The Final Reckoning: When Nazi “Sisters of Death” Faced Justice JJ
The evening of 30 January 1933, Berlin. Only hours after Adolf Hitler is appointed Chancellor of Germany, his supporters march through the Brandenburg Gate carrying torches. Within six months, every rival political party is either banned or dissolved, and Germany becomes a one-party dictatorship.
What the Nazis promise is not only a new political but also biological order. They present Germans as a master race whose blood must be kept pure and claim that the nation is being weakened from within by those they consider racially inferior or hereditarily unhealthy.
Jews and Roma people face persecution that ultimately leads to their systematic murder, while millions of Slavs are marked for displacement, exploitation and death. The regime also turns against Germans it considers unfit to belong to the national community, including people with mental and physical disabilities. The persecution of these people cannot be carried out without medical staff.
German doctors join the Nazi Party in greater proportions than members of almost any other profession, with many nurses also becoming supporters of the regime. Within a few years, some of them will help implement its racial policies and even take part in the murder of their own patients. One place where this will happen is the Meseritz-Obrawalde psychiatric hospital, on the far eastern edge of Germany.
There, a senior physician selects patients for death, while the members of the nursing staff carry out many of the killings. Two women stand at the centre of this system: Hilde Wernicke and Helene Wieczorek. Both will ultimately pay the highest price for their crimes. Gertrud Emmy Hilde Wernicke was born on 11 November 1899 in the town of Schleswig, in the northern part of the German Empire, into the family of an army officer.
She left the girls’ high school in Mainz in 1919 with the Abitur, the examination that gives access to university. Wernicke then studied medicine in Frankfurt am Main, passed her first state examination in 1924 and received her doctorate at Marburg University two years later. From 1929 onward, Wernicke spent her entire career as a senior physician at the Meseritz-Obrawalde Sanatorium and Nursing Home.
In May 1933, four months after Adolf Hitler took power in Germany, she joined the Nazi Party, later becoming the leader of the local branch of the National Socialist Women’s League, the Nazi Party’s organization for women. Helene Wieczorek was born in 1904 and she worked as the Oberschwester, or head nurse. She met with Wernicke in the Meseritz-Obrawalde Sanatorium and Nursing Home, where both of them came to help their patients at first.
Meseritz-Obrawalde, often referred to simply as Obrawalde, opened in 1904 as a hospital near the town of Meseritz, today Międzyrzecz in western Poland. Germany lost the First World War, and in November 1918 the German Empire collapsed and was replaced by the Weimar Republic. Most of the former Province of Posen was transferred to the re-established Polish state, while Meseritz remained in Germany.
The new German-Polish frontier lay only a few kilometres to the east, leaving the hospital on Germany’s eastern border. Discussion about killing of the mentally ill patients did not come with Nazis when they took power. Already in 1920, during the democratic Weimar republic, a distinguished lawyer Karl Binding and a professor of psychiatry Alfred Hoche, published a short book arguing that the state should be permitted to kill the incurably ill and the severely disabled, whom they called lives unworthy of life.
This book was widely read, so when Adolf Hitler took power in January 1933, the argument for the killing of the ill patients was already waiting for him. In July 1933, only half a year after Nazis took power in Germany, a law ordered the compulsory sterilisation of the hereditarily ill.
The operations were authorised by special hereditary health courts, where two doctors and a judge made their decisions behind closed doors. This is where the work of our team of historians, researchers and editors becomes the story you hear. I’m Marchand Steenkamp and since 2022, I’ve had the privilege of being the voice behind World History.
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Now, let’s get into today’s story. Some 400 000 people were sterilised in the Nazi Germany. The indoctrination that certain groups of people were unworthy of life ran so deep that even schoolchildren were given arithmetic problems calculating the cost of keeping a disabled person alive. German society was gradually being prepared to accept the killing of its most defenceless members.
In March 1939 the city of Berlin opened talks, among other also with Obrawalde Sanatorium and Nursing Home. Berlin’s own asylums were overcrowded, while Obrawalde had room, and lay far east from the capital. The two sides agreed that Berlin would send its mentally ill patients there and pay for their care.
Some 900 patients had been living at Obrawalde at the start of 1939, and by the end of that year there were more than 2 000, with only 3 doctors responsible for their care. Thousands of mentally ill people were now being far from anyone who knew them. While Obrawalde was filling up, Nazi Germany began the killing of people with mental and physical disabilities.
In October 1939 Hitler signed a memorandum authorizing doctors to grant a so-called mercy death to patients judged incurable. The order was backdated to 1 September 1939, the day the Second World War began. Hospitals filled in questionnaires on everyone in their care, and evaluators in Berlin reviewed the forms and decided who would die.
