Friedrich Mennecke

Confirmed findings

• As director of the Eichberg institution he helped shape its participation in the system for murdering patients, while also working as a T4 assessor.
• He travelled to psychiatric institutions and concentration camps where, on the basis of forms and brief examinations, he selected thousands of patients and prisoners for death in T4 killing centres.
• In a letter of 25 November 1941 he described his own pace and routine of selection at Buchenwald; this perpetrator document makes it possible to individualise his actions in Aktion 14f13.
• Frankfurt am Main Regional Court sentenced him to death in the Eichberg Trial in 1946. Mennecke appealed and died in Butzbach Prison before the appeal was heard, so the judgment never became final.

Place in the chain of responsibility

Mennecke connects the local direction of a psychiatric institution with the supraregional, itinerant selection mechanism of T4 and 14f13. His surviving letters make it possible to describe not merely his position but his own working methods.

Key events and mechanisms

• taking charge of the Eichberg institution in 1939
• beginning work as a T4 medical assessor in 1940
• selections of concentration-camp prisoners under Aktion 14f13 in 1941–1942
• the non-final death sentence in the Eichberg Trial in 1946 and death before the appeal was heard on 28 January 1947

Postwar accountability

In the first Eichberg Trial before Frankfurt am Main Regional Court, he was sentenced to death in 1946. He appealed, but died in Butzbach Prison on 28 January 1947 before it was heard; the judgment never became final.

Limits of the evidence

Sources

The source set combines institutional, archival, trial or scholarly material from at least two independent publishers.

• t4-denkmal.de
• t4-denkmal.de
• United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
• stgs.sachsen-anhalt.de
• Justiz und NS-Verbrechen
• stadtgeschichte-ffm.de