Mass Violence in Nazi-Occupied Europe by Kay Alex J.; Stahel David; Dean Martin & David Stahel

Author:Kay, Alex J.; Stahel, David; Dean, Martin & David Stahel
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Published: 2018-07-25T16:00:00+00:00

The Patient Murders in Mogilev: Sources

The most detailed source materials for the reconstruction of the murders of the patients of the psychiatric hospital in Mogilev and its agricultural colony in the years 1941 and 1942 are the records of interrogation25 from the preliminary proceedings against Georg Frentzel (1914–1979).26 The case of the former driver of Einsatzkommando 8 of Einsatzgruppe B was brought before the District Court of Karl-Marx-Stadt (today: Chemnitz) in 1969. The accused had been investigated because, among other things, he was suspected of being involved in the murders of psychiatric patients in Mogilev. The arrest warrant against Frentzel, who had continued to work unmolested as a miner after his release from Soviet captivity on September 10, 1949, and had been a member of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands, or SED), was preceded by thorough and extensive observations of his family and professional environment by the Ministry of State Security (MfS). The discovery of Frentzel was the result of systematic research by the MfS since the mid- to late-1960s regarding a “series of criminal complexes or units involved in them, especially in the area of the SS-Einsatzgruppen.”27 In the course of these investigations, which are to be viewed in connection with the large concentration camp trials in West Germany—Auschwitz (I 1963–1965, II 1966, III 1973–1976), Sobibór (1965–1966), Treblinka (1964–1965)—the GDR came across with “astonishing regularity several dozen members of the respective Einsatzgruppen . . . who had been living unmolested in East Germany for more than twenty-five years.”28

On December 10, 1971, after a trial that had lasted for more than two years, Frentzel was sentenced to life imprisonment for war crimes and crimes against humanity.29 In the course of the taking of evidence by the East German prosecutor at the time, former nurses and doctors from the Mogilev institute were flown to the GDR from Belarus and interrogated in detail. Their statements were also included in our study, as well as the statements made by the indicted and convicted doctors of the Mogilev hospital in July 1944 and November 1948. Written recollections of former doctors and nurses could also be resorted to; they are stored in the State Archives of Public Organizations of Mogilev Region, in the State Archives of the Russian Federation, the State Archives of Mogilev Region and in the Yad Vashem Archives in Jerusalem. All these sources were supplemented by the memories of the victims’ families or villagers who broke their silence and reported on the murder of the patients only when a memorial was established on the hospital grounds in 2009. Finally, the “Operational Situation Reports of the Chief of the Security Police and the SD in the USSR,” the “Incident Reports USSR”30 and some documents of the Mogilev Health Office, copies of which were found in the central investigation proceedings regarding Frentzel, were also used. This extremely heterogeneous collection of sources promised, on the one hand, a detailed description of what happened, but also held in store a special challenge in terms of evaluation.

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