Talking about the National Socialist German Workers’ Party takes us on a gloomy journey to one of the darkest chapters in the history of humanity. Obsession, hatred, ambition and genocide, everything is integrated into a macabre formula that ended not only with the deaths of soldiers in the war, but also with the annihilation of more than six million people, many of them followers of the Jewish faith. But Among the many nuances of Nazism and its war, that of health was one of the bloodiest. The children’s clinic Am Spiegelgrund is one of the most horrifying tests.
Since the spring of 1938, the Nazi regime required doctors, nurses and midwives in Austrian hospitals to report any mental disturbances they detected in newborns and children passing through their facilities. The reason was the application of the so-called “Aktion T4”, the Nazi euthanasia program. Join us on Supercurious to find out what was going on at Am Spiegelgrund, the ruthless Nazi-run children’s clinic.
Am Spiegelgrund, the Nazi-run children’s clinic
The Am Spiegelgrund was an institution in Vienna, Austria that operated during the era of the Nazi regime in the 1940s. Unlike what might be expected of a health care institution, however, the Am Spiegelgrund had a dark reality behind its facade, as was to be expected in the case of institutions run by the regime. This clinic was initially a pediatric hospital that became an institution for the care of children with mental and physical disabilities. during the Third Reich era in Austria.
However, with the advent of Nazi ideology, the Am Spiegelgrund became a sinister place where atrocities were carried out in the name of “racial hygiene” and the “euthanasia” of people deemed “undesirable” or “incurable” according to the criteria of Nazi pseudoscience.
It was composed of two pavilions, one that acted as a reformatory for children and a sanatorium. In this clinic they “cared” for children considered sick, disabled, irrecoverable or uneducable.
Inhumane medical experiments were carried out at the Am Spiegelgrund, as well as the forced sterilization and murder of children with disabilities, genetic and mental illnessesand others considered socially undesirable, according to Nazi ideology.
Cruel methods such as starvation, the administration of poisonous drugs and the application of violent measures were used to eliminate those who did not meet the standards of “perfection” established by the Nazi regime.
Despite efforts to cover up these atrocities, many children died at the Am Spiegelgrund as a result of abuse and neglect. Years after the end of World War II, the horrors that occurred in the institution were discovered, which led to trials and convictions of some of those involved in these crimes.
The victims of the Am Spiegelgrund
Within the walls of this horrible place, at least 789 children were murdered. The brains of which were preserved in jars in formaldehyde for further study.. Some were lucky enough to die by lethal injection or gassed. But many others suffered excruciating deaths, victims of experiments by Nazi doctors. They were used as guinea pigs to investigate diseases such as tuberculosis, from which they were injected with the bacteria or virus so that they contracted the disease.
They were also left to die of starvation or victims of inclement weather, since they were abandoned on a balcony, out in the open, until they fell ill and later died. Families were notified that their child had suffered a worsening condition or had contracted a disease and a few days later they received a heartfelt letter telling them that he had died despite having received the best care.
The Action 4 program
In the clinic Am Spiegelgrund the so-called program was applied Action 4. It was a plan created and carried out during the Nazi regime, in which doctors and nurses were responsible for the elimination of those people considered “unproductive, incurably ill or, in the case of children, those who had hereditary defects”.
It is believed that more than 200,000 human beings were killed. Nazi propaganda presented these people as “lives not worth living” and justified their murder as an act of compassion for the sick and at the same time a benefit to the community.
Many nurses refused to carry out the instructions of the «Aktion 4» program and were silenced with threats or dismissed from their positions. Families protested, and both the Catholic and Protestant churches filed complaints with the Nazi government over what they saw as covert killings. They got the Aktion 4 officially suspended in 1941, but the plan was actually carried out until the end of the war.
The clinic directors
The Am Spiegelgrund children’s clinic was run during the years of World War II by doctors affiliated with the Nazi party Ernst Illing and Heinrich Gross.
Ernest Illing was captured at the end of the war and sentenced to death, but Heinrich Gross, held directly responsible for at least 9 child deaths, was sentenced only to two years in prison, from which he was released on a legal technicality. Tried again many years later, the trial was suspended, as he was considered to be senile due to his advanced age, which was later found to be untrue.
Unfortunately, Am Spiegelgrund was not the only clinic in which the Nazi regime preyed on the weakest to achieve what they considered a “sanitization of society.”
Definitely, the history of the Am Spiegelgrund is a dark reminder of the horrors perpetrated by the Nazi regime in the name of its distorted ideology. It is a sad example of how science and medicine can be used for nefarious purposes when inhuman criteria and discrimination are applied against certain groups of people.
If you have been interested in this topic, you may be interested in knowing the article in which we tell you about the terrible death suffered by the girls forced to taste Hitler’s food. Until a next topic!