always of the opinion that most people got in through connections. They would hear of the job as being “attached to the Führer Chancellery” and that sounded good. Then of course these jobs carried extra pay; and it meant not having to go to the front.32
Again, there is no reason to distrust Allers on this point, for the post-war criminal records of the organization’s staff show that the T4 organization was indeed to an amazing degree a syndicate of friends, acquaintances and relatives. Thus, Allers’ colleague (and co-defendant) Reinhold Vorberg thanked his appointment as head of its ‘transport service’ (responsible for carrying the selected death candidates to the gassing centers) to his cousin, T4-chief Brack. And his successor was yet another cousin, engineer Gerhardt Siebert. There were also family ties between the bureau’s financial wizard, Hans-Joachim Becker, and Dr. Herbert Linden, one of the main organizers of the killing program. Although it is not entirely clear whether it was Linden who actually recruited Becker for T4, the fact is that the two men got along very well. After Becker’s start with Brack’s bureau, he lived for a while in the household of his brother-in-law, and the two men joined forces in their attempt to save Becker’s epileptic sister from Hitler’s ‘euthanasia’ regime. ‘Millionen-Becker’ was the one who turned T4 into a highly profitable enterprise by his introduction of a clever cost-manipulation system, whereby the patients who had already been gassed and cremated were ‘kept alive’ in an administrative sense so that huge sums of money could be earned with their ‘continued’ care and feeding.33
The head of the central finance office, accountant Friedrich Lorent, was no relative of Brack but an old acquaintance. During the mid-nineteen thirties, the two men had been office neighbors in Berlin and Brack had supported Lorent during a fierce conflict with an SA leader. In the autumn of 1941 Lorent worked as manager of a former Polish company in building materials in Warsaw, a job he allegedly detested because of the chaos and corruption surrounding the German administration of confiscated Polish-Jewish property. While on leave in Berlin, in the winter of 1941/42, Lorent visited Brack and complained about his situation. Brack instantaneously offered him a job at his bureau with the words ‘Du, ich brauche Dich’ ←35 | 36→[‘You, I need you’]. As head of the finance office, Lorent succeeded two other friends of Brack, Willy Schneider and Fritz Schmiedel. Schneider had earlier introduced his cousin, bookkeeper Alfred Ittner, to the organization. In April 1942, Ittner was dispatched to Sobibor.34
Among the regular customers of Berlin nightclub waiter Franz Rum was the co-organizer of the killing program which specifically targeted handicapped children (‘Kinder-Euthanasie’), Richard von Hegener. When the nightclub business deteriorated due to the restrictions imposed by the war, Rum looked around for other employment. Von Hegener helped him to a job at the photography section of T4, where the files and pictures of the murdered victims were copied. After a while, however, Rum became allergic to the chemicals used in the process. He asked for other work, ‘preferably in the open air’, as his judges echoed the defendant in their trial judgment. This could be arranged: Rum was offered a new job in a ‘labor camp’ in Poland. It turned out to be Treblinka.35
The brothers Franz and Josef Wolf took over the photo shop in the Czechoslovakian town of Krummau after their father’s death in 1938. Both came to T4 a few years later through the introduction of their fellow townsman Franz Wagner, who already worked at the bureau’s photo department and who knew the Wolf brothers from the time he was an apprentice in their father’s shop. In March 1943, the brothers were transferred to Sobibor. Wagner turned out to be a prolific recruiter for T4 among his townsmen for he also introduced the Krummau tailor Franz Suchomel to the organization. In August 1942, Suchomel was sent to Treblinka.36
And then, there was the CID man from the Austrian town of Linz, Franz Stangl. We will have ample opportunity to get to know him better later on, but he too was among those who came to T4 through ‘friendly intervention’. Thus, Stangl got along badly with his Gestapo chief and was on the lookout for other employment when a former colleague and fellow student from the CID school offered to introduce him to the secret government organization where he himself already worked in what he described as a ‘pleasant job’. Stangl gratefully accepted and came as a policeman to the Hartheim extermination center, and, later on, to Sobibor and Treblinka.37
Those who did not find their way to T4 through this informal network of relatives and friends were generally recruited on the basis of what the Berlin historian and trial expert Wolfgang Scheffler called the ‘coincidence ←36 | 37→principle’.38 A striking example is that of the five young girls (aged between seventeen and twenty years), who became responsible for the registration of the murdered patients and their ‘possessions’ in the Hartheim and Grafeneck extermination centers. They also drew up the transport lists and typed the thousands of ‘comfort letters’ which were sent to the relatives of the murdered victims, including fabricated data on the circumstances of their deaths and falsified names of the doctors involved in their ‘care’. Three of these girls were trainees at the Defaka, or Deutsches Familien Kaufhaus (German Family Department Store) and were simply drafted by the Frankfurt labor exchange. This also happened with the fourth, who was a shop-girl in a Frankfurt store, whereas the fifth was simply conscripted by the Party Gauleitung shortly after passing her school exams. None of these women had a political profile beyond that of a membership of the ‘German Girl’s League’, the ‘National Socialist Welfare Organization’, or the ‘German Labor Front.’39
No less coincidental was the recruitment of the Westphalian farmer’s and miller’s son August Miete. From 1921 onwards, he and his brother ran the farm their father had left them. In the spring of 1940, however, August considered it time to start on his own and – equipped with a recently acquired Nazi Party membership card – requested the Agricultural Chamber in Münster to grant him his own agricultural settlement. Unfortunately, they could not help him, but as an alternative they offered him a position at the estate of the Grafeneck institution. Miete accepted and, from May 1940 until October 1941, tended the farm lands of this gassing center, after which he was transferred to another one at Hadamar. Here, he worked as a so-called Brenner in the institute’s crematorium where the bodies of the gassed victims were burned. In June 1942, Miete came to Treblinka, where, because of his brutal conduct, he turned into a much feared member of the camp’s staff.40
The Münster Agricultural Chamber also recruited the thirty-six years old dairy master Willi Mentz for T4. Since 1929 Mentz had worked in the dairy business but in early 1940 he applied for a job with the police. They could not use him there, but considering his profession the Münster agency offered him ‘something better’, namely a job at Grafeneck. Mentz accepted, and – just like Miete – was informed of what went on there and sworn to secrecy. According to his admission, he tended the Grafeneck livestock for the next ←37 | 38→one-and-a-half year and was then – as Miete – transferred to Hadamar, where he divided his time between work in the vegetable garden and the maintenance of the central heating system. Like Miete, Mentz came to Treblinka in the summer of 1942, where he acquired a similar reputation of brutality.41
This certainly also applied to carpenter Karl Frenzel, whose involvement with T4 was the result of nothing less than his procreative abilities. Thus, around Christmas 1939, Frenzel was discharged from Wehrmacht service as a so-called kinderreicher Familienvater (father of a large family). His biological declaration of loyalty to a regime which celebrated the family as the ‘germ cell of the nation’ not only earned his wife a (bronze) medal hailing her motherhood, but also rewarded her husband with suspension of his military duties. This, however, was not at all to Frenzel’s liking as he genuinely enjoyed these duties and now felt embarrassed in front of his comrades and his two brothers, both of whom served in the Wehrmacht. And so, Frenzel immediately reported himself again as a volunteer and enlisted the support of his SA superiors to endorse his request. But Hitler’s family policy was no joking matter and Frenzel received no reply. Instead, his SA chiefs suggested him to report to the Führer Chancellery in Berlin, which was looking for ‘trustworthy party comrades for a special assignment’. Frenzel complied and, in January 1940, together
