As I told before I have conclusive evidence about the so-called "Mercy" killing. In July 1940 the first rumors went around that Jewish insane persons were not any more accepted in lunatic asylums. The relatives of these patients who were already in this institution could not get information on the whereabouts of the patients. The only answer they got on repeated requests was that all the patients had been sent to Eggelfing, which is an institution for insane people, or to Linz, another institution of the same kind. Owing to the strain of the last years in Germany many families had relatives in lunatic asylums. Therefore, the fate of these people was discussed everywhere. One rumor spoke of their being shipped off to Poland. Everybody thought such an uprooting of patients whose only comfort lies in a certain daily routine and in regular habits was very cruel. I was very much interested in the fate of these patients and therefore tried to get some details. I visited a friend of mine who was a patient in a private sanatorium. She was neither nervous nor neurotic, but she was very delicate and had lived for many years in the private sanatorium where she was well cared for. She was very upset and told me that a Jewish insane man had been fetched in a bus. They had been told that this man been brought to Eggelfing. The man who fetched the patient had spoken to no one and had made a very disagreeable impression on everybody. The patient himself had been in the sanatorium for years and was very popular, saying: "I am not an Aryan, but foolish all the same." Because of his popularity his male and female nurses tried to visit him in Eggelfing on their days off. They were not admitted at all and looked troubled when they came back. My friend told me that this man was the only patient who had disappeared in this way and that all the other Jewish patients had been dismissed four or six weeks before the bus appeared to fetch them. It is known that the head physician is an ardent Nazi. It was, therefore, very likely that he knew of what was coming and wanted to save his patients, probably mainly in order to have them as paying guests again. Several persons tried to find out what had happened to patients whom they had sent to private sanatoriums. In one case one Ayran doctor who inquired about a Jewish relative, received a letter from the matron of the private sanatorium telling him that his relative had been sent away on order of the Government. She was not able to give any other information but would pray for the patient of whom she was very fond. One day in July or August 1940 he received a death certificate of his relative together with the urn with her ashes. He was not able to get any more information about the reason of her death. The matron of the sanatorium did not know anything but the fact of her being taken away and then receiving the urn. Several of my friends have had the same experiences. First we heard that only the Jewish insane persons disappeared, but from the middle of September 1940 onwards, my Ayran friends got similar news about their relatives. These Aryans usually belonged to the poorer classes. The State had normally to bear the expenses for their stay in the lunatic asylums. I heard also of a paying Aryan patient disappearing in the same way, but that seems to be an exception. Nobody could understand how these persons were killed because there was really no lack of food. I heard in February 1941 of a bad case of malnutrition in a lunatic asylum which led to death, but that was a single case. Normally the food situation was good. There was, therefore, a readiness to believe that the reason for these deaths was a military one. Everyone seemed to believe that they had been killed in experiments where they had taken the place of guinea-pigs in order to try the effect of poison gas. These rumors were corroborated by the evidence of the nurses and doctors of the institution who told of the same story that they had received the clothes in which the patients had left in, turned inside out, e.g. that means the vest or shirt outside, the coat or dress inside, as if these clothes had been taken over the head of the person in a hurry. All the clothes had a very disagreeable, sweet smell of gas. What shocked me most was that no one who was not connected with one of the victims seemed to realize how horribly inhuman it was. Some quite nice people to whom I spoke said to me that they thought it was quite sensible to take the burden of support off the State and to gain valuable knowledge for winning the war at the same time. Only when I told them of particularly cruel individual cases they seemed to understand that something inhuman had happened.
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