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Posted by Bonnie Jean Smith About a month ago there was an exhibition here in Trondheim of photos and narrative on Hadamar Germany. Hadamar was the site where 15,000 people The killing in Hadamar began in Jan. 1941. As I mentioned, people were From the gas chamber we were led into the dissection room. It reminded From the dissection room we moved to the creamatorium (this is all in a We slowly ascended out of the basement back to the floor where the After Aug. 1941, the archbishop of the area began to question what was
on July 17, 2001, 6:54 am
I would like to say that fear of people who are not like us is not anything "new".
It has happened all through mankinds history, you'd think we would have learned by now.
I would like to post a letter that was written
ยท by a friend that visited "Hadamar
Date: Fri, 4 May 2001 08:17:27 -0500
Subject: Hadamar
Greetings all,
I spent several hours earlier this week writing about my recent trip to
Hadamar Germany and it was late in the evening and I did something....
and it
was gone.... so I wanted to make time today to write about this
incredible
experience. It's one of those things that you have to say out loud to help you
process the impact. I know I mentioned to some of you that I would be
going but for those I haven't let me begin by setting a little context. ( I will
write randomly as things come so I hope you follow the flow)
with disabilities were put to death in both the gas chamber and through over medication and starvation between 1941-1945. It was part of Hitler's "euthanasia" program, a benign word for a death camp. Upon seeing the exhibit, I inquired how we might bring it to the US and consequently was invited to take the trip with a group of people with disabilities and the
staff who work in the organization that provides them support. This organization is small and has just begun to require all who work or are
served by them to visit. They have people with disabilities on the board and it was a decision they made. The director of the organization (28 people with staff and people served was instrumental in having the exhibit translated to
Norwegian and to English. We have video footage and photos and the exhibit will come to Minnesota and to the TASH conference in Novemeber.
Let me begin with a little of the story and then describe the facility.
The context for what happend in 1941 at this institution began much
earlier.
In 1934, those who didn't fit into the ideal of the nazi's, the poor,
unemployed , etc. were sterilized,,, this happened to over 400,000
people both
men and women. The history of Hadamar specifically relates initially
to
people with disabilities (toward the end of the war, elderly people and
even
wounded soldiers were sent to clear out the hospitals). This includes
all
types of disabilities, even things such as epilepsy. Those who were
institutionalized at the time were brought from the institutions to
what they
called transit centers. These were like collection sites. ONce there
were
enough people at, for example, the collection site connected to
Hadamar, the
hospital was called and 3 busses came out to pick up the people. They
were
told only that they were being transferred to another instituion. They
arrived at Hadamar and were unloaded into a large room with beds, where
they
stayed until thier death. The doctors, nurses and administrators were
the
perpetraters. Administrators did not carry out the killinlgs but
organized
the murders, looked at records but never met the people. They
determined who
should be killed first and sent to doctors who, in hte mornings, would
go over
the records they recieved and decide who would be killed that night.
All of
these people were from outside of Hadamar and things were kept very
secretive.
This was all legally sanctified and the language used was they were
providing
people "mercy deaths"(sound familiar?) The terms, of course,
euthanasia and
mercy killing were important to help cover what was really happening.
3 main
criteria were used to determine who should be killed.
1. could the person work 2. will the person go back to their family or
stay
in the institution for the next 20 years and 3. Was the person ever
visited by
family members (if they were there would be more questions to answer).
Of course documents were falsified and doctors had a list of ailments
that
they selected to put on the death cert. (TB, lung disease, heart
attack
etc.).
told
this was just another instituion (the site were they slept is now a
huge
exhibition in German only). Those selected were taken in the evening
and were
told they were being taken down to the showers. They were led down the
dark
stairway to the basement which was not very large.80 people were packed
into
this small room at a time. They were taken to room and told to disrobe
after
which they were told to enter the shower. As you enter this room, the
gas
chamber, your met with yellow floor tiles and yellow bathroom type
tiles on
the wall. The room is about 15' by 12', very tiny. Ironically there
was a
basement window in the room. As we stepped in Uta, the guide, pointed
to the
plugged hole were gas came out of the wall and up to the ceiling as a
shower
on people. On the other side, doctors watched as people fell. It
felt, in a
way, like this should be some sort of sacred ground that we were
standing on.
The thought of so many people dying in this small room became
overwhelming for
most of us. It was as though all I had heard upon our arrival at 11pm
the
night before to this experience in this room,I listened, but couldn't
take it
all in. It's as though you hear but shut down at times to try to
process the
enormity of it. Because we stayed here (second floor of the building)
we
could come back alone or with one or 2 people and process it a little
more. I
went back with a man who had lived in an institution for 20 years in
Norway.
He and 2 other people talked and he said. "I can only imagine myself
being in
here, seeing people you know. One falls, and then another , and then
you say
when will it be me, or worse yet, will I be last."
me of a
basement laundry room, cement, stark , cold. There in front of us was
a large
thick grey cement table cemented to the ground. It lay tilted slightly
with a
drain at the bottom of the table. Some bodies were brought here and
body
parts, especially brains were removed., They were sent to 3
universities in
Germany. They were used until 1990's for teaching. When students
found out
about this they demanded they be buried. Uta said, "there are still
probably
body parts being used in some Universities." For some reason, that
day, this
room overwhelmed me. I realized that at certain times I sort of went
numb
(the gas room) and then once I could muster up the courage to let the
feelings
in again I would break down.
very
small area). It was odd, I thought, as we began to walk down a sort of
hallway where we passed under about 4 arches. At the end it looked
like an
alter. When I got closer I saw that it was a picture of the ovens.
They had
been removed but we stood around the small area where bodies were
burned.
10,000 people gassed and cremated from jan, 1941-august 1941 in this
small
basement. Later in the day, we had a small ceremony here where we
placed some
flowers and a few people in the group made some comments. Around the
corner
were pictures of some of the people who died, hanging there as though
keeping
a watchful eye or making us look into thiers and remember. The place
was so
still, so cold yet so filled with lessons and that reach to the very
core of
your soul.
exhibit
was and a meeting room. Here we met with a 78 year old woman who had
lived in
Hadamar (the town) at the time. Her father worked at the post and had
to send
telegrams for the SS so had some suspicions of what was happening. When
asked
at work one day she said she thought people were being killed. the next
day
the SS came and questioned her, the next week her family, then she was
taken
away and put in a concentration camp as a traitor and stayed there for
a year.
She was 19 at the time. She said when she returned after the war no
one
talked about it and it was only when they began to put the exhibit
together in
1983 that she came forward to tell her story. One has to ask yourself.
Would
I have spoken up... especially for people with disabilities... do we do
it
today?? That question haunts me even more now as I think of my/our
work in
the field today. I feel even more so, that there are some things I
don't want
to be part of, and I feel very clear about that.
happening so the gassing stopped. Until the end of the war in 1945,
another
5000 people were killed in a secretive manner. They were either
overmedicated
or starved to death (no fat in the diet). 15,000 at Hadamar, 200,000
people
with disabilities throughout Germany.
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