Honoring the perpetrators

In late 1999, early 2000 as I was beginning to wrap up my first pass at data entry into my Access database, I was also beginning to get a feel for the personalities behind those words. Slowly I could see the character of each living person, as well as the temperament of their family members or friends whom Nazis had executed in 1943.

At that time, I still thought Jürgen Wittenstein had been one of them, one of our White Rose heroes. Every word of his essays, speeches, correspondence, notes, and his Shoah Foundation testimony had been entered into my database as if it were true. It would be another year, after interviewing him face to face in January 2001, before I began to understand his true character.

And yet, five years in, I knew that Inge Scholl’s refusal to grant me an interview, and Franz Josef Müller’s Ja, Inge, ja, Inge were rooted in their loyalties from 1933-1945. Five years in, I knew for a fact that Inge had been an ardent Nazi, even after the execution of her siblings. She only “saw the light” when money was involved postwar. The 2 million Marks ($16 million in today’s currency) she received in Marshall and McCloy Funds made her a firm believer in democracy.

Without recanting her Nazi ideology.

I wasn’t sure why Müller bowed the knee to Inge. After all, he was the person who had recommended Otl Aicher’s little book to me. Otl married Inge after the war, but his memoirs paint a vivid picture of her absolute fealty to Adolf Hitler and Nazi ideology. Her own book, Sippenhaft, is the source of information about the high-ranking Nazi circles the Scholls moved in. And continued to move in, even after the executions in February 1943.

I “figured out” Wittenstein after the 2001 interview, and I “figured out” Müller in 2002 after receiving his otherwise-blocked Gestapo interrogation transcripts. Yeah, Inge probably knew his dirty little secrets.

Although I didn’t know the hard facts about Müller and Wittenstein until later, by late 1999 I already understood why White Rose history is told in such a legend-ary manner. Inge badly needed her siblings’ noble work as means to get all that money.

So here is idealistic Me, working through voluminous documentation – Protokolle, memoirs, interview notes, correspondence, phone call scribbles, newspaper articles – that had begun to take shape in my database. I still wanted to believe that this was a sweet story, but the Inge-Müller ‘stuff’ bothered my gut. I wanted my first three or four drafts, with everything light and joy and utter nobility, to be true, dammit! And my gut kept telling me, No, Denise…

Well, my gut and Dr. Armin Ziegler, who – independently of me – was himself working through a similar set of facts and also asking hard questions.

In the middle of this turmoil, working through conflicting emotions about White Rose and the informed dissent they practiced, I stumbled across a short essay by the independent journalist, Ernst Klee. Entitled “Wer Täter ehrt, mordet ihre Opfer noch einmal” [Whoever honors perpetrators murders their victims all over again], Klee’s treatise was a triple turning point for me.

First, Klee mentioned the Zwiefalten psychiatric institute (top image) that Wittenstein had written me about. The father of Wittenstein’s very best friend on the face of the earth Alfons Metzger (per Wittenstein – he tended to those sorts of exaggerated statements) was chief administrator in Zwiefalten. According to Wittenstein, Heinrich Metzger, father of Alfons, was “tormented” by the T-4 program. Wittenstein claimed that he (Wittenstein) was the source of information for White Rose friends about the euthanization of the mentally ill.

That last claim was a red flare – way more than a red flag – since it is fairly well established that Heinz Brenner and his small group of friends in Ulm provided the source of information regarding the T-4 program for at least Hans and Sophie Scholl. Their publication of Bishop Galen’s sermon, mailed, likely also underscored the value of mailed leaflets, something Traute Lafrenz also had experience with from her days in Hamburg.

In the middle of Klee’s data regarding when, where, how of the murders of psychiatric patients, there’s Zwiefalten. That “hospital” sent 46.5% of its psychiatric patients for execution – in 1945, as the war was ending! This sent me scurrying for more information about Heinrich Metzger and Zwiefalten.

