With its Renaissance style, octagonal towers and frescoed arcades, Hartheim Castle in northern Austria, west of Linz, could feature in a fairytale movie.
On the contrary, this place has become the symbol of one of the most frightening pages of the Nazi regime.
During the Second World War, this beautiful house became one of the killing centers for the forced euthanasia operation for the physically and mentally disabled implemented by the Third Reich.
Considered by Hitler as "dead weights" in the war economy, they are described as beings "whose life is not worth living".
In a document, the Führer asks to grant the "grace of death" or "merciful death" to patients deemed incurable.
In 1939, the "Aktion T4" was launched.
70,000 disabled people murdered in a few months
Torn from their asylums, the sick were taken to specially equipped centers where they were gassed and cremated.
At Hartheim Castle, which housed an institution for disabled people from the end of the 19th century, the Nazis expropriated its occupants and put into service an extermination center in 1940. A gas chamber camouflaged as a shower room and a crematorium oven are landscaped.
"Its location played a role in this choice," underlines historian Florian Schwanninger, head of the Hartheim Castle Study Center.
"It is located near Linz and is easily accessible by road. On the other hand, the building could be easily isolated from the rest of the world."
The old gas chamber of the castle of Hartheim with the corridor leading to the crematoria.
© Lern- und Gedenkort Schloss Hartheim
The first victims arrived in Hartheim in May 1940. They were killed with carbon monoxide and their ashes were sent to families who requested it. In the space of more than a year, around 70,000 people were murdered in six killing centers, more than 18,000 at Hartheim Castle alone.
But on August 24, 1941, after the protest of several clergymen, Hitler decided to put an end to this program.
"The efforts of the Nazis to keep Aktion T4 secret failed. More and more information was circulating among the population. After a famous sermon by the Bishop of Munster (Editor's note: August 3, 1941) which condemned this euthanasia, the regime was afraid of the state of mind in the rear. It needed popular support for the war, especially since the offensive against the Soviet Union in June 1941 ", describes Florian Schwanninger.
Reichspost bus assigned to the euthanasia institute, in front of Hartheim castle, with its driver.
Recent research by Jean-Marie Winkler has established that this bus was also used to transport prisoners to Hartheim.
© Oberösterreichisches Landesarchiv
A first gassing of Jewish concentration camps
However, Hartheim Castle does not remain without activity. A few days before the "end" of the T4 program, another operation begins to take place, the Aktion 14f23, intended to assassinate prisoners of Nazi concentration camps. On August 11, 1941, it was a transport of a different kind that arrived at the Château d'Hartheim. Seventy Jewish detainees of Dutch origin, coming from the Mauthausen concentration camp, were taken there and also gassed. "Most of these men had been rounded up in Amsterdam at the end of February 1941, in reprisal for the protest of the Dutch population, in particular the dockers, against the fate reserved by the Nazis for the Dutch Jews", explains the historian Jean-Marie Winkler, author of "Gassing concentration camps at Hartheim Castle: the action"14f13 "in annexed Austria, new research on the accounting of death" (Tirésias Michel Reynaud editions, 2010).
For this professor at the University of Rouen, this date marks a turning point.
Even if he points out that Jews had already been killed by gas on that date in the context of the massacres committed by the Einsatzgruppen (mobile extermination units) in the territories conquered in the East and even of Aktion T4, " it is the symbolic beginning of what I called the Shoah before the Shoah. For the first time, according to the documents preserved, the Nazis select Jews because of their Jewishness, with a view to a gassing carried out in direct relationship with a concentration camp ".
From Aktion T4 to Aktion Reinhard
For his part, Florian Schwanninger wants to be more nuanced. Although he admits that their selection was probably made on the basis of racial criteria, he also points out their catastrophic physical condition as a result of the mistreatment: "If you could no longer do work for the SS, you would run the risk of being selected for Hartheim ". However, the two historians agree on the importance of the T4 program in the foreshadowing of the final solution. "During the T4 program, the Nazis acquired a know-how to massively destroy a large number of people in the shortest possible time and in the most efficient way based on the division of labor", summarizes Florian Schwanninger.
Group photo taken in September 1940 in front of Hartheim castle on the occasion of a wedding. From left to right: Witness Christian Wirth (office manager in Hartheim, later commander of the Belzec extermination camp and inspector of the Aktion Reinhardt extermination camps), Franz Reichleitner (deputy to the office manager, later commander of the Sobibor extermination camp), the bride, Elisabeth Vallaster ("nurse" in Hartheim), the groom, Josef Vallaster (crematorium worker in Hartheim, future supervisor in Sobibor, where he will be killed during the insurrection of the inmates ), and Gertrude Blanke, second witness (“nurse” in Hartheim). © NARA II, RG 549, Records of Headquarters, US Army Europe (USAREUR), War Crimes Branch, War Crimes Case Files
“Very concretely, the Aktion T4 teams will be mobilized in 1941/1942 as part of the Aktion Reinhard (Editor's note: the code name which designates the extermination of Jews in the region of the General Government of Poland). East, Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka were opened with the help or under the command of assassins from Aktion T4, in particular from Hartheim. In this sense, T4 was indeed the 'school of murderers', according to the terms of Simon Wiesenthal ", adds Jean-Marie Winkler.
"Both by its dimension of industrialized death and by the assassination techniques used, Auschwitz nevertheless marks the passage to a different logic, of a progression in rationalized horror. The ideological origin of Auschwitz is the Wannsee conference ( Editor's note: On January 20, 1942, fifteen senior officials of the Nazi Party and the German administration met in the suburbs of Berlin, to discuss the implementation of "The Final Solution to the Jewish Question) and not the Nazi eugenic delirium . Even if, in both logic of Nazi horror, the elimination of otherness, the assassination of the other because he is other, is the basis of mass murder ", he wants to clarify.
A plaque belonging to Marcelino Larrea Vertis, a Spanish deportee from the Gusen camp, assassinated in Hartheim on December 3, 1941. It was discovered, along with others in 2002, during excavations in the old garden of the castle.
© Lern- und Gedenkort Schloss Hartheim
Give victims a name again
In total until December 1944, in addition to the victims of Aktion T4, between 7,000 and 10,000 concentration camp prisoners from Mauthausen, Gusen, Dachau or Ravensbrück were murdered at Hartheim castle. For a long time, this story will remain taboo in Austria. According to Florian Schwanninger, this place became the "symbol of the inability of Austrian society to create a cultural memory of Nazi crimes": "The mentally or physically ill were already on the margins of society before the Nazis. They all had the difficulties of the world to be recognized as victims. Eugenics or racial hygiene ideas also continued after 1945. Their recognition only became a subject from the 1960s ".
Since then, Hartheim Castle has had a memorial and a permanent exhibition in memory of the victims.
Each year, around 17,000 visitors go there, including many schoolchildren.
The place also has a study center run by Florian Schwanninger.
"Our goal is to establish the database of victims. So far, we have found 23,000 names of the approximately 30,000 people murdered here from 1940 to 1944."
These names are also inscribed on glass panels.
In order not to forget them and remember these crimes, a ceremony is organized every October 1st.
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