On September 1, 1939, German forces crossed into Poland, and the Second World War began in Europe. As the armies moved across the continent, another campaign of killing was about to begin inside the Third Reich, one whose victims were not enemy soldiers but some of the most vulnerable people in German society. Under a secret program authorized by Adolf Hitler, men, women, and children with mental and physical disabilities were selected for death, transported to killing centers, and murdered in gas chambers. Yet in 1941, amid growing public knowledge and protest, Hitler officially halted the centralized operation.
The killings did not stop. They moved behind the walls of psychiatric institutions, where patients died from lethal doses of medication and deliberate starvation. One of those institutions was Meseritz-Obrawalde, situated on the far eastern edge of Germany. There, a woman entrusted with the care of patients would instead become one of their executioners.
As a ward supervisor, she would take a personal part in the killing, later confessing to the murder of more than 1,500 patients, continuing until just one day before Soviet forces seized the hospital. Only months later, she would pay for her crimes. Her name was Amanda Ratajczak. Ratajczak was born in 1895 in the village of Eichberg, then part of the German Empire.
In 1904, the Meseritz-Obrawalde sanatorium and nursing home, often referred to simply as Obrawalde, opened near the town of Meseritz, today Międzyrzecz in western Poland. By 1915, Ratajczak was working there as a senior nurse in the women’s department. The First World War, which lasted from July 1914 to November 1918, changed the region profoundly. Germany lost the war.
The German Empire collapsed, and most of the surrounding province of Posen was transferred to the reestablished Polish state. Meseritz remained within Germany, leaving Obrawalde less than 15 kilometers, about 9 miles, from the new German-Polish border. Ratajczak stayed at the institution through these changes and continued her work with psychiatric patients. At some point, she also became a member of the Nazi Party.
By 1939, overcrowding was beginning to build at Obrawalde as patients were transferred there from other institutions. Around 900 people lived in the facility in early 1939. By the end of that year, there were more than 2,000 patients, with only three doctors responsible for their care. The outbreak of war also marked the beginning of a new phase in Nazi policy toward people with disabilities.
In October 1939, Hitler secretly authorized doctors to kill patients considered incurable. The order was backdated to September 1, 1939, tying the program directly to the start of the war. It became known as Aktion T4, the Nazi euthanasia program for the systematic killing of institutionalized people with mental and physical disabilities, named for its headquarters at Tiergartenstrasse 4 in Berlin. Hospitals filled out questionnaires about every person in their care, and reviewers in Berlin examined the forms and decided who would die.
Beginning in 1940, selected patients were gathered and taken by bus to one of six killing centers in Germany and Austria, where most were murdered within hours of arrival in gas chambers using carbon monoxide. By August 1941, more than 70,000 people had been killed. Amid growing public knowledge and protests, Hitler ordered the centralized killings to end that month. But the killings did not stop.
Instead, murder moved inside the hospitals themselves, where it could be done quietly, ward by ward, through medication and starvation. Many institutions continued to kill their patients, but Obrawalde was more suited to it than most: it was remote, overcrowded, and full of patients whose families lived hundreds of kilometers away. By late 1942, systematic killing was underway at Obrawalde, with doctors and nurses murdering patients through lethal doses of drugs and deliberate starvation. Patients from at least 26 German cities were eventually sent to Obrawalde and killed, making the hospital one of the deadliest institutions in this new phase.
At Obrawalde, one of the central figures in the killing was Dr. Hilde Wernicke, responsible for the women’s and children’s wards. Working with the chief physician, Dr. Teofil Motz, she reviewed patient records and selected people for death.
Their names were then passed to the senior nurses, including Amanda Ratajczak, who carried out the orders. Ratajczak personally administered lethal doses of medication, including morphine, scopolamine, and the sedative Veronal. But as a ward supervisor, her role went beyond killing patients herself. Testimony from other nurses shows that she also ordered her subordinates to take part in the killings.
Not every member of the staff was willing to comply. One nurse, identified later as Anna D. , testified that she once refused to give a patient a lethal injection and was severely reprimanded by Ratajczak. Despite that, Anna participated in other killings, explaining that she had learned obedience and feared refusing orders.