Those selected were collected by bus and taken to one of six institutions equipped with gas chambers. The operation became known as T4, after its headquarters at Tiergartenstrasse 4 in Berlin. In less than two years, more than 70,000 people were killed at these institutions. The mass killing of patients did not remain secret for long. Families received urns and condolence letters containing details that did not correspond with what they knew about their relatives, and by the summer of 1941, Catholic and Protestant clergy were openly denouncing the killings in sermons and written protests, some of them addressed directly to Adolf Hitler. In August
1941 Hitler ordered the gassings stopped but the killing moved into the hospitals themselves, where it could be done quietly, ward by ward, with drugs and hunger. Many institutions continued in the murder of their patients, but Obrawalde was suited to it better than most, because it was remote, overcrowded, and full of patients whose families were hundreds of kilometres away.
At the end, patients from at least 26 German cities were sent and murdered in Obrawalde. One of the main perpetrators was Hilde Wernicke. She was in charge of the women’s and children’s wards, with responsibility for examining each new arrival before recording one of two findings.
Fit for work bought a patient time but incurably ill and children were marked for death from the start. Between 1943 and 1944, Wernicke chose around 600 people this way. Early in 1944, while she was killing her patients, the Nazi regime awarded her the War Merit Cross, a decoration for service away from the front. Wernicke did not act alone.
Nurses working under her supervision took an active part in the killings. Among them was head nurse Helene Wieczorek, who supervised the women involved in these crimes and gave injections with her own hands. She was later accused of responsibility for several hundred deaths. The patients Wernicke had marked were not killed on the open wards. Instead, they were taken to separate rooms reserved for that purpose, out of sight of the others.
There they were given a barbiturate, a sleeping drug that stops the breathing if the dose is large enough. Sometimes it was injected, but more often it was stirred into food. Patients who understood what was happening resisted, and it could take three members of staff to hold one of them still. Among those who worked in the rooms were the ward supervisor Amanda Ratajczak, the orderly Hermann Gulke, and the 21 other nurses remembered afterwards by the grim nickname the sisters of death.
The bodies were carried out by the staff themselves at first, and later by a work party of male patients put together for the job, who became known as the cemetery gang. Most of the naked corpses were buried in mass graves, but some were cremated in Frankfurt an der Oder.
Construction of a crematorium to handle the large number of corpses started, but the project was not completed until the end of the war. The doctors filled in the certificates with plausible causes, stroke being a common one, and each was sent to the family of deceased. By January 1945 the Red Army, the armed forces of the Soviet Union, was closing on the region, and Wernicke and Wieczorek did not wait for them to liberate the hospital.
They fled together to the west to the town of Wernigerode in the Harz mountains in central Germany. Soviet troops reached the hospital on 29 January 1945 and found about 1000 surviving patients and mass graves of at least 10 000 people who were murdered there. In March 1945 the former Obrawalde ward supervisor Amanda Ratajczak was arrested.
She admitted killing more than 1500 patients, the last of them the day before the liberation, and on 10 May 1945, two days after the war in Europe ended, she was shot alongside the care-giver Hermann Gulke. Hilde Wernicke and Helene Wieczorek were arrested in Wernigerode on 10 August 1945 and taken to Berlin. Their trial opened before the regional court there, with the newsreel cameras recording the proceedings. During the trial Wernicke defended herself without any visible remorse.
She told the court that her task had been to identify, among the large number of patients admitted to the institution, those who were still capable of performing even minimal work and to spare them from being killed. According to Wernicke, only mentally ill patients who were considered truly incurable and those who suffered from the most severe physical ailments, were selected for euthanasia. For them, she claimed, death was, in the truest sense of the word, a release.
Wieczorek’s defence was different. According to her, she had refused to kill the patients at first, but Walter Grabowski, who was director of the hospital, had told her that refusal was pointless, that her years of state service bound her to her duty, and that the law permitted the incurably ill to be released from their suffering.
During her statement, Wieczorek claimed that Director Grabowski had repeatedly threatened the nurses with the Gestapo, Nazi Germany’s secret police. She told the court: “I have only done my duty and done everything at the directions of my superiors. Director Grabowski always threatened us with the Gestapo.
He told us that the Gestapo would take us by the neck, if we did not do what he wanted.” Despite her defence, the truth is that the Nazis’ programme of mass murder depended on people willing to carry it out and at Obrawalde, no nurse who refused to participate was ever punished or persecuted by the Gestapo. The court believed neither of them and on 25 March 1946 both women were convicted of murder in several hundred cases and sentenced to death.
The Berlin´s Court of Appeal confirmed the sentence on 24 August 1946. The sentences were carried out on the morning of 14 January 1947 in the Lehrter Strasse prison in Berlin and both women were executed by guillotine. Helene Wieczorek was 42 years old and Hilde Wernicke was 47. Thanks for watching the World History Channel. Be sure to like and subscribe and click the bell notification icon so you don’t miss our next episodes. We thank you and we’ll see you next time on the channel.
