Nazis gassed Hitler's relative
Susanna Loof in Vienna, Associated Press
Wednesday January 19, 2005
The Guardian
One of the thousands of victims of the Nazi regime's programme to kill mentally ill people was a relative of Adolf Hitler, two historians said yesterday.
The woman, identified only as Aloisia V, was 49 when she was gassed to death on December 6 1940 in Hartheim castle near the northern Austrian city of Linz, Timothy Ryback said.
Mr Ryback, an American who now lives in Salzburg and heads the Obersalzberg Institute in Berchtesgaden, Germany, said the details surrounding the woman's death surfaced last week, after Obersalzberg archivist Florian Beierl gained access to her medical file at a Vienna medical institution where she had been treated.
An ink stamp on the file serves as "proof of extermination", Mr Ryback said. "It's painful to see what this woman went through. It highlights the cruelty and brutality of that system to an excruciating degree."
That mental illness flourished in Hitler's extended family is nothing new. A 1944 Gestapo report, known for decades, described Aloisia's line of the family as "idiotic progeny", Mr Beierl said.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/secondworldwar/story/0,14058,1393658,00.html