I learned that Metzger’s actions were so egregious that the French arrested him postwar. We know what went on in Zwiefalten because of Metzger’s testimony. Which, of course, completely contradicted Wittenstein’s fable. Among other things, Metzger demonstrated no remorse. He was not “tormented.” Reading his testimony, you realize that he agreed with the policy of gassing psychiatric patients.

Metzger and the psychiatrists in Zwiefalten did not themselves murder the patients. No, they put them on blue buses that transported their patients to Grafeneck, where they were gassed to death. “Euthanized.”

One of the doctors in Zwiefalten – Dr. Alfons Stegmann – would promise his patients that they were being shipped to a hospital where the food was better. Once the truth leaked out, and prisoners’, I mean patients’, personal effects began being unceremoniously dumped in front of the hospital after their death, Metzger and the doctors and the ruffians they hired had to forcibly load patients onto those blue buses. After they were murdered, the patients’ personal effects were given to a Nazi aid organization in Münsingen.

Metzger would then falsify their death certificates and mail them to grieving families. Influenza, heart attack, ruptured appendix, these were the sorts of diseases listed as cause of death. Susanne Hirzel noted in her memoirs that it could be awkward if “ruptured appendix” was listed as cause of death, and the family knew their loved one’s appendix had been removed. But few people questioned Metzger’s death certificates.

That single line in Klee’s essay sent me trekking for truth about Zwiefalten.

Second, Klee slaughters truckloads of sacred cows. If you are a PhD student looking for a Holocaust-related topic, or if “psychiatry during the Shoah” is a topic that bothers you (as it should), use Klee’s words as a jumping off point. He matter-of-factly denounces individuals and institutions that euthanized or sterilized mentally ill patients as means of “healing” them. Yes, that was the word applied to the gas chambers in Grafeneck and elsewhere, and to sterilizations of psychiatric patients.

Klee wrote, “Bis heute finden die Täter im Regelfall mehr Verständnis als ihre Opfer. … Menschen, die zwangssterilisiert wurden, fielen dem Rassenwahn der Nazi-Zeit zum Opfer, wurden aber rechtlich nie als Nazi-Verfolgte anerkannt und entschädigt. Es bleiben lediglich Almosen aus einem Härtefallfond. Die Täter setzten ihre Karriere ohne Scham fort, traten sogar als Gutachter in Entschädigungsfällen auf und verhöhnten ihre Opfer, angesichts ihrer Minderwertigkeit könne kein seelischer Schaden vorliegen.”

[To this day, perpetrators generally find more understanding than their victims. … People who were forcibly sterilized were victims of the racial insanity of the Nazi era, but were not legally recognized as persecuted by the Nazis and were never compensated. There’s just alms from a hardship fund. Perpetrators continued their careers, bearing no shame, sometimes even appearing as experts in compensation cases, ridiculing their victims, saying there could be no psychological damage since they were inferior.]

Klee therefore names the pharmaceutical companies that profited from the drugs and chemicals used. He calls out prominent postwar psychiatrists who kept practicing “medicine” after 1945. He writes about the whitewashing of careers, attitudes, ideology, denouncing both the perpetrators as well as those who enabled their continued work as “doctors.” One such example is the university in Kiel, who wrote regarding the death of Prof. Dr. Werner Catel, that Catel “in vielfältiger Weise zum Wohl kranker Kinder beigetragen [hat]” [that Catel had contributed in many ways to the wellbeing of sick children]. Catel was responsible for the mass murder of children! He “healed” them by killing them.

Yet, after the war, Catel quickly found employment at a children’s psychiatric home near Frankfurt. While there, he continued to advocate for euthanization of mentally ill children, as well as leading the way in performing medical experiments on children, e.g., administering untested drugs for tuberculosis on children in his “care.” But an investigation into his work postwar was blocked by fellow psychiatrists.

Klee also references pharmaceutical experiments that Nazi doctors performed on behalf of German Big Pharma during the war. For example, they erroneously believed that multiple sclerosis was an infectious disease. One particular doctor (Georg Schaltenbrand) would inject monkeys with cerebrospinal fluid, then inject psychiatric patients with cerebrospinal fluid from those monkeys. Patients who did not die from that experiment were subsequently gassed. With no repercussions after the war for Schaltenbrand. He remained professor of neurology in Würzburg until his death.

