The Historiography of the Holocaust

Figure 24
The Topography of Genocide 245
sheds and hangars were used. Here ‘Operation Reinhard’’s booty was sorted,
graded and cleaned by 3,000 Jewish women before being sent to Germany
(figure 26). 62 In other places factories could become slave labour camps for
more profitable or more useful neighbouring enterprises (figure 27). 63
Perhaps the greatest perversion of all was the use of hospitals as the site of
the T-4 programme, euphemistically called the ‘euthanasia programme’. 64 In
Germany the mentally and physically handicapped of an area were brought by
buses to be gassed in converted rooms in mental hospitals. These were not
sanatoriums deep in the forest but ordinary hospitals in towns. Children often
jeered at the buses carrying the patients and the plume of smoke from the
Hadamar hospital’s crematorium needed no explanation. Moreover, the very
act in the landscape of changing a place of care and treatment into one of
killing, ‘special treatment’, demonstrates how important the medical discourse
underpinning Nazi racial/social policy was. At the death camps the Lazarett, or
hospital, with its Red Cross flag welcomed the infirm and the mentally and
physically handicapped where they could be ‘cured’ by a bullet.
If the end of the journey for the captives held unimaginable terrors, what
must they have felt at the start of their journey as they passed through familiar
streets? The first transport of 1,000 Jews from Berlin was from Grunewald station
in an affluent district of Berlin. 65 They were brought out by tram on a Sunday
morning to a district where so many streets were named after musical associations.