Richard Jenne, the last child killed by the head nurse at the Kaufbeuren-Irsee euthanasia facility

Richard Jenne, the last child killed by the head nurse at the Kaufbeuren-Irsee euthanasia facility

The last child killed by the head nurse at the Kaufbeuren-Irsee euthanasia facility. Said by the Dr at the facility during his trial for killing the lame, "Death can mean deliverance. Death is life - just as much as birth." In the book The Life of Reason: Reason in Common Sense, Santayana wrote, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." Anyone who can kill a child or order it is absolute scum. RIP poor babies.

The Kinderfachabteilung in Kaufbeuren was established in December 1941 (as the second of three in Bavaria) and was in operation until mid-April 1945 (and children were killed until June 1945). The clinic's medical director was Dr. Valentin Faltlhauser, who was directly responsible for this ward. The ward (an extension) in Irsee, which is close by, opened a few months later. Its medical director was Dr. Lothar Gärtner, the clinic's deputy director, who was directly responsible for the ward in Irsee and committed suicide in 1945. Dr. Faltlhauser received a sentence of 3 years for instigation to be an accessory to manslaughter and was pardoned by the Bavarian secretary of justice in 1954. He died in 1961. 221 children died in the special children's ward in Kaufbeuren and Irsee. 

Dr. Faltlhauser collaborated with another doctor in conducting tuberculosis experiments on children in the Kinderfachabteilung, of whom the majority died as a consequence. Heuvelmann (2014: 58) notes that 400 person were deported from the Irsee facility as part of the "T4" program, and 600 died during the war thereafter. The first children were admitted in November 1940, and between the end of 1945 to the end of 1945 108 minors died there. Recent research (Steger 2006) has shown the role of the three Bavarian "special children's wards" (Ansbach, Eglfing-Haar, and Kaufbeuren) as suppliers of tissue specimens for the Neuropathological Research Institute in Munich.

With certainty Eglfing-Haar provided 144, and probably as many as 297, slide preparations of brain material from the “Special Pediatric Unit” in Eglfing-Haar, whereas 23 came from Kaufbeuren and 25 from Ansbach. Even though American troops entered Kaufbeuren in late 1945, the clinic site was initially left undisturbed because of a putative occurrence of typhus there. 

After military personnel entered the clinic, it was discovered that a 4-year old, Richard Jenne, had become the last victim of "children's euthanasia" on May 29, 1945 (see for his picture provided by the US Holocaust Memorial Museum here; and for the document that is part of the extensive Nuremberg trial record available online here). Kaufbeuren was probably known of having been one of the most notorious sites of medicalized murder in Bavaria, as indicated in the Munich newspaper of 7 July 1945, which titled its story, printed on its cover, on Kaufbeuren "Mass murder in the asylum" (Klee p. 452). Continue reading