Nazi Gustav Wagner, Sadist 'Beast' of Sobibor Camp; T4 Euthanasia Prog Killed 300K Unworthy of Life

[appalachiablue]

*Note: GRAPHIC MATERIAL. (15 mins).
------
- Gustav Franz Wagner (18 July 1911– 3 Oct. 1980) was an Austrian member of the SS with the rank of Staff sergeant (Oberscharführer). Wagner was a deputy commander of Sobibor extermination camp in German-occupied Poland, where 200,000-250,000 Jews were murdered in the camp's gas chambers during Operation Reinhard. Due to his brutality, he was known as "The Beast" and "Wolf".

- Biography: Wagner was born in Vienna, Austria. He served as a soldier in the Austrian army from 1928 and joined the then illegal Nazi Party in 1931 as member number 443,217. After being arrested for proscribed National Socialist agitation, he fled to Germany, where he joined the SA and later the Schutzstaffel in the late 1930s, serving as a guard at an unknown concentration camp.

In May 1940, Wagner was part of the Aktion T4 euthanasia program at Hartheim killing centre with administrative functions and cremating the bodies of murdered patients.

Due to his experience in T4, Wagner was assigned to help establish the Sobibor extermination camp in March 1942 and oversaw the construction of the camp. Once the gassing installation, barracks, and fences were completed, Wagner became deputy commandant of the camp under Commandant Franz Stangl. His official title was quartermaster-sergeant of the camp. Wagner was in charge of selecting which prisoners from the newly arrived transports would be used as slave laborers in and outside the camp, from among the newly arrived ghetto inhabitants.

When Wagner was on vacation or attending to duties elsewhere, Karl Frenzel assumed his role within the camp. More than any other officer at Sobibor, Wagner was responsible for the daily interactions with prisoners. Survivors of the camp described him as a cold-blooded sadist. Wagner was known to beat and thrash camp inmates on a regular basis, and to kill Jews without reason or restraint. Inmate Moshe Bahir described him: He was a handsome man, tall and blond - a pure Aryan. In civilian life he was, no doubt, a well-mannered man; at Sobibor he was a wild beast. His lust to kill knew no bounds... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gustav_Wagner
--------
- Aktion T4 was a campaign of mass murder by involuntary euthanasia in Nazi Germany. The term was first used in post-war trials against doctors who had been involved in the killings.

The name T4 is an abbreviation of Tiergartenstraße 4, a street address of the Chancellery department set up in early 1940, in the Berlin borough of Tiergarten, which recruited and paid personnel associated with Aktion T4. Certain German physicians were authorised to select patients "deemed incurably sick, after most critical medical examination" and then administer to them a "mercy death" (Gnadentod). In October 1939, Adolf Hitler signed a "euthanasia note", backdated to 1 Sept. 1939, which authorised his physician Karl Brandt and Reichsleiter Philipp Bouhler to begin the killing.

The killings took place from Sept. 1939 until the end of the war in 1945; from 275,000 to 300,000 people were killed in psychiatric hospitals in Germany and Austria, occupied Poland and the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia (now the Czech Republic). The number of victims was originally recorded as 70,273 but this number has been increased by the discovery of victims listed in the archives of the former East Germany.

About half of those killed were taken from church-run asylums, often with the approval of the Protestant or Catholic authorities of the institutions.

The Holy See announced on 2 Dec.1940 that the policy was contrary to divine law and that "the direct killing of an innocent person because of mental or physical defects is not allowed" but the declaration was not upheld by all Catholic authorities in Germany. In the summer of 1941, protests were led in Germany by the Bishop of Münster, Clemens von Galen, whose intervention led to "the strongest, most explicit and most widespread protest movement against any policy since the beginning of the Third Reich", according to Richard J. Evans. Several reasons have been suggested for the killings, including eugenics, racial hygiene, and saving money. Physicians in German and Austrian asylums continued many of the practices of Aktion T4 until the Germany's defeat in 1945, in spite of its official cessation in Aug. 1941.

The informal continuation of the policy led to 93,521 "beds emptied" by the end of 1941.

Technology developed under Aktion T4, particularly the use of lethal gas on large numbers of people, was taken over by the medical division of the Reich Interior Ministry, along with the personnel of Aktion T4, who participated in mass murder of Jewish people. The programme was authorised by Hitler but the killings have since come to be viewed as murders in Germany. The number of people killed was about 200,000 in Germany and Austria, with about 100,000 victims in other European countries. Following the war, a number of the perpetrators were tried and convicted for murder and crimes against humanity...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aktion_T4
------
- Operation Reinhard -
Operation Reinhard or Operation Reinhardt (Aktion Reinhard or Aktion Reinhardt; also Einsatz Reinhard or Einsatz Reinhardt) was the codename of the secret German plan in World War II to exterminate Polish Jews in the General Government district of German-occupied Poland. This deadliest phase of the Holocaust was marked by the introduction of extermination camps. The operation proceeded from March 1942 to Nov. 1943; about 1.47 million or more Jews were murdered in just 100 days from late July to early Nov. 1942, a rate which is approximately 83% higher than the commonly suggested figure for the kill rate in the Rwandan genocide.

