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Leonardo Conti (24 August 1900 – 6 October 1945) was the Reich Health Leader and an SS-Obergruppenführer in Nazi Germany. He was involved in the planning and execution of Action T4 that murdered hundreds of thousands adults and children with severe mental and physical handicaps. On 19 May 1945, after Germany's surrender, Conti was imprisoned and in October hanged himself to avoid trial.
Conti was born to a Swiss Italian father, Silvio, and a German mother, Nanna Pauli; his mother later became the Reich Midwifery Leader in Nazi Germany. He attended elementary school in Switzerland and the Friedrich Wilhelm Gymnasium in Berlin. In the summer of 1918, he volunteered for military service in the First World War with the Imperial German Army's 54th Field Artillery Regiment in Küstrin (today, Kostrzyn nad Odrą). However, he did not see any combat before the war ended in November.
Returning to school, Conti then studied medicine at the Humboldt University of Berlin and the University of Erlangen–Nuremberg. He was active in the national student movement and in right wing politics. He became involved in the völkisch movement and co-founded the antisemitic combat association, Deutscher Volksbund. He took part in the Kapp Putsch in 1920 as a member of the Marinebrigade Ehrhardt. After it was disbanded in May 1922, he followed its leader Hermann Ehrhardt into the ultra-nationalist and antisemitic terrorist organization Organisation Consul. After this organization was banned by the government in July 1922, Conti enrolled in the Viking League, another right wing group committed to the overthrow of the Weimar Republic. He was also involved with the Deutschvölkischer Schutz- und Trutzbund, the largest and most active antisemitic organization in Germany. He passed his state medical examinations in November 1923 and joined the Sturmabteilung (SA) in Erlangen that year, becoming their first physician in Berlin. He obtained his license to practice medicine in 1925 and moved to Munich where he worked as a general practitioner and a pediatrician.
In 1927, Conti moved back to Berlin and joined the Nazi Party on 20 December (membership number 72,225). He was appointed the SA physician for Standarte V and was placed in charge of organizing the SA medical services in Berlin. From 1929 to 1930 he was the senior physician in SA-Gruppe Ost. He also founded the Berlin branch of the National Socialist German Doctors' League, (NSDÄB). In February 1930, he was called upon to treat Horst Wessel, an SA member who was shot by members of the Communist Party of Germany and whose death was exploited by Joseph Goebbels in a propaganda campaign to elevate him into a martyr of the Nazi movement. However in September 1930, Conti, who had reached the rank of SA-Oberführer, was expelled from the SA when he came into conflict with Walter Stennes, at that time the commander of SA-Gruppe Ost.
Conti joined the SS on 16 November 1930 (member number 3982) and became the senior doctor for SS-Gruppe Ost. In May 1932, Conti was elected as a Nazi deputy to the Landtag of Prussia where he served until it was dissolved on 14 October 1933. After the Nazi seizure of power, Conti was given a number of official positions in the German government, mostly in the areas of medicine and health. On 12 April 1934 he was appointed by Hermann Göring to the Prussian State Council. He was placed in charge of all medical arrangements for the 1936 Berlin Olympics. On 1 April 1936, he was assigned to the personal staff of Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler. In 1937 Conti was elected to the presidency of the FIMS, the International Federation of Sports Medicine. The FIMS today considers this to have been "a black page" in their history. Conti also played a role in the banning of Jewish physicians from medical practice. In an interview in 1938, he declared: "It is only the elimination of the Jewish element which provides for the German doctor the living space due to him."
On 20 April 1939, Conti was appointed Reich Health Leader, President of the NSDÄB and head of the Main Office of Public Health; he was granted the Party rank of Hauptdienstleiter. This was followed on 28 August by Adolf Hitler appointing him State Secretary for Public Health and Nursing in the Reich and Prussian Ministry of the Interior. Conti attempted to have the use of the methamphetamine Pervitin restricted by the Wehrmacht, which had been issuing millions of tablets to their soldiers and airmen. In July 1941 Conti succeeded in having Pervitin added to the list of restricted substances but only a warning was issued to the military. In August 1941, Conti was elected to the Reichstag. On 1 October 1941 he was promoted to SS-Gruppenführer and attained the rank of SS-Obergruppenführer on 20 April 1944.
Conti was a staunch promoter of a public medical administration strongly controlled by the Nazi state. Under his leadership, local health offices were further expanded to allow for a genetic control and selection of the population in order to remove "weak" elements for the improvement of the German race, a doctrine known as eugenics. The various programmes were the basis for "racial hygiene" a lethal part of the Nazi philosophy. Conti worked with Dr. Karl Brandt to draft plans for the extermination of all Germany's mental patients along with those suffering from severe physical handicaps. This program, known euphemistically as Action T4, is estimated to have killed over 200,000 adults and children between 1939 and 1945. Conti was initially placed in charge of this initiative but soon was replaced by Philip Bouhler.
