Pirna-Sonnenstein Memorial

Gedenkstätte Pirna-Sonnenstein

Located in the former mental hospital was one the German Reich's six »euthanasia killing centres«. Here, the National Socialist regime had 13,720 mentally ill and mentally handicapped people as well as over 1,000 concentration camp prisoners murdered within a time frame of 15 months. A memorial was opened in 2000. It honours the memory of the victims, which for a long time was buried in oblivion.

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. Upon decision of the »T4« office, a part of the former psychiatric hospital at Sonnenstein was converted to a »euthanasia killing centre« in 1940. This involved the construction of a crematorium, the installation of a gas chamber as well as fencing in the premises. These measures were meant to keep what was happening hidden from the outside world. Between June 1940 and August 1941, doctors and nursing personnel from the psychiatric hospital in Pirna murdered mostly mentally ill and mentally handicapped people, however, their victims also included patients from nursing and old age homes. Following a medical examination, the patients were led in groups to the basement of House C16. Located here were a gas chamber - disguised as a shower room - and a crematorium.

Pirna, 1940, View of the town, Archiv der Gedenkstätte Pirna-Sonnenstein

Pirna, 2008, View of the permanent exhibition, Gedenkstätte Pirna-Sonnenstein

Victims

13,720 people - stemming from Saxony, Thuringia, Franconia, the Sudetenland, Silesia as well as Eastern and Western Prussia - were murdered at Sonnenstein. In the summer of 1941, over 1,000 concentration camp prisoners who were ill or unable to work were murdered here as part of the »Aktion 14f13«.

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

When the »euthanasia« campaign was brought to a halt, those responsible had all facilities connected with the crimes that had been committed disassembled. In the summer of 1947, a number of doctors and nurses involved in the murders were called to account in the so-called »Dresden Doctors Trial« and sentenced to death. In the decades that followed, the crimes committed at Sonnenstein were suppressed by the residents of Pirna or, for the most part, kept secret. Only at the end of the 1980s did citizens of Pirna and relatives of victims jointly begin to openly confront the site's history. In 1991, they founded the »Kuratorium Gedenkstätte Sonnenstein e.V.« (»Trustees of the Sonnenstein Memorial«) and began lobbying for the establishment of a memorial. Between 1992 and 1994, the cellars where the murders had been carried out were reconstructed. The memorial was unveiled at the historic location in June 2000. It is maintained by the Saxon Memorial Foundation. In addition, in November 2011 a memorial cross and a grave field have been unveiled on the former disposal site of the psychiatric hospital of Pirna-Sonnenstein. Employees of the killing centre had thrown the bodies of many of the victims there.

No place given, 1935, Maria Stephan, who was murdered in Pirna in 1940, with her daughter, Gedenkstätte Pirna-Sonnenstein

Pirna, 2009, Commemorative stele with names of victims, Gedenkstätte Pirna-Sonnenstein

Possibilities

Educational programme, workshops for educators, travelling exhibitions, gathering and providing information on the fates of individual victims, events, lectures

Open

Monday to Friday: 9.00 a.m. to 4.00 p.m.,
Saturday, Sunday and holidays 11.00 a.m. to 5.00. p.m.
Closed on December 24, 25, 26 and 31 and on January 1

Contact

http://www.pirna-sonnenstein.de

gedenkstaette.pirna@stsg.de

+49 (0)3501 710 960

Schlosspark 11
01796 Pirna

Pirna, 2011, View of the memorial cross and the grave field, Gedenkstätte Pirna-Sonnenstein

Pirna, 2009, Pirna-Sonnenstein Memorial, Thorbjörn Hoverberg

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