The Facilities for Murder in and around Linz

Henry Friedlander

The Nazi terror system was a mixture of law and violence. Since the National Socialist government prided itself on having restored “law and order”, it made its acts of terror part of the law. The power and function of the police and of the concentration camps, which embodied the system of terror from the beginning, were founded in law, but simultaneously placed outside the responsibility of the justice system. Thereby the police could , on their own authority, intern political opponents as well as people who were considered “anti-social” in the concentration camps, where they were exposed to the egomania of the SS. In the “Ostmark”, this terror system was embodied by Mauthausen. The world war, which Nazi Germany started in 1939, radicalised the regime and facilitated the elimination of a whole social group through mass murder. This started with the murder of disabled Germans in the so-called Euthanasia-Action (called T4), but was soon expanded to include Jews, “gypsies”, and others. For this industrialised mass murder the perpetrators invented T4 murder centres, which included the Hartheim centre in the “Ostmark”. Similar murder centres were founded in the east for the destruction of Jews and “gypsies”. Thus the perpetrators who had been trained in the T4 murder centres were posted to the death camps Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka. There, men from Hartheim played a particularly large part. The concentration camps made use of the T4 murder centres, too, where prisoners were killed from 1940 to 1943.