In the time frame of July to Oct. 1942, the overall death toll, including all killings of Jews and not just Operation Reinhard, amounted to two million killed in those four months alone. It was the single fastest rate of genocidal killing in history.

During the operation, as many as two million Jews were sent to Bełżec, Sobibór, and Treblinka to be murdered in purpose-built gas chambers. In addition, facilities for mass-murder using Zyklon B were developed at about the same time at the Majdanek concentration camp and at Auschwitz II-Birkenau, near the earlier-established Auschwitz I camp. Background: After the German–Soviet war began, the Nazis undertook their European-wide "Final Solution to the Jewish Question".

In Jan. 1942, during a secret meeting of German leaders chaired by Reinhard Heydrich, Operation Reinhard was drafted; it was soon to become a significant step in the systematic murder of the Jews in occupied Europe, beginning in the General Government district of German-occupied Poland. Within months, three top-secret camps (at Bełżec, Sobibór, and Treblinka) were built to efficiently murder tens of thousands of Jews every day. These camps differed from Auschwitz and Majdanek, which initially operated as forced-labour camps before facilities for mass death were installed (gas chambers, crematoria etc.)

Even after becoming death camps fitted with crematoria, konzentrationslager like Auschwitz remained largely dedicated to forced labor.

Unlike "mixed" extermination camps, the extermination camps of Operation Reinhard kept no prisoners, except as needed to advance the camp's industrial-scale murder. Very few Jews escaped death (notably, only two at Bełżec). All other victims were murdered on arrival. The organizational apparatus behind the new extermination plan had been put to the test already during the "euthanasia" Aktion T4 programme ending in August 1941, during which more than 70,000 Polish and German disabled men, women, and children were murdered. The SS officers responsible for the Aktion T4, including Christian Wirth, Franz Stangl, and Irmfried Eberl, were all given key roles in the implementation of the "Final Solution" in 1942...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Reinhard

[appalachiablue]

1. Hartheim (Castle) Killing Center, Aktion T4 Euthanasia Program, Near Linz, Austria

- The Hartheim killing centre (German: NS-Tötungsanstalt Hartheim, sometimes translated as "Hartheim killing facility" or 'Hartheim euthanasia centre') was a killing facility involved in the Nazi programme known as Aktion T4, in which German citizens deemed mentally or physically unfit were systematically murdered with poison gas.

Often, these patients were transferred from other killing facilities such as the Am Spiegelgrund clinic in Vienna. This was initially a programme of "involuntary euthanasia" permitted under the law ostensibly to enable the lawful and painless killing of incurably ill patients; these murders continued even after the law was rescinded in 1942.

Other victims included Jews, Communists and those considered undesirable by the state. Concentration camp inmates who were unfit for work, or otherwise deemed troublesome, were also executed here. The facility was housed in Hartheim Castle in the municipality of Alkoven, near Linz, Austria, which now is a memorial site and documentation centre.. Other transports came from the concentration camp of Gusen, and probably also from Ravensbrück during 1944, made up of women inmates who were predominantly tuberculosis sufferers and those deemed mentally infirm.

Execution doctors
The Action T4 organisers, Viktor Brack and Karl Brandt, ordered that the execution of the sick had to be carried out by medical doctors because Hitler's memorandum of authorisation of 1 September 1939 only referred to doctors. The operation of the gas tap was thus the responsibility of doctors in the death centres. However, during the course of the programme, the gas valves were occasionally operated by others in the absence of the doctors or for other reasons. Also, many doctors used pseudonyms rather than their real names in the documents. The following execution doctors worked in Hartheim:...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hartheim_killing_centre

[appalachiablue]

2. Judgment at Nuremberg movie (1961) Courtroom scene, Montgomery Clift

In his 12-minute cameo scene in Judgment at Nuremberg (1961), Clift played a developmentally disabled German baker who had been a victim of the Nazi sterilisation programme testifying at the Nuremberg trials. His anguished performance earned him his 4th Academy Award nomination...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montgomery_Clift
------
- Judgment at Nuremberg is a 1961 American epic legal drama film directed and produced by Stanley Kramer, and written by Abby Mann. It features Spencer Tracy, Burt Lancaster, Richard Widmark, Maximilian Schell, Werner Klemperer, Marlene Dietrich, Judy Garland, William Shatner, and Montgomery Clift.
Set in Nuremberg, West Germany, the film depicts a fictionalized version – with fictional characters – of the Judges' Trial of 1947, one of the twelve Nuremberg Military Tribunals conducted under the auspices of the U.S. military in the aftermath of World War II...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judgment_at_Nuremberg

[appalachiablue]

3. Thomas Blatt, Sobibor Escape Survivor, Interview 1989

Interview with Thomas 'Toivi' Blatt who escaped Sobibor as a teenager. Dutch TV, 1989. In Dutch and English.