Family of Hermine Hlavek remembered her as a gentle but fragile young woman. To the doctors who treated her, she was unworthy of life.
She was one of more than 250,000 victims of a Nazi program to murder patients with disabilities.
Hermine Hlavek suffered from seizures and experienced emotional problems in her early 20s. She was treated with electric shock and later admitted to a mental institution in her native Vienna. Along with this, by her 25th birthday, she had been diagnosed with schizophrenia and was declared incapable of making decisions for herself.
Hermine’s situation was dire, but it became more so in March 1938 after the German annexation of Austria, bringing Hermine’s care under the policies of Nazi Germany.
German children with disabilities had become targets of a secret killing operation in the fall of 1939. The program was soon expanded to adults. Under Nazi ideology, people with disabilities were a threat to the goal of a so-called pure “Aryan” race.
Moreover, Hermine’s sister was able to see her for the last time in the fall of 1940. In October of that year, she was transferred to Hartheim, a historic castle that had become one of six institutions in Germany and Austria used as killing centres for patients with disabilities. Her death certificate, stamped with the Nazi eagle, cites tonsil abscess and blood poisoning, though her tonsils had previously been removed.
Furthermore, the last gassings at Hartheim were conducted on this day in 1944.