Accordingly, he was co-responsible for the forced sterilization program, the racially motivated forced pregnancy interruptions, and ultimately the Action T4 euthanasia program. It is also undisputed that Conti participated in human experiments. Conti was also involved in the forensic investigation into the Katyn massacre, and received a detailed report, known as the Katyn Commission on the discovery from an international team of experts.
On 19 May 1945, after Germany's surrender, Conti was arrested by the British in Flensburg and was imprisoned and held as a witness for the Nuremberg trials. He would have been brought to the Doctors' Trial for his involvement in Action T4. However, on 6 October 1945, Conti hanged himself in his Nuremberg cell. On 1 May 1959, his estate was fined 3000 Deutsche Marks by the Berlin denazification tribunal.
Source :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonardo_Conti
https://index.hu/fortepan/2015/05/30/usznak_el_a_felmalhazott_nepek/
https://milosvojinovic.substack.com/p/11-nacisticki-kamp-u-beogradu-1940
Portrait of Hanskarl von Hasselbach (doctor accompanying the Führer), 1942/43. Source: Walter Frentz Collection.
Hanskarl von Hasselbach, actually Hans Karl von Hasselbach, (born November 2, 1903 in Berlin; † December 21, 1981 in Pullach im Isar Valley) was a German surgeon and attending physician to Adolf Hitler. Hasselbach, son of the Prussian Rittmeister Karl von Hasselbach, finished his school career in Hirschberg (Silesia) in 1921 with the Abitur. He then studied medicine at the Universities of Breslau, Munich, Freiburg and Rostock. He was approved in 1927 and was awarded a doctorate in Freiburg with the dissertation "About neck fibroids". med. PhD.
He then became an assistant under the chief physician Georg Magnus at Bergmannsheil Hospital in Bochum and, after his appointment to the Charité in November 1933, also moved to Berlin. In addition to Hasselbach, Magnus Karl Brandt's assistant also came to Berlin, as did Magnus from Jena, known Werner Haase. In 1934 Brandt became Hitler's first accompanying surgeon, and Haase soon after became Brandt's deputy in this function. After Haase temporarily resigned from this post due to health reasons, Hasselbach became another deputy surgeon accompanying Hitler through Brandt's mediation in 1936. Hasselbach had already joined the NSDAP (membership number 2,794,377) and SA before the handover of power to the National Socialists in 1932. He switched from the SA to the SS in 1933/34 (SS No. 264.054). Due to his extensive medical work for Hitler and his environment, he was only able to qualify for his habilitation in 1938 with the work "Die Endangitis obliterans" at the University of Munich. He was released from teaching at the Charité.
With the beginning of the German-Soviet War, his place of work was the Führer headquarters in Wolfsschanze in East Prussia. As an SS doctor he was appointed associate professor on April 20, 1943, and in June 1943 he achieved the rank of SS-Sturmbannführer of the Waffen-SS within the SS. In the course of Brandt's dismissal as Hitler's attending physician, Hasselbach also lost his deputy post in October 1944. He was then used in a field hospital on the Western Front.
After the end of the war, Hasselbach was interned by the United States and was interrogated as a witness during the Nuremberg trials. The American authorities found him honest and credible. After his release from Allied internment, he headed the surgery department of the Sarepta hospitals of the Von Bodelschwinghschen Anstalten Bethel as chief physician from 1949 to 1970.
Source :
https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=631162261485935&set=gm.1906226999562714
In Spring 1945, a group of Navy flight nurses walk from their Douglas R5D (C-54) transport. They are, from left to right: Lt. JG Lydia Masserine, Lt. Stella Makar, Lt. JG Dorothy Wood, Lt. JG Hope Toone, Lt. JG Mae Hanson, and Ens. Winnifred Jennings.Source :
National Archives and Records Administration 80-G-K-5446
Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum
https://www.flickr.com/photos/airandspace/albums/72157715574200936
Soviet prisoners of war are disinfected in the German prisoner of war camp Zeithain
In the summer of 1942, Karl Schmitt – head of the Wehrmacht mining division in Liège, Belgium – went to Berlin on vacation with his wife. On the way, he visited the Zeithain prisoner of war camp in Saxony. The Soviet POWs were ordered to present themselves for inspection with the aim of deploying them to Belgian mines under German control. They were accordingly checked for physical fitness. Karl Schmitt decided who was to be transported to Belgium and who was not.
Soviet prisoners of war were frequently put to work in mines. The Reich Security Main Office had ruled that they could be employed only in work gangs kept separate from German workers. The authorities considered the mines particularly suitable in that respect.
In September 1942, the prisoner of war camp was closed, and the remaining prisoners of war (by that time more than ten thousand) were transferred to the Leuven camp in Belgium, from where they were sent to the mines of Belgium and Northern France for forced labor – to extract coal. The photo is disinfected before transport to Belgium.
Source :
https://www.ausstellung-zwangsarbeit.org/en/selection-in-a-prisoner-of-war-camp.html
https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=4183730505083768&set=gm.1769254436593305
Source :
Akira Takiguchi photo collection
https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=10222441267213963&set=gm.1608344909350926