What I did not know until only recently: Wittenstein’s sixteen-page (!) “PhD” was not about “Pubertätsfantasien” [puberty fantasies]. Wittenstein’s sixteen-page “PhD” was written as part of the psychiatry program of the university in Munich, on the same topic that preoccupied Schaltenbrand. However, Wittenstein believed and “proved” that multiple sclerosis was a “psychiatric” disorder. He seemed to equate MS with schizophrenia and dementia, based on four and only four examples. It’s unclear whether he personally met and dealt with the four MS patients, or whether he lifted someone else’s research. He presented no objective test results.

And yet. Wittenstein was allowed to reinvent himself, same as Inge Scholl, who taught antisemitic and Nazi racial ideology to Jungmädel leaders in the Ulm region of Bund deutscher Mädel-Jungmädel. And never recanted that ideology. Or Franz Josef Müller, who was a strong participant in Hitler Youth, avoided bündische youth and anti-Nazi sentiments “because the Pope said so,” and was able to transform himself into a good Social Democrat after the war.

No one ever called Wittenstein on his “medical” degree, until Armin Ziegler did so in 2003. And Wittenstein flat-out lied. Thanks to Dr. Martin Kalusche for finding the real dissertation!

Klee therefore not only pointed me in the direction of truth re Zwiefalten, but he forced that very hard question which was only answered by Dr. Kalusche last year.

Finally, the premise of Ernst Klee’s brilliant short essay, namely that whoever honors perpetrators murders their victims all over again, greatly influenced my writing of the White Rose histories.

It’s not a sweet story. It’s not simple and clear-cut. It is anything but easy.

When Jennifer Rosenfeld and I visited the Dachau memorial in October 2023 – it has come a long way since I first went there in 1973! – we were both struck by a small exhibit. Not a prominent exhibit. Just a quiet testimony to an awful truth.

That awful truth: Medical students from Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität (LMU) in Munich, the same university and medical school that almost all of our White Rose students were enrolled at, carried out internships – at Dachau. They performed medical experiments on prisoners in that concentration camp.

Those first few drafts of my White Rose histories that were all sweetness and light? In those drafts, it was a good thing they studied medicine! They wanted to be healers! They found and used a great loophole for military service when they signed up to study medicine. Right? Right?

Maybe not. All those gaping holes regarding Kristallnacht (for every single person engaged in White Rose resistance) and for Scholls, the utter silence regarding their May 1939 move from a “Jewish” apartment building to the great home on Münsterplatz, a home that 99.99% certainly belonged to one of the Jewish families at that address who was deported or escaped or murdered over Kristallnacht… What are we to think about their medical studies, with this new (for me) knowledge about the medical internships served at Dachau? What will we find when, one of these days in the very near future, everything related to Germany in 1933-1945 is digitized and uploaded for scholars (or AI!) to analyze? Whose names will we find on that internship list that will blow us away?

Yes, we should, we must, honor the sacrifice of those who dared to resist. Precious few in Germany did so. Precious few. As Dr. Ziegler wrote me once as I struggled with the “we didn’t know” wail one usually hears from older Germans, they all knew that Jews were not allowed to attend German schools, Jews were not allowed to own businesses or real estate, Jews were not allowed to marry non-Jewish Germans, Jews were not allowed to sit on park benches, Jews were not allowed to live in their former homes. Per Ziegler, even the most “innocent” German knew these things and did nothing.

So yes, the precious few who did stand up for what was good, and just, and proper, they deserve every bit of honor we can bestow on them.

At the same time, we may not – MAY NOT – turn a blind eye to difficult truths or gaping holes. And we especially may not fete those who were Nazis and after the war, who pretended they had been good democrats all along. Inge Scholl. Franz Josef Müller. And most especially, Oskar Jürgen Hans Gustav Wittenstein.

