thinkers". The doctors
were, in the broadest sense, obeying orders. Hitler had authorised mercy
killing for incurable children and in the initial stage of the programme
doctors would fill out forms with comments like "improvement impossible" or
"permanently unsuitable for work".
The forms would be forwarded to Berlin and the go-ahead for "treatment" -
that is, killing - was promptly given. The doctors thus bore much of the
responsibility. Their scope for independent action increased as the war
progressed. Doctors became diagnosticians and executioners.
There was no professional group so deeply committed to the Nazis as doctors
and few countries could match Austria for its Nazi involvement. The
combination of the two - a deeply compromised profession operating in a
compromised nation - has given this trial extraordinary importance. Other
issues will be raised, on medical ethics and the morality of euthanasia,
but at its core the trial remains political.
The chief doctor of the clinic, Ernst Illing, was executed in 1946. Another
doctor was jailed for ten years. Professor Gross returned to Austria
relatively late from imprisonment in the Soviet Union. Although he was
investigated and initially sentenced, he was left with his reputation intact.
