TIEGENHOF | DZIEKANKA

Until 1943, Vladimir Nikolayev was the medical director of Tiegenhof and participated in the massacre of patients. He was succeeded by Viktor Ratka, who remained director until 1945. Today, the facility is located in the city of Gniezno, but during the Nazi era it was located 2.5 kilometres outside the city. At the end of October 1939, the province of Posen (Poznań) was annexed to the German Reich and the institution was renamed ‘Tiegenhof’. Almost all Polish employees were dismissed. At the beginning of 1940, the ‘Sonderkommando Lange’ murdered around 1,200 patients in gas vans. From the end of 1941, Tiegenhof became a killing centre.

Patients from the German Reich were transferred to the Tiegenhof sanatorium and nursing home to be murdered with medication or by starvation. From 1943 to 1944, there was also a ‘children’s ward’ in Tiegenhof, where children and young people with disabilities were murdered.

When the Red Army arrived on 21 January 1945, they found 138 German and Polish children and adolescents aged between four months and 14 years. In the days that followed, 88 of the children and adolescents died by the end of January 1945.

Due to the high number of beds in the ‘Tiegenhof Children’s Ward’ and the obvious willingness to murder, it can be assumed that several hundred children and adolescents were murdered.

From September 1944 onwards, Tiegenhof was assigned the task of a ‘collection centre for foreigners’. There is suspicion that the sick forced labourers collected in the Old Reich were transferred either to Tiegenhof or to Meseritz-Obrawalde in late autumn 1944 in order to murder them there.

A total of at least 3,600 sick adults were murdered in Tiegenhof.

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