History teachers and professors must also stop whitewashing doctors, bankers, professors, writers, artists, politicians, judges, accountants, Beamte, and the rest who were Nazis during the war. Who willingly participated in the T-4 program. Who rounded up Jewish Germans (and Jewish Poles, Jewish Russians, and so on) and put them on trains heading to death. Who bought Jewish assets at 10% or less of value. Who taught impressionable young people to hate. Who beat up anyone who was Other.

We. Must. Stop. Honoring. The. Perpetrators.

Now.

Postscript #1: Karl Bonhoeffer, father of Dietrich and fellow “resistance fighter” Klaus Bonhoeffer, was among those who believed that mentally ill individuals should be sterilized. Karl Bonhoeffer’s father was a judge in Ulm. Lawrence A. Zeidman apparently claimed that Karl Bonhoeffer was also part of anti-Nazi resistance, but Klee points out that Karl Bonhoeffer believed in sterilization of psychiatric patients and recommended sterilization early on for Jewish men.

When I then saw Bonhoeffer cited in Wittenstein’s 1944 PhD dissertation (“disturbances of the exogenous reaction type” - disorientation, delirium, and insanity that per Wittenstein, Bonhoeffer related to multiple sclerosis), I went a little further down this rabbit hole. Karl Bonhoeffer also agitated against gay rights, believing that homosexuality was “infectious” and that gay men infected straight men and made them gay. The NSDAP used Karl Bonhoeffer’s psychiatry theories to justify many of their policies towards Jews, the mentally ill, and LGBTQ+ Germans.

Postscript #2: That said, I am not an expert on this topic. Much more research is needed before we can fully comprehend what happened. Strip away the whitewash, please.

Comments worth keeping

This was a terrific read, Denise.

--Mark Mansour, December 7, 2024.

I read briefly about Hans and Sophie Scholl and their part in White Rose. Hans brought his Nazi girlfriend to a White Rose meeting, and Sophie scattered pamphlets publicly in front of the janitor who caught them. Why are they not considered traitors? Especially Hans.

Thank you.

--Kai Kinzer, December 6, 2024.

My response:

It goes beyond even those two things. Hans Scholl continued close personal friendships with people known to be Nazis. At least one or two of them denounced him for White Rose work prior to Feb 18, 1943. Sophie Scholl was corresponding with an ardent Nazi guy named Waldemar. There's hints that Waldemar was a romantic interest.

Further, after Kristallnacht she never mentions her close friend Annelies Kammerer in letters or diaries *that Inge Scholl granted access to*, and suddenly Erika Reiff - known in Ulm for her pro-Nazi politics -is Sophie's closest friend in Ulm. The Kammerers had stirred up Nazis in Ulm because Annelies' father continued to associate with and do business with Jewish friends. Hans Scholl called Mr. Kammerer "a Jewish lackey."

I have long believed that once Scholl Archives (and other archives) are finally open, every single "wannabe" scholar who followed the Inge Scholl narrative about White Rose is going to be disgraced.

For now, Scholl narrative continues to dominate the scene. It's next to impossible to be taken seriously in German academic circles if you write negative things about the Scholls. Bothers me no end.

I *do* believe that Hans and Sophie Scholl were "heroes," depending on the definition of hero. They did in fact die for their anti-Nazi work.

But unlike Willi Graf, Alexander Schmorell, Christoph Probst, Traute Lafrenz, and others, Hans and Sophie (and Kurt Huber) resisted the Nazis because their PERSONAL freedoms had been infringed. Not because they were enraged about Nazi policies towards Jews, the mentally ill, Eastern Europeans, and so on. No, because THEIR personal rights had been violated.

Sadly relevant in these days.

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The above information is fully footnoted in our White Rose histories. Please purchase them for access to that material! To order digital version of White Rose History, Volume I: Coming Together (January 1933-April 30, 1942), click here. To order digital version of White Rose History, Volume II, click here. WRH1 is © 2002, 2003, 2007 by Denise Elaine Heap. WRH2 is © 2002, 2007 by Denise Elaine Heap.

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