It took the Germans only 4 weeks to turn the castle from a "care" facility run by Catholic nuns with 190 children, into a killing facility. There were no survivors or liberations from Hartheim. (In the picture, the smoke coming from the chimney is coming from the crematorium. Villagers were told the smoke and the smell was coming from oil being refined in the castle!)
In four short years, from 1940-44, 30,000 people, 18,000 children and adults with disabilities, as well as 12,000 people from the concentration camps of Dachau and Mauthausen, were killed here. The children and adults came from "care facilities" all over Austria, with 3,000 coming from the care facility in Vienna alone. People arrived by busses, eventually known as "death busses," with black curtains blocking out the windows, so the local villagers could not see who was on the busses, or how many people were on the busses. It also prevented them from seeing that the busses were empty when they left the castle. (These same busses were used for leisure trips by some of the 70 employees at Hartheim; however, they travelled with the curtains open. The employees were paid extra to work outside their home villages, and they were also paid extra to keep quiet about their work.)
A total of 40 doctors in Berlin were charged with "choosing" the people who would go to Castle Hartheim. Three doctors at a time would discuss the fate of each adult or child. They used a system of pluses and minuses to choose who would live and who would die...3 minus signs meant you would live, 3 pluses meant you would die, and there had to be consensus either way. The doctors deemed these individuals "useless," and wrote this information on the medical forms they filled out. In making their decisions, doctors also considered the numbers of visitors people had...people who would miss them if they disappeared.
Death certificates were falsified, and doctors would actually choose each individual's cause of death at the time of their arrival at Hartheim, after each person was examined by the doctors. The date of death and eventual letters of condolences to the families were carefully coordinated, and sent at reasonable intervals.
One of the doctors involved at Hartheim, Dr. Rudolf Lonauer, committed suicide with his wife and two daughters. Another doctor, Dr. George Renno, was not sent to court until 1970, 26 years after the closure of Castle Hartheim. Dr. Renno claimed he was too sick to continue at trial, so his case was dismissed. Oddly enough, he managed to live for another 27 years and died in 1997.
The youngest victim at Hartheim was a 5 year old girl, and the oldest was just over 80. We were told about Theresia Kara who was only 12, and brought to Hartheim because of her epilepsy. Ironically, a cousin of Hitler's was killed here...she was schizophrenic.
The picture below shows some of the belongings found buried in the grounds of the castle.
After the war ended, the castle was turned into an apartment building until 1999. The memorial was not opened until 2003.
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