Two Nazi ‘mercy Killing’ Physicians Commit Suicide; Faced Trial

Two Nazi physicians, accused of killing more than 200,000 persons under the Nazi “racial party” program, committed suicide within the last 24 hours. One of them was the notorious Dr. Werner Heyde, 61, who headed Hitler’s “mercy killing” program, and the other is Dr. Friedrich Tillman, 60, a former director of the Nazi euthanasia death office in Berlin. Both were to go on trial next Tuesday.

Dr. Heyde committed suicide in prison today by hanging himself. Dr. Tillman fell to his death from the ninth floor window of a Cologne office building yesterday and died instantly. Dr. Fritz Bauer, Hesse chief prosecutor, said reports he had received indicated that the Tillman death was a suicide. Another physician-defendant. Dr. Gerhard Bohne, fled to a South American country last August. Unofficial reports listed him as living in Buenos Aires.

A district spokesman said that, despite the dramatic developments affecting the key defendants, the trial will get underway here next Tuesday as originally scheduled. He said. the remaining physician-defendant, Hans Hefelmann, will be “in the defendants’ dock. “A spokesman for the Hesse district attorney’s office said “we are investigating Dr.Heyde’s death although there is every indication that no mismanagement or violation of prison regulations were involved. He was alive at 9 a.m. this morning when guards made a routine check of his cell. During another check he was found hanging from a radiator pipe.”

Dr. Heyde was once one of Germany’s most brilliant doctors who became a professor of psychiatry at the University of Wuerzberg when he was only 37. As a principal in the euthanasia program, one of the most closely guarded secrets of the Nazis from 1931 until its abolition in 1941 under Catholic Church pressure, Dr. Heyde and several other physicals–including a child specialist–systematically murdered 70,000 mentally ill and retarded children, feeble-minded adults and other “biologically and racially interior” persons. Carbon oxide gas was used. The objective of the program was “the racial purity of the German people.”

DR. HEYDE ESCAPED FROM U. S. INTERMENT CAMP FOLLOWING ARREST

The Heyde trial is expected to have a much greater impact on Germans than prior war crimes trials because relatives of the Heyde murder program victims are all Germans. Even the scene of the killings is not far from the courtroom in Limburg. The Hadamar Asylum, one of the six places used in the euthanasia program, is only three miles from Limburg. More than 20,000 victims were murdered there.

In addition, the Heyde case was shot through with political implications. Originally arrested by Allied troops in 1945, Dr. Heyde escaped from a United States internment camp in 1947 and slipped into Schleswig-Holstein, West Germany’s northernmost province.

Using the alias of Dr. Fritz Sawade and forged identity papers, Dr. Heyde obtained employment as a doctor with the city administration of Flensburg and soon advanced to the post of medical adviser for state courts. His wife, Erica, meanwhile had him declared dead and collected nearly $16,000 in widow’s pension payments from 1952 to 1959, a scheme which also netted her a one-year prison term for fraud.

Most of the high-ranking state officials with whom Heyde-Sawade was in contact in Schleswig-Holstein knew his identity. The political scandal which followed Heyde’s arrest in November 1959 was followed by an eruption, the tremors of which are still being felt in provincial government circles. Heyde’s suicide follows closely on that of Ewald Peters, Chancellor Ludwig Erhard’s chief of security, who killed himself in a Bonn prison cell alter being arrested last week on charges of having participated in the mass slaughter of Russian Jews during World War II.