Another nurse at Obrawalde, Berta Nitz, later described one of these killings in detail. She recalled a girl with a mental disability, about 17 or 18 years old, who was placed in an isolation room in the autumn of 1942. Wernicke ordered that she receive daily injections of morphine and scopolamine. According to Nitz’s later testimony, Ratajczak administered most of the doses herself and ordered Nitz to inject the girl two or three times.
The patient did not die immediately; she remained alive for about two weeks while undergoing this treatment. Evidence that emerged after the war indicates that Wernicke, from the spring of 1943 through 1944, informed Ratajczak and other nurses of the names of around 600 patients selected for killing. The drugs were also hidden in food. In children’s ward three, Veronal was mixed with jam and given to patients until they lost consciousness.
After that, Ratajczak injected them with doses of morphine and scopolamine. As the death toll grew, Obrawalde developed a system for disposing of bodies and concealing what had happened. A group of male patients, known as the grave gang, carried the bodies to the morgue and later buried them in the institution’s cemetery. The killings were disguised through official paperwork.
Doctors recorded false but plausible causes of death on certificates sent to relatives. A diagnosis such as a stroke could hide a death by drug overdose. Many victims were buried in mass graves, while some bodies were taken to the city of Frankfurt on orders to be cremated. There was also a crematorium under construction at Obrawalde, but it was not completed before the Soviets arrived.
By January 1945, the Red Army was rapidly approaching the region. Most of the staff prepared to flee west, but the killings continued almost to the final moments. According to Ratajczak’s later interrogation, she killed two more women on January 28, 1945. The next day, Soviet troops entered the area and took control of the institution.
Around 1,000 patients and workers had been left behind. Ratajczak had fled before the Soviets arrived. The other senior staff also escaped, including the director, Walter Grabowski, and the two doctors, Teofil Motz and Hilde Wernicke. Inside Obrawalde, the Soviet forces encountered the surviving patients and the evidence of the killings that had taken place there.
A Soviet military commission arrived on February 16 and began reviewing the surviving records and investigating the murders. The investigation continued over the following months as pathologists examined what had happened inside the institution. Survivors reported that between 30 and 50 patients had been killed daily over several years. Investigators discovered more than 800 ampoules of morphine and more than 2,000 ampoules of scopolamine, along with syringes and storerooms filled with patients’ clothing and shoes.
The commission also reported finding crematorium facilities, an unfinished gas chamber, and two mass graves, each containing more than 1,000 bodies. The Soviet investigators concluded that 18,232 patients had died at Obrawalde over three years, although the exact number of victims remains uncertain. Meanwhile, Ratajczak’s flight proved temporary. Soviet forces arrested her in early March 1945 and brought her back to the institution where she had worked for nearly three decades.
She was led to one of the cells and ordered to explain how patients had been killed. The simulation of the crime was filmed by the Soviet authorities. During the investigation, Ratajczak confessed to killing more than 1,500 patients herself. The exact number attributed to her varies among surviving accounts, with later sources giving higher figures.
During her trial, she is said to have confirmed the Soviet investigators’ figure of 18,232 deaths over three years. On April 25, 1945, a Soviet military court attached to the 16th Air Army sentenced Ratajczak to death for war crimes connected to the killings at Obrawalde. The same proceedings convicted Hermann Goltke, a male nurse at the institution. On May 10, 1945, two days after the war in Europe officially ended, Amanda Ratajczak and Hermann Goltke were executed by firing squad.
Ratajczak was about 50 years old. The Nazi euthanasia program in many ways served as a rehearsal for the regime’s later policies of mass murder. The methods developed during Aktion T4, including the use of gas chambers and purpose-built crematoria, were later adapted on a much larger scale during the Holocaust. The connection was also visible in the staff.
A number of men who gained experience in the T4 program went on to play significant roles in the killing centers at Bełżec, Sobibór, and Treblinka. In this sense, T4 helped create a cadre of experienced personnel and techniques later used in the systematic murder of Europe’s Jews.
