The Euthanasia trials () were legal proceedings against the main perpetrators and accomplices involved in the "euthanasia" murders of the Nazi era in Germany.
The first euthanasia trial was held by the United States in October 1945 to prosecute doctors and nurses at the Hadamar killing centre for the murder of Polish and Russian workers sick with tuberculosis in summer 1944. All seven defendants were found guilty, and three were executed. Euthanasia was a tangential issue at the Nuremberg Doctors' Trial, held by the United States from December 1946 to August 1947, as only four of its 23 defendants were charged with participation in the euthanasia programme: Karl Brandt, Viktor Brack, Waldemar Hoven, and Kurt Blome. Brandt, Brack, and Hoven were convicted, sentenced to death, and executed; Blome was acquitted.
There was a euthanasia trial held in the Soviet occupation zone in Dresden in June 1947 to prosecute those who had worked at the Sonnenstein Euthanasia Centre in Pirna. There were 15 defendants, including Paul Nitsche, the director of the T4 Medical Office (German: Medizinische Abteilung). Four of the defendants, including Nitsche, were sentenced to death and executed.
Hadamar trial (1945) The U.S. Hadamar trial, officially titled U.S. v. Alfons Klein et al., was held between 8 and 15 October 1945. The defendants were former workers at the Hadamar killing center in Hadamar, Hesse-Nassau. The euthanasia center in Hadamar was a mental hospital before World War II began in Europe in 1939. Starting in September 1939, it served both as a mental hospital and as a hospital for German soldiers and POWs. At the end of 1940 it was selected to replace the Grafeneck Euthanasia Centre, which was closed in December 1940. Over the next nine months at least 10,000 mentally disabled Germans were gassed at Hadamar. The euthanasia killings of mental patients temporarily stopped in August 1941, and the gas chambers were dismantled. Killing the mentally disabled resumed in August 1942 and resulted in 3,000 to 3,500 additional deaths, though now narcotic overdoses were used instead of gassing. At this time, Hadamar began killing mentally disabled German children and healthy half-Jewish children (German: Mischlingkinder); the facility also began killing concentration camp prisoners as part of Action 14f13. In the summer of 1944 Hadamar became a killing center for hundreds of conscripted Polish and Russian workers who had tuberculosis. It was occupied by American troops on 26 March 1945.
Although five different groups were killed at Hadamar over the course of the war, the U.S. military was not allowed to try many of the defendants. Prior to a charter by the Nuremberg trials, which introduced crimes against humanity as a charge, they were not allowed to prosecute Hadamar personnel for murdering German citizens.
However, officials found a loophole, and instead sought to prosecute multiple suspects for murdering 476 sick Polish and Russian workers, who were considered Allied nationals. The seven defendants in the trial were Alfons Klein, Adolf Wahlmann, Heinrich Ruoff, Karl Willig, Irmgard Huber, Philipp Blum, and Adolf Merkle. Klein, Ruoff, and Willig were sentenced to death and hanged one by one at a prison in Bruchsal on 14 March 1946. Wahlmann was sentenced to life in prison with hard labour due to his old age (he was nearly 70) and poor health. The other three defendants were sentenced to hard labour terms ranging from 25 years to 35 years.
Defendant Position at Hadamar Euthanasia CenterSentence Alfons Klein DirectorDeath by hanging, executed on 14 March 1946 Adolf Wahlmann Chief doctorLife imprisonment with hard labor, reduced to 12 years. Wahlmann was discharged from his U.S. sentence in December 1952, but remained in prison due to his life sentence from West Germany. He was released from prison on 20 October 1953, and died on 1 November 1956. Heinrich Ruoff Head male nurseDeath by hanging, executed on 14 March 1946 Karl Willig Ward male nurseDeath by hanging, executed on 14 March 1946 Irmgard Huber Head female nurse25 years imprisonment with hard labor, commuted to 12 years, released in July 1953, and died in 1983. Philipp Blum Cemetery attendant30 years imprisonment with hard labor, reduced to 15 years, paroled on 11 February 1954, discharged from parole on 9 July 1957 Adolf Merkle Registrar and bookkeeper35 years imprisonment with hard labor, reduced to time served and released in March 1950
Nuremberg trials International Military Tribunal (1945–1946) At the International Military Tribunal at the Nuremberg Palace of Justice, one of the crimes charged was the euthanasia program. Reich Minister of the Interior Wilhelm Frick was sentenced to death for, among other charges, his responsibility for the deaths of 275,000 disabled patients under the banner of the euthanasia program. Frick's death sentence was carried out on 16 October 1946 alongside nine others passed down by the tribunal.
Doctors' Trial (1946–1947)
The Nuremberg Doctors' Trial took place from 9 December 1946 to 20 August 1947 at the Nuremberg Palace of Justice before an American military court. Its primary purpose was to prosecute Nazi doctors for their involvement in torturous medical experiments performed in German concentration camps during the war; prosecuting those who had participated in the euthanasia programme was of secondary importance to the Americans. Thus, only four of the 23 defendants were charged with murdering the mentally ill as part of the euthanasia programme: Karl Brandt, Viktor Brack, Waldemar Hoven, and Kurt Blome. All of them except for Blome were convicted and executed.
