Ex-prof on Nazi-era killing rap

2004-02-10 21:02

Berlin - An 88-year-old former medical professor has been charged with the murder of a mentally ill patient in 1941.

It is claimed the murder came during a Nazi drive to kill institutional patients, said a German prosecutor on Tuesday.

Rosemarie Albrecht, who after World War II taught at a university in the eastern German town of Jena, could face life in prison if she is convicted of killing the patient with an overdose of sleeping pills.

Albrecht has been under investigation for the past three years after details of her patients' medical records emerged from East German secret police files, said Raimund Sauter, a state prosecutor in the eastern city of Gera.

The former doctor says she is innocent and plans to fight the charges, Sauter said. No date has yet been set for a trial.

The records showed that 159 people died while Albrecht was working as one of the doctors between 1940 and 1942 at the women's and children's psychiatric ward at a hospital in nearby Stadtroda, Sauter said.

"It's likely there were more cases of murder," he said. "Because of her age and the difficulties of this case, we decided to charge her with the murder of just one patient."

200 000 handicapped killed - archive

Rosemarie Albrecht, who is half-Japanese, would have needed special permission to work as a doctor at the time, since she was not of 100% German blood, said Sauter.

The alleged victim, 34-year-old Selma Albrecht, who is no relation to the accused, had been diagnosed as schizophrenic and recommended for sterilisation by a Nazi court.

Germany's Federal Archive said the Nazi regime used hundreds of hospitals and clinics to kill at least 200 000 handicapped, mentally ill and other institutional patients as part of Adolf Hitler's effort, as he saw it, to purify the German race by rooting out "worthless lives."

Kurt Schrimm, the head of Germany's central office for investigating former Nazis, said more prosecutions of doctors involved in the programme were "highly possible", but gave no details.

In Jerusalem, the Simon Wiesenthal Centre's chief Nazi hunter noted that the euthanasia programme predated the full-scale organisation of the Holocaust, in which six million European Jews died.

"This terrible thing went on to something just as terrible, maybe even worse," he said. "There's a straight line that runs to Auschwitz, Sobibor and Treblinka."

Zuroff lauded the German government for continuing to pursue crimes of the Nazi era.

- AP