Continuities, New Suffering, and Speaking Out
From SS Murderer to Children’s Sanatorium Director: Dr Werner Scheu
Werner Scheu (1910–89) was born into a prosperous estate-owning family in the East Prussian town of Heydekrug, now Šilutė in Lithuania. He studied medicine, but returned to farming in 1934. Joining the Nazis in 1939, Scheu later oversaw the execution of over two hundred Jewish inmates at a private labour camp of his own, on 5 July 1941. According to later testimonies, he shot at least four of them himself.
After the war, Scheu ran a private children’s sanatorium called the Mövennest on the island of Borkum. The children there suffered frequent abuse. In 1965, the Federal Court of Justice sentenced him to life imprisonment for the 1941 massacre, but he was then pardoned in 1972. Scheu was never prosecuted for the systematic abuse suffered by the children at his sanatorium.
Consigned to a Children’s Sanatorium: Isa Jakob-Pike
Born 1962 in Giessen, Isa Jakob-Pike was ten years old when she arrived for a six-week stay at the Mövennest children’s sanatorium, where there was a palpable climate of fear. Its staff enforced a perverse system of surveillance and punishment. For example, Isa Jakob-Pike described how she had to spend the whole night standing in the hallway, barefoot in just a nightgown, because she had broken the strict rules by going to the bathroom at night. Her experiences at the children’s sanatorium are recounted in her 2017 book KOPFimBAUCH.
“… whether a sterilization of the genetically diseased is still possible …”
The above question was raised by the Working Group of West German Medical Associations and the regional offices of the West German Association of Statutory Health Insurance Physicians in a memo of 21 September 1950. But the issue of whether the “genetically diseased” could still be sterilized was not the only question preoccupying these physicians’ associations. More importantly: Who was responsible for drawing up the relevant assessment reports, was it the regional medical associations or the governmental public health offices?
This memo is emblematic of the continuities in how German doctors saw themselves through the 1950s and into the 60s. It was not until the 1970s that patient advocacy groups and medical students, along with a few doctors and medical historians, began a critical examination of the Nazi period’s medical profession. It took until 1989 for the Annual Congress of German Physicians to take a more detailed look at the role of doctors in the Third Reich.