Am Spiegelgrund clinic

Am Spiegelgrund was a children's clinic in Vienna during World War II, where 789 patients were murdered under child euthanasia in Nazi Germany.

Am Spiegelgrund was divided into a reform school and a children's ward, where sick and disabled adolescents were unwitting subjects of medical experiments and victims of nutritional and psychological abuse.

Gross went unpunished for his actions after the end of World War II and became a court psychiatrist in Austria, with much of what he did only becoming public knowledge very late in his life.

[2][3][4] Beginning in the spring of 1938, an extensive network of facilities was established for the documentation, observation, evaluation and selection of children and adolescents, whose social behavior, disabilities, and/or parentage did not comply with the Nazi ideology.

[6] Around 789 children died in the Spiegelgrund clinic[7] while the Steinhof complex was responsible for the death of around 7,500 patients by the end of World War II.

[8][failed verification] The clinic operated under the direction of the Führer's Chancellery and Ministry of the Interior where physicians conducted "all manner" of procedures on the vulnerable and disabled children which were often fatal.

[10] The establishment of a children's ward at the Am Steinhof facility was not possible until the implementation of Aktion T4, a product of the Euthanasia Letter[11] signed by Adolf Hitler.

On 24 July, just weeks after the transfers began, the children's clinic, Am Spiegelgrund, opened its doors with room for six hundred and forty patients in nine buildings on the grounds.

Some of the children arrived perfectly healthy, in both mind and body, but were brought to the center due to delinquent behavior, poor upbringing, or unsuitable parentage.

In July 1940, Anna Wödl, a nurse and the mother of a disabled child, led a protest movement against the evacuation and killing of institutionalized children.

[13] The Austrian Communist Party, the Catholic and Protestant Churches and others formally condemned the killings, and on 24 August 1941, Hitler was pressured to abolish Aktion T4.

To strengthen the Nazi regime and Germany as a whole, utilizing euthanasia to select against individuals who would not produce strong and productive offspring was seen as a merciful gesture.

[22] If a child had any sort of mental or physical condition, their questionnaire would be sent to Hitler's Chancellery, who would recommend "special treatment" despite having never met the children.

Survivors Johann Gross, Alois Kaufmann, and Friedrich Zawrel described and testified to several of the "treatments", which included electroshock therapy,[23] a so-called "cold water cure" in which Zawrel and Kaufmann recall being repeatedly submerged into freezing bath water until they were blue and barely conscious and had lost control of their bowels;[24][25] a "sulfur cure", which was an injection that caused severe pain in the legs, limiting mobility and ensuring that escape was impossible;[25] spinal injections of apomorphine; injections of phenobarbital; overdoses of sedatives, which would often lead to death when the children were exposed to extreme cold or disease; observed starvation;[26] and efficacy testing of tuberculosis vaccines, for which children were infected with tuberculosis pathogens.

[21] The children who were killed at Am Spiegelgrund often died by overdose of depressants such as morphine, scopolamine, and barbiturates, gassing by carbon monoxide, which was a common Nazi tactic, exposure, and starvation.

Brains and other body parts were removed, placed in formaldehyde jars or sealed in paraffin wax, to be stored secretly in the basement for "research".

These people included Erwin Jekelius, Hans Bertha, Ernst Illing, Heinrich Gross, Margarethe Hübsch and Marianne Türk.

[34] The head of the institution from 24 July 1940, to January 1942 was Erwin Jekelius, who in October 1940 was one of 30 participants in a conference about "Euthanasia" laws, which were never put into effect.

In September 1941, the Royal Air Force dropped pamphlets detailing his involvement in multiple murders at Spiegelgrund which eventually led to his removal as the director of the clinic.

Bertha was never tried for his crimes despite documented evidence that he was involved in the murders of patients at Spiegelgrund and his close association with Jekelius and other war criminals.

He previously worked as a senior physician in the first children's division at the national institution at Brandenburg-Görden, alongside Hans Heinze, infamous for his involvement in the euthanasia program.

The ensuing investigation provided compelling evidence of his involvement in the deaths of nine children, whose preserved remains contained traces of poison;[24] however, by then, he was seen unfit to stand trial.

During World War II, Asperger worked as a doctor in the University of Vienna Pediatric Clinic, which was in close proximity to Am Spiegelgrund.

[2] Czech found that Asperger signed his diagnostic reports with "Heil Hitler", and his name was present in the patient files of mentally deficient children who were sent to Am Spiegelgrund.

One notable patient of Am Spiegelgrund whom Asperger had a great involvement with was Herta Schreiber, a three-year-old child who had experienced mental and physical delays after having encephalitis.

"[2] While it is not confirmed that Asperger was aware of the euthanasia happening at Am Spiegelgrund, it is notable that he called for Schreiber's "permanent placement;" he did not expect her to ever return to her family or society.

[44] Authors with differing opinions give Asperger's devout Catholicism and his lack of membership to the Nazi party as reasons that he was not associated with the medical and racial eugenics occurring at the time.

This investigation included thorough analyses of the records for all the patients he and colleagues referred to Am Spiegelgrund from the Therapeutic Pedagogy Unit of the University Children's Hospital in Vienna.

This covered the period between 1939 and March 1943 when Asperger was drafted by the military.″[47] In April 2002, six hundred urns containing the remains of children killed at Spiegelgrund were interred at Vienna's Central Cemetery in the section reserved for victims of the Nazi regime.

A plaque nearby states that the strict arrangement of the lighted stelae reflects the "situation of the children, held hostage and deprived of their freedom".