Kaufbeuren - Irsee

In 1849, a mental hospital (clinic) for mentally ill people opened in a former monastery in Irsee, about eighty kilometers southwest of Munich. The hospital had about 80 beds but the number of patients rose at a rapid pace so therefore a larger hospital was built for about 150 patients in Kaufbeuren, completed in 1876, about five kilometers south of Irsee. The monastery in Irsee then became a branch of the hospital in Kaufbeuren and a facility for long-term patients. After the Nazis took power in Germany in 1933, the clinic came to institutionalize mentally ill people in large numbers. These were people who did not live up to the Nazi racial ideals. During the thirties, the clinic had a capacity for about 1200 patients and thus became the largest clinic in Swabia. Therefore, patients from all over the area, including Bavaria, were sent to Kaufbeuren. In addition to adult patients, special children’s wards were also set up at the clinic.

Head of the clinic was psychiatrist Dr. Valentin Faltlhauser, a devoted supporter of the Nazi racial doctrine and advocate of both sterilization and murder of mentally and physically disabled people. According to the Nazi racial doctrine, these were considered to be an economic burden on society and a direct threat to the German race if they allowed to multiply. However, it was a sensitive subject to advocate mercy killing of German citizens. But a month after the outbreak of Word War Two in September 1939, Hitler signed an order which gave psychiatrists and doctors mandate to murder patients in mental hospitals. The murders were part of a program called the T-4. Lists were sent out to hospitals around Germany with names of patients to be murdered. Between August 1940 and August 1941, 687 patients from Kaufbeuren – Irsee were sent to Grafeneck or Hartheim where they were murdered with carbon monoxide in gas chambers.

The T-4 program was liquidated in August 1941 after protests from the public, particularly from influential bishops and priests, who questioned the murders of German citizens. But this did not mean that the murders ceased, but was carried out directly in the hospitals under the supervision of licensed doctors and nurses. This form of murder was called wild euthanasia because it was no longer centralized from Berlin but decentralized to the respective hospitals to decide for themselves which patients would be murdered.

At Kaufbeuren – Irsee, Dr. Faltlhauser introduced a starvation diet in August 1942, which meant that patients who could not contribute to their own livelihoods were given a nutritionally poor diet that made them eventually starved to death. In november 1942, this starvation diet was given a legal basis when the Bavarian interior ministry passed a starvation decree. The decree was signed by Dr. Walter Schultze who was a driving force within the state of Bavaria for the murder of mentally and physically disabled people. In addition to the starvation diet, patients were also murdered with syringes containing sedatives (luminal). 

Medical experiment was also carried out at the clinic, for instance, children were injected with a tuberculosis vaccine. Thirteen children died as a result of these experiments. Kaufbeuren – Irsee was liberated by American troops in late April 1945, but without knowing what was going on in the hospital. Therefore, the murders could secretly continue for a month and as late as May 29, four-year-old Richard Jenne was murdered before it was stopped. Between 1940 and 1945, more than 1,300 men and women and about 200 children were murdered at one of the two clinics, the majority at Irsee. Those murdered during the wild euthanasia were buried until April 1944 in a cemetery in st. Stephan. Then until May 1945 they were buried at a cemetery next to the monastery in Irsee established for the purpose.