[The following is taken from a memoir of Irmgard A. Hunt, who grew up in the mountains under Hitler’s Eagles Nest during the Second World War.]
White-blond Hildegard, the youngest of the three sisters who played with us, was a somewhat peculiar-looking, slow child with very small eyes and seemingly little response to the world around her. Her two older sisters, Else and Gisela, were incredibly patient with Hildegard and carefully helped her get through a fence or sat her down on a lump of grass or moss so that she could see us while she gently rocked her body back and forth, back and forth.
[…]
One afternoon (it must have been Monday, wash day, because they were hanging their linens on the wires strung across the small, sloping meadow in front of our house), Tante [German: Aunt] Susi and my mother talked quietly with serious, worried faces. I loved to listen to grown-up gossip and moved closer to hear what the two women were saying. “One of the Dehmel children, the mongoloid one that’s never outside, was picked up by the Health Services a few weeks ago, and now they’ve said she’s dead from a cold,” said my mother.
Tante Susi with her pretty bobbed haircut shook her head. “That child was retarded worse than Hildegard,” she mused, adding for a moment, “Well, it’s probably true, her dying from a cold, I mean.”
Mutti [German: Mom] bent down for another blindingly white sheet from the tin tub and sighed. I began to pick some white, pink-rimmed daisies as I mulled things over. Just that morning I had played with Else, Gisela, and Hildegard and knew they were fine. I began to wonder about the sister who had never played outside. What did it mean, she was taken away? She died from a cold? Would they take me away if I had a cold, and would I die too?
tl;dr:
The author is reminiscing about the death of a girl she knew who had an unspecified mental disability. The girl was taken by Health Services during what would become known after the war as Aktion T4, the Nazis’ euthanasia program. Mental deficiencies were just one criteria that lead to one’s death at the behest of the Nazis in what they would call mercy killings. The parents of these children were usually told by the authorities that they had died of a cold while being cared for at a remote facility.
Source:
Hunt, Irmgard A. “Ominous Undercurrents.” On Hitler’s Mountain: Overcoming the Legacy of a Nazi Childhood. New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 2005. 66-67. Print.
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