Whoever undertakes such an investigation on the basis of the prosecution records referred to earlier, will discover that the answer to the puzzle lies above all in the absence of distinctive features of those who fill its pages. For they were indeed distinctive because of the crimes of which they stood accused, but hardly because of their unusual personalities or background characteristics. In fact, it is no exaggeration to say that most would never have exceeded their inconspicuousness if historical coincidence had not ‘tapped them on the shoulder’, so to speak. And we can get a pretty good idea what this ‘shoulder tap’ looked like when focusing on the recruits for Hitler’s earliest mass murderous enterprise: the so-called Euthanasie-Aktion.
This wholesale medical killing program targeted Germany’s physically and mentally handicapped and was set up by Hitler’s personal Chancellery at the start of the war. It lasted until its very end and cost a total of some 200.000 lives. The patients included in this secret program – men, women and children – were murdered either through carbon-monoxide gassing in one of the six extermination centers spread across Germany, or poisoned by means of lethal injections or overdosed medication in ‘regular’ nursing homes.29 The first – gassing – phase of this ‘mercy killing’ project provided ←33 | 34→considerable expertise for Hitler’s subsequent genocidal operations in Poland and the Soviet Union and part of its staff was later transferred to the so-called Aktion Reinhard camps, Belzec, Treblinka and Sobibor, where about one-third of all Jewish victims of the Holocaust perished under its hands.
One of the obvious questions in any attempt to make sense out of this group of annihilation experts concerns the way in which they became involved in Hitler’s killing apparatus. Dietrich Allers, one of the leading managers of this so-called T4 organization (named after its Berlin address, Tiergartenstrasse 4), pictured his introduction as follows:
I was scheduled to go to officer’s training school, but then, in November 1940, my mother met Werner Blankenburg in the street in Berlin. When she told him what I was doing he said, “That’s ridiculous. There is an opening in my department for a lawyer. I’ll fix it.” And that’s how I got into T4.30
Such a dreary prologue to a profession as prominent administrator of mass killing may well appear too ridiculous to be taken seriously, but there is actually no reason to doubt Allers’ version in this respect. Just as with many of his generation, the start of the war meant the unwelcome end of a promising civil career. In Allers’ case it was that of a young lawyer in Prussian public service. Instead, he was now drafted and stationed in Poland as a non-commissioned officer with the task of training recruits. Unsurprisingly, he felt little enthusiasm about his new duties and his mother’s coincidental meeting with his old SA-comrade – Allers had joined both the NSDAP and the SA as a law student in 1932 – offered him an excellent opportunity to escape from his dreaded military existence. Werner Blankenburg had worked himself up to the position of deputy to the operational chief of the ‘euthanasia’ organization, Viktor Brack. And it was indeed a fact that, at the time, the bureau was in desperate need of an experienced legal professional, as the first one had resigned after a fierce dispute.31 Allers, therefore, did not need to think twice before deciding to accept Blankenburg’s offer. The opportunity to leave the military behind, return home and pick up his profession in the service of such a prestigious institute as the Führer Chancellery, was certainly more than he could have dreamed of. And so, as of January 1941, Dietrich Allers started to devote his talents to the administrative aspects of the annihilation program.
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Allers’ unspectacular and coincidental introduction to T4 was hardly exceptional. As he himself told his post-war interviewer, it applied to most of the organization’s employees:
I was always of the opinion that most people got in through connections. They would hear of the job as being “attached to the Führer Chancellery” and that sounded good. Then of course these jobs carried extra pay; and it meant not having to go to the front.32
Again, there is no reason to distrust Allers on this point, for the post-war criminal records of the organization’s staff show that the T4 organization was indeed to an amazing degree a syndicate of friends, acquaintances and relatives. Thus, Allers’ colleague (and co-defendant) Reinhold Vorberg thanked his appointment as head of its ‘transport service’ (responsible for carrying the selected death candidates to the gassing centers) to his cousin, T4-chief Brack. And his successor was yet another cousin, engineer Gerhardt Siebert. There were also family ties between the bureau’s financial wizard, Hans-Joachim Becker, and Dr. Herbert Linden, one of the main organizers of the killing program. Although it is not entirely clear whether it was Linden who actually recruited Becker for T4, the fact is that the two men got along very well. After Becker’s start with Brack’s bureau, he lived for a while in the household of his brother-in-law, and the two men joined forces in their attempt to save Becker’s epileptic sister from Hitler’s ‘euthanasia’ regime. ‘Millionen-Becker’ was the one who turned T4 into a highly profitable enterprise by his introduction of a clever cost-manipulation system, whereby the patients who had already been gassed and cremated were ‘kept alive’ in an administrative sense so that huge sums of money could be earned with their ‘continued’ care and feeding.33
The head of the central finance office, accountant Friedrich Lorent, was no relative of Brack but an old acquaintance. During the mid-nineteen thirties, the two men had been office neighbors in Berlin and Brack had supported Lorent during a fierce conflict with an SA leader. In the autumn of 1941 Lorent worked as manager of a former Polish company in building materials in Warsaw, a job he allegedly detested because of the chaos and corruption surrounding the German administration of confiscated Polish-Jewish property. While on leave in Berlin, in the winter of 1941/42, Lorent visited Brack and complained about his situation. Brack instantaneously offered him a job at his bureau with the words ‘Du, ich brauche Dich’ ←35 | 36→[‘You, I need you’]. As head of the finance office, Lorent succeeded two other friends of Brack, Willy Schneider and Fritz Schmiedel. Schneider had earlier introduced his cousin, bookkeeper Alfred Ittner, to the organization. In April 1942, Ittner was dispatched to Sobibor.34
Among the regular customers of Berlin nightclub waiter Franz Rum was the co-organizer of the killing program which specifically targeted handicapped children (‘Kinder-Euthanasie’), Richard von Hegener. When the nightclub business deteriorated due to the restrictions imposed by the war, Rum looked around for other employment. Von Hegener helped him to a job at the photography section of T4, where the files and pictures of the murdered victims were copied. After a while, however, Rum became allergic to the chemicals used in the process. He asked for other work, ‘preferably in the open air’, as his judges echoed the defendant in their trial judgment. This could be arranged: Rum was offered a new job in a ‘labor camp’ in Poland. It turned out to be Treblinka.35
The brothers Franz and Josef Wolf took over the photo shop