Grey Buses Memorial Weißenau

Denkmal der grauen Busse Weißenau

Since 2006, the »Grey Buses Memorial« in Ravensburg-Weißenau has commemorated the fates of the handicapped and mentally ill people who were taken from the Weißenau hospital to »T4« killing centres in Grafeneck and Hadamar in 1940/41. A second identical »Grey Buses Memorial« regularly changes locations, being displayed at historic sites of the »euthanasia« campaign.

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 gas chambers. The transfer of patients deemed »unworthy of living« to so-called transit institutions was to ensure better concealment of the »Action T4«. After several weeks in transit institutions, the handicapped and mentally ill patients were taken to one of six killing centres by the Gemeinnütziger Krankentransport GmbH (GEKRAT; engl.: charitable ambulance service). The camouflage organisation used omnibuses from the bus pool of the Reich postal service. Before using them, the GEKRAT repainted the red buses, including the windows, grey. In order to hide the buses' real purpose from the public, the bus drivers were instructed to take alternate routes on their journeys.
The mental hospital in Württembergian Weißenau close to Ravensburg was converted to a transit institution by National Socialist authorities in 1940. From here, the GEKRAT brought nearly 700 patients to the Grafeneck and Hadamar killing centres in 1940/1941. Even after the »euthanasia« campaign had officially been put to a halt, doctors and medical staff continued killing patients from the Weißenau hospital by poisoning them with medications and starving them to death.

Ravensburg-Weißenau, 1930s, View of Weißenau and the hospital, Stadtarchiv Ravensburg

Berlin, 2008, The Grey Buses Memorial at one of its temporary sites in front of the Berliner Philharmonie, Ronnie Golz

Victims

691 physically and mentally handicapped people were transported from the Weißenau hospital in the GEKRAT's grey buses to the »T4« killing centres in Grafeneck and Hadamar in 1940/41. There, doctors and medical staff asphyxiated them with carbon monoxide in gas chambers camouflaged as shower rooms.

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

In 2005, the city of Ravensburg and the Weißenau Centre for Psychiatry (ZfP) launched a tender for a concept of the »Weißenau Memorial«. A jury consisting of delegates from the city, the ZfP as well as art experts selected the design by Horst Hoheisel and Andreas Knitz at the beginning of 2006 - it entailed a reproduction of the GEKRAT omnibuses made out of concrete. The »Weißenau Memorial« has been standing in an unused gateway on the hospital premises since November 2006. It is from here that the GEKRAT buses departed in 1940/41 carrying the patients who were to be murdered. A central passageway between the two segments of the memorial is used as an entrance to the premises by both visitors and staff of the ZfP. Inscribed on the wall in the central passageway is a quote of one of the patients: »Where are you taking us to?«
A second, identical copy of the memorial which is temporarily being put on display at various sites in Germany honours the victims of »euthanasia«. The bus has already been presented in Ravensburg on the street used by the GEKRAT in 1940/41 as well as in Brandenburg an der Havel, Stuttgart and Berlin's Tiergartenstraße. The central »T4« office was located there during the National Socialist period; in the present day, the site is home to the Berliner Philharmonie.

Grafeneck, 1940, GEKRAT omnibus, Landesarchiv NRW – Abteilung Rheinland – RWB 18248/010

Ravensburg-Weißenau, 2006, The Grey Buses Memorial in Weißenau, ZfP Südwürttemberg

Open

Accessible at all times

Contact

http://www.dasdenkmaldergrauenbusse.de

info@zfp-zentrum.de

+49(0)7583 331 584

Weingartshofer Straße 2
88214 Ravensburg

Ravensburg-Weißenau, 2006, Setting up the Memorial, ZfP Südwürttemberg

Ravensburg-Weißenau, 2006, The Grey Buses Memorial in the former gateway to the hospital premises, ZfP Südwürttemberg

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