In the Doctors' Trial, as in the 1945 Hadamar trial, the American prosecution insisted that euthanasia was an offense against international law, not a targeted campaign to purge German society of "unworthy life." This allowed the United States to convict Brandt and the others for their participation in the euthanasia programme without comprising its national sovereignty. The U.S. was able to do so by claiming that the purpose of euthanasia was to free up resources for Germany's war machine, thus making euthanasia a war crime that aided Nazi Germany's illegal campaign of aggressive war.
Background The Doctors' Trial took place after the first International Military Tribunal (IMT). In January 1946, Telford Taylor, the U.S. Chief of Counsel for War Crimes, began planning to hold a second IMT to try German industrialists and financiers in the U.S. zone of occupation, but reconsidered when he realized the Russians would insist on holding the trial in the Russian zone of occupation, presided over by a Soviet judge. Since a trial held under such circumstances would be politically unpopular in the United States, Taylor instead decided in August 1946 to hold a trial based on criminal experiments on concentration camp prisoners. This decision was based on evidence uncovered during the IMT trial of Hermann Göring that showed that Luftwaffe doctors had performed cruel experiments on these prisoners, as well as Wolfram Sievers' admission at the IMT that there was a Jewish skull collection" consisting of bones from murdered Jewish concentration camp prisoners. In May 1946, when Taylor was still considering holding a second IMT, his office tasked James McHaney with heading an investigative group to gather evidence about SS and German health care leaders. McHaney's group found much evidence of medical crimes, in addition to the evidence already assembled by the IMT prosecution team. The abundant evidence, combined with the fact that a number of leaders responsible for these medical crimes were in American and British custody, led Taylor to think that it would be easy to try and convict these individuals.
Trial of Karl Brandt
Brandt was the highest-ranking defendant indicted in the Doctors' Trial. He was an inviting target for the American prosecution because of his personal relationship with Hitler, his leading role in the euthanasia programme, and his role in medical experiments at Dachau concentration camp. In 1938, he and Philipp Bouhler had been commissioned by Hitler to run the children's euthanasia programme; in 1939, Hitler gave the two of them the task of organizing and running the adult euthanasia programme as well. (Philipp Bouhler, head of Hitler's Chancellery (German: Kanzlei des Führers or KdF), was not indicted in the Doctors' Trial because he had committed suicide in May 1945.) Brandt claimed that he was a humanitarian idealist who participated in the euthanasia programme because he wanted to relieve the suffering of terminally ill patients. He also claimed that he had nothing to do with killing the mentally disabled after the euthanasia programme officially ended in August 1941. The American prosecution did not agree with Brandt that euthanasia was a "humanitarian measure," and even he admitted that the primary motivation behind the second or "wild" phase of euthanasia was economic rather than humanitarian; according to Brandt, this economic rationale was to kill "useless eaters" in order to conserve food and medical resources for the German military.
Trial of Victor Brack
Victor Brack was Bouhler's deputy in Hitler's Chancellery, and as such he played a major role in organizing the euthanasia programme in 1939 and the Final Solution (German: die Endlösung) in 1941. Unlike in the 1945 Hadamar trial, in Brack's case the American prosecutors were interested in the links between the euthanasia programme and the Nazis' attempts to exterminate other groups they deemed "unworthy of life." In Brack's pre-trial questioning, the American interrogators disputed his claim that the euthanasia programme ended in 1941, maintaining that it was just a "general test" (German: Generalprobe) for the Third Reich's other, larger extermination campaigns. Brack vehemently denied that the two events were linked and claimed that Hitler did not have the Final Solution in mind when he ordered the euthanasia programme to begin in 1939. The main disagreement between Brack and his interrogators was over the motive behind Nazi euthanasia. Brack claimed that it was to give "incurable" cases a "mercy death"; his interrogators maintained that it was undertaken for economic reasons, to free up medical resources for the Germany army as it waged aggressive war, as well as to test killing methods and psychologically harden personnel for other mass murders.
Brack and his lawyer attempted to use the "collision of duties" defense (German: Pflichtkollision), also called the "sabotage" theory of criminal wrongdoing, to prove his innocence. Since he could not deny that he had taken part in the euthanasia programme, he argued that he committed the crime of helping to murder some disabled Germans and Jews in order to prevent even more from being murdered. That is, he claimed his involvement in euthanasia and the Final Solution was a cover so that he could secretly sabotage it from within. In the end, his efforts to invoke a sabotage defense could not overcome the incriminating evidence against him, which proved that he had assigned euthanasia personnel from the T4 programme to Operation Reinhard (the annihilation of Poland's Jews) and that he had volunteered to provide gas vans to murder Jews incapable of work.
Trial of Kurt Blome