Bernburg Memorial

Gedenkstätte Bernburg

Between 1940 and 1943, the former Bernburg mental hospital functioned as one of several »euthanasia« killing centres in National Socialist Germany. The memorial to the victims of National Socialist »euthanasia« honours the thousands of mentally and physically handicapped patients as well as concentration camp prisoners who were murdered in Bernburg by doctors and medical staff.

History

Under the National Socialist regime the term »euthanasia« stood for the murder of thousands of mentally and physically handicapped people. The murder was planned and organised by a central office which directly reported to Adolf Hitler. The office was code named »T4« in reference to its postal address in Berlin's Tiergartenstraße. At first, toddlers up to the age of three fell victim to »euthanasia«, later older children and youths were affected. Beginning 1940, handicapped adults and ill people were included in the scheme under the new code »Action T4«. During the initial phase, people were killed by malnourishment, poison or medications. From January 1940, more and more »T4« killing centres began operating their own gas chambers. From 1941, the SS also used the »Action T4« hospitals to murder concentration camp prisoners who were no longer able to work or were deemed undesirable. The mass killings of camp inmates were referred to as »Sonderbehandlung 14f13« (»Special treatment 14f13«) by the National Socialists. Part of the former Bernburg mental hospital functioned as one of the six central »euthanasia« killing centres in Germany. In October 1940, a gas chamber disguised as a shower room was installed in the former men's house of the hospital along with a dissecting room and a crematory. These facilities made it possible for medical personnel to kill patients on the day of their arrival. On November 21, 1940, the first transport carrying 25 patients from the Brandenburg state hospital in Neuruppin arrived. Within a few months, thousands more people were murdered in Bernburg. In the spring of 1943, one and a half years after the official end of the »Action T4«, the »euthanasia« centre in Bernburg was shut down. Some of those responsible went on to participate in the systematic murder of Jews in occupied Poland.

Bernburg, 2009, Building of the former »euthanasia« killing centre, Stiftung Denkmal, Constanze Jaiser

Bernburg, 2009, View into the gas chamber disguised as a shower room, Stiftung Denkmal, Constanze Jaiser

Victims

By August 1941, over 9,300 mentally ill and handicapped patients had been killed by doctors and medical personnel in the Bernburg mental hospital. In the years 1940/41, a total of over 70,000 old, sick and handicapped people were murdered in the German Reich. By March 1943, about 5,000 inmates from the Buchenwald, Flossenbürg, Groß-Rosen, Neuengamme, Ravensbrück, and Sachsenhausen concentration camps had been transferred to Bernburg as part of the »Action 14f13«. Most of them were Jews, but also homosexuals, Jehovah's Witnesses, Sinti and Roma and »asocials«. In all, the number of victims killed at hospitals in National Socialist Germany until 1945 is estimated to be over 200,000.

The entry to power of the National Socialists in 1933 heralded the state persecution of opponents of the regime, Jews, Roma – who were classed as »gypsies« -, the sick and many other groups. For the first time, anti-semitism became part of the government policy of a modern state and the persecution of all groups was progressively heightened. The process was characterised by the interplay between state regulation, violence from supporters of the regime and rabble-rousing propaganda from the press. The acts of terror against the Jews in November 1938 (»The Night of the Broken Glass«), culminating in around one hundred deaths, marked the prelude to the complete exclusion and murder of the Jewish minority. With the outbreak of the Second World War in September 1939, large parts of Europe fell under German control. In Eastern Europe in particular a multi-tiered system of camps and extermination sites was established, in which the SS murdered up to six million Jews, among them around 165,000 German Jews. It is estimated that around seven million Germans lost their lives in the war, including almost 3.5 million civilians. Around 28 million residents of the occupied Soviet Union (both soldiers and civilians) and three million non-Jewish Poles met a violent death. These groups are still barely commemorated in Germany. Germany came under Allied occupation in 1945 and 1949 saw the foundation of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) and the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG), who had very different cultures of remembrance. The GDR profiled itself as an »antifascist« state. The former concentration camps at Buchenwald, Ravensbrück and Sachsenhausen became »National Memorials« and primarily documented the communist resistance during the war. In the Federal Republic, the dominant memory was initially of the victims of Allied bombing raids and those who had fled or been expelled from their homes in the former territory of the Third Reich. It was left to specific groups to remember Nazi persecution, the Holocaust or the resistance. With the exception of the war crimes trials, there was no public discussion of perpetrators or involvement in crimes. However, the situation was to change in the mid-1960s, when the statute of limitations for murder was lifted following a lengthy debate. Also during this period, memorial sites were established at former concentration camps (1965: Dachau and Neuengamme; 1966: Bergen-Belsen) and the German Resistance Memorial Centre was opened in 1968 in West Berlin. However, it was not until the 1980s that a diverse and often small-scale landscape of memory developed as the result of local initiatives. Following German unification in 1990, a national memorial site concept was developed and there was a major review of German sites of memory. The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin was inaugurated in 2005. The Topography of Terror, a comprehensive documentation of National Socialist crimes and perpetrators, has opened with a new centre in May 2010; the documentation centre »Flight, Expulsion, Reconciliation« followed suit in 2021. In the meantime, central memorials in Berlin have been erected to commemorate further groups of Nazi victims as well: the murdered Sinti and Roma, the patients murdered in the context of the Nazi’s »Euthanasia« killings and the persecuted homosexuals. The German victims of National Socialist terror in the former Eastern territories of the Third Reich were forgotten by both German states after the end of the war. For decades, memory of these victims was only preserved by West German associations for Germans born in these territories and it mainly excluded the period from 1933 to 1945.

Remembrance

Today, a psychiatric and neurological clinic is located on the grounds of the former Bernburg mental hospital. A small memorial, which had previously been established, was re-opened in 1989. It is situated in the basement and on the first floor of the hospital. Visitors can see the remains of the crematory and the gas chamber. The former crematory now serves as a commemorative chamber. The »corpse transport corridor« has also been preserved: the dead were dragged along the corridor from the gas chamber to the crematory. Even today traces of this are visible on the floor. Medical personnel would smear soft soap onto the floor in order to be able to move the corpses more easily.
An exhibition spread over various rooms of the memorial documents National Socialist forced sterilisation, the history of the »euthanasia« programme and »Special treatment 14f13« in Bernburg. The work of the Bernburg Memorial not only deals with the fate of marginal groups during the National Socialist period, but instead presents a broader perspective reaching from the beginning of the 20th century into our times.

Bernburg, 2009, Remaining fragments of the crematory, Stiftung Denkmal, Constanze Jaiser

Bernburg, 2009, Part of the »corpse transport corridor«, Stiftung Denkmal, Constanze Jaiser

Possibilities

Workshops, guided tours, reference library, archive, guided city tours, contact with eyewitnesses for lectures at schools

Open

Tuesday to Friday 9 a.m. to 4 p.m.,,
Every first Sunday of the month 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., workshops and guided tours on other days by appointment

Contact

https://gedenkstaette-bernburg.sachsen-anhalt.de/

info-bernburg@erinnern.org

+49 (0)3471 319 816

Olga-Benario-Straße 16/18
06406 Bernburg

Bernburg, 2009, Exhibition in the basement corridor of the Bernburg Memorial, Stiftung Denkmal, Constanze Jaiser

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