Stubble wrote: ↑Mon Sep 01, 2025 9:09 pm
If the whole point of using people from T4 was to be their prior experience, why didn't the Germans, you know, use people with prior homicidal gassing experience?
Your question makes no sense.
T4 personnel had prior experience working in centres that gassed psychiatric patients. That doesn't mean, however, that the reason for the transfer to Lublin was technical knowledge, it was their availability with the suspension of T4 - while some centres continued because of 14 f 13, most were on the verge of shutting down. .
Brack had by his own account made contact with Globocnik in early autumn 1941, to discuss a fallback T4 centre with the suspension of operations in the Reich. This was evidently a source of inspiration for Globocnik, who together with Himmler got more T4 personnel redirected to Lublin.
Brack had also discussed transferring more classic T4 technology to Riga, thus the 'Vergasungsapparate' note. It is worth noting that the medical authorities in Lemberg-Lwow also appealed to contacts in Berlin evidently seeking to get T4 personnel or support for killing psychiatric patients in the hospital there; this didn't happen, and the patients were starved to death (as happened in second phase euthanasia in Germany). Meanwhile, Sonderkommando Lange were demanded by both von dem Bach-Zelewski for psychiatric hospitals in Belarus (they did not go), while they were authorised to go to Novgorod in northern Russia to clear a psychistric hospital. All of these things are documented, two in intercepted signals (Police Decodes).
SK Lange also made the transition from bottled CO to engine exhaust with the new generation of gas vans being used at Chelmno. This unit was expanded so there were only few veterans of the bottled gas van operations clearing psychiatric hospitals in Poland. SK Kulmhof added a company of Order Police guards to the small inner commando which was Security Police, but also absorbed SS from the resettlement staffs of the Warthegau (Umwandererzentralstelle).
The key personnel transferred to Lublin were the officers Wirth and Stangl, who had commanded T4 centres and came from the police; they had neither a medical background nor technical training. There were other future officers with SS backgrounds, like Kurt Franz and Johann Niemann, who rapidly became deputy commandants.
Other reasons to transfer T4 personnel: to keep them together in the event that T4 resumed later on, because they couldn't really be drafted to the Army since they were 'bearers of secrets', and because they had been desensitised to serial murder.
Talk of 'transfer of technology' grossly exaggerates the sophistication, and this applies when some mainstream historians lazily talk in those terms. Turning on a valve or turning on an engine are not high-tech matters. Having craftsmen experienced in converting rooms to gas chambers, like Erwin Lambert, was of some help but not much above a builder or window fitter in complexity.
There were practices which were transferred to the AR camps, but some came from the KZ system. Kurt Franz served in Buchenwald before the war as a guard corporal and evidently observed enough to institute a KZ-like regime for the Treblinka workforce, by all accounts. The practice of greeting arrivals and trying where possible to deceive them by inviting them to take a shower came from T4, and was easily learned - the Auschwitz SS used it without requiring a T4 choreeographer to orchestrate the event. Other T4 practices used on arrivals from psychiatric hospitals fell away as unnecessary.
There were three trained chemists involved in T4 as well as the engine exhaust experiments that preceded the engine exhaust gas vans: August Becker (T4 and gas vans), Helmut Kallmeyer (T4) and Albert Widmann (T4, Mogilev gassing experiment, testing engine exhaust gas van in Sachsenhausen). Kallmeyer was named as the expert to go to Riga but claimed he never went, he admitted being in Lublin in early 1942 but fell ill with typhus and "couldn't remember" what he did. Interestingly he later met Horst Schumann and his wife in Ghana in the 1960s. Schumann had worked at Grafeneck and Sonnenstein for T4 before conducting X-ray sterilisation experiments at Auschwitz, which Brack had planned/sponsored (this is documented). Becker and Widmann were forthcoming about their roles postwar, Becker already in the 1940s in early West German trials of T4 doctors.
Kallmeyer and Widmann both worked at various times for the Kriminaltechnisches Institut of the Kriminalpolizei, under Amt V of the RSHA. Becker was with another branch of the RSHA before being transferred to T4, and was directed in 1941-2 by the RSHA motor pool section (II D 3A) under Friedrich Pradel, who helped oversee the development of gas vans.
At Belzec, testimonies of Polish workers reported an improvised engine exhaust gas van being tried, while a 1960s dig found a carbon monoxide bottle there. Since they had quite a lot of time before the camp began operations, experimenting with different methods, all pretty simple, is not unreasonable. The camp was a pilot project.
One point which eludes revisionists when they abstractly consider the T4-AR connection is that the T4 personnel with AR all admitted T4 used gassing, they were also remembered as leaving for Lublin by other T4 employees who remained behind, with 500 T4 personnel in Berlin and the centres this is a substantial number of witnesses, while the core of it - the purpose and the use of bottled CO gas - is documented, just like the gas vans are documented. I get that revisionists have testimony cooties but the overlaps are extensive here, and because of documents for Chelmno overlapping further with the gas vans documents, down to vans in the license plate series, this plus the contemporary non-German sources makes it clear why Sonderbehandlung was originally used in the Korherr report, which in turn connects to many cases of Sonderbehandlung, including ones in connection with AR. Since Globocnik noted that the records of AR and the camps were destroyed in his final report, demands for documents explicitly about gassing for the AR camps can go swing, the ties are close enough that the witnesses (especially those who operated the engines at the AR camps) are telling the truth. Meanwhile, the heavy overlap with T4 and from there with gas vans multiplies the size of the 'problem' to be explained away. T4 and the related Aktion 14 f 13 may not have killed nearly as many people, but that can also be said for the use of gas vans to kill Jews outside of Chelmno, which 'achieved' about a tenth of the body count of the AR camps.
