And then, there was the CID man from the Austrian town of Linz, Franz Stangl. We will have ample opportunity to get to know him better later on, but he too was among those who came to T4 through ‘friendly intervention’. Thus, Stangl got along badly with his Gestapo chief and was on the lookout for other employment when a former colleague and fellow student from the CID school offered to introduce him to the secret government organization where he himself already worked in what he described as a ‘pleasant job’. Stangl gratefully accepted and came as a policeman to the Hartheim extermination center, and, later on, to Sobibor and Treblinka.37
Those who did not find their way to T4 through this informal network of relatives and friends were generally recruited on the basis of what the Berlin historian and trial expert Wolfgang Scheffler called the ‘coincidence ←36 | 37→principle’.38 A striking example is that of the five young girls (aged between seventeen and twenty years), who became responsible for the registration of the murdered patients and their ‘possessions’ in the Hartheim and Grafeneck extermination centers. They also drew up the transport lists and typed the thousands of ‘comfort letters’ which were sent to the relatives of the murdered victims, including fabricated data on the circumstances of their deaths and falsified names of the doctors involved in their ‘care’. Three of these girls were trainees at the Defaka, or Deutsches Familien Kaufhaus (German Family Department Store) and were simply drafted by the Frankfurt labor exchange. This also happened with the fourth, who was a shop-girl in a Frankfurt store, whereas the fifth was simply conscripted by the Party Gauleitung shortly after passing her school exams. None of these women had a political profile beyond that of a membership of the ‘German Girl’s League’, the ‘National Socialist Welfare Organization’, or the ‘German Labor Front.’39
No less coincidental was the recruitment of the Westphalian farmer’s and miller’s son August Miete. From 1921 onwards, he and his brother ran the farm their father had left them. In the spring of 1940, however, August considered it time to start on his own and – equipped with a recently acquired Nazi Party membership card – requested the Agricultural Chamber in Münster to grant him his own agricultural settlement. Unfortunately, they could not help him, but as an alternative they offered him a position at the estate of the Grafeneck institution. Miete accepted and, from May 1940 until October 1941, tended the farm lands of this gassing center, after which he was transferred to another one at Hadamar. Here, he worked as a so-called Brenner in the institute’s crematorium where the bodies of the gassed victims were burned. In June 1942, Miete came to Treblinka, where, because of his brutal conduct, he turned into a much feared member of the camp’s staff.40
The Münster Agricultural Chamber also recruited the thirty-six years old dairy master Willi Mentz for T4. Since 1929 Mentz had worked in the dairy business but in early 1940 he applied for a job with the police. They could not use him there, but considering his profession the Münster agency offered him ‘something better’, namely a job at Grafeneck. Mentz accepted, and – just like Miete – was informed of what went on there and sworn to secrecy. According to his admission, he tended the Grafeneck livestock for the next ←37 | 38→one-and-a-half year and was then – as Miete – transferred to Hadamar, where he divided his time between work in the vegetable garden and the maintenance of the central heating system. Like Miete, Mentz came to Treblinka in the summer of 1942, where he acquired a similar reputation of brutality.41
This certainly also applied to carpenter Karl Frenzel, whose involvement with T4 was the result of nothing less than his procreative abilities. Thus, around Christmas 1939, Frenzel was discharged from Wehrmacht service as a so-called kinderreicher Familienvater (father of a large family). His biological declaration of loyalty to a regime which celebrated the family as the ‘germ cell of the nation’ not only earned his wife a (bronze) medal hailing her motherhood, but also rewarded her husband with suspension of his military duties. This, however, was not at all to Frenzel’s liking as he genuinely enjoyed these duties and now felt embarrassed in front of his comrades and his two brothers, both of whom served in the Wehrmacht. And so, Frenzel immediately reported himself again as a volunteer and enlisted the support of his SA superiors to endorse his request. But Hitler’s family policy was no joking matter and Frenzel received no reply. Instead, his SA chiefs suggested him to report to the Führer Chancellery in Berlin, which was looking for ‘trustworthy party comrades for a special assignment’. Frenzel complied and, in January 1940, together with another fifteen T4 recruits, was informed in Berlin by Brack and Blankenburg about his new duties and sworn to secrecy. He worked – inter alia as crematorium worker – in the gassing centers Grafeneck, Hadamar and Bernburg, and came to Sobibor in April 1942.42
We could extend this list of T4 recruiting examples without much difficulty, but it should be clear by now that Scheffler accurately described the recruitment policies of the killing organization as being largely governed by coincidence. Indeed, if Allers’ mother had not bumped into Werner Blankenburg during her daily shopping round in Berlin, it is highly unlikely that her son would ever have come into contact with the mass extermination business. And if they would have granted August Miete his farm, had accepted Willi Mentz with the police force and had allowed Karl Frenzel his return to the military, the first would have continued his peasant existence, whereas Mentz and Frenzel would have worn the police uniform and the field gray of the Wehrmacht, respectively. None of these four men had actively sought a career in the killing profession and with respect to ←38 | 39→Miete, Mentz and Frenzel one could say that it was not even their ‘first choice.’ Their entry into Hitler’s annihilation machinery then was not the outcome of careful deliberation on the pros and cons of employment in the extermination business, but the result of a chance meeting between fate and opportunity. And for their colleagues this was little different.
Prior to their enrolment in T4 none of them had any idea of its existence, let alone its purpose. Different from the doctors and nurses who were to lend their hand in the ‘euthanasia’ killings, hardly any of them had ever personally visited a psychiatric ward, nursing home or insane asylum and it is highly doubtful whether they had any understanding of (or interest in) their government’s intention with its inhabitants. Typical in this respect was perhaps Reinhold Vorberg’s reaction when cousin Brack promoted him to head of T4’s transport service. When Brack explained its purpose, Vorberg reportedly answered him that he had no idea what the concept of euthanasia stood for and that he couldn’t understand why, in times of war, one should bother with ‘die Verrückten’ [‘the lunatics’].43
Of course, one could still suspect that T4 selected its staff by political criteria, i.e. that the recruitment of the men described here was somehow related to their Nazi profile. And it is certainly true that all of the above were members of the NSDAP or any of its branch organizations. But neither their grounds for entry (often linked to ‘economic’, career-related considerations), nor their commitment to the Party organizations of which they were members (none of them occupied a particularly profiled position within these organizations) can really explain for their selection. That T4 primarily recruited its collaborators from within the circle of Party comrades seems understandable enough, but why exactly it chose these ones from among the millions of candidates can only be explained through the use of the social network described earlier, combined with random selection.44
This even applies to such a notorious T4 criminal as the Stuttgart Kriminalkommissar Christian Wirth, who would play a leading role in both the ‘euthanasia’ killing program as well as in its successor, the Aktion Reinhard. His former colleague, Dietrich Allers, had this to say about the ratio behind Wirth’s recruitment for T4:
I am sure that when Grafeneck [the first extermination centre at which Wirth was appointed ‘office chief’, close to the CID bureau in Stuttgart where he was ←39 | 40→employed, DdM] was opened up and they needed a couple of police officers to put in charge, whoever was the chief of police in that district