Richard von Hegener was a bank employee and was offered a position in the Chancellery of the Führer in 1937. This had been arranged by his brother-in-law Hans Reiter, President of the Reich Health Office. Von Hegener was responsible for procurement and organised the buses, the building materials for the gas chambers and the crematorium ovens. This is why the Gemeinnützige Krankentransportgesellschaft m. b. H. was also known as »Sonderstaffel Hegener«. He also organised the deliveries of carbon monoxide and medicines, which were mainly used in »child euthanasia«, and paid the special allowances to the murderers. At the end of the war, von Hegener went into hiding as Richard Wegener and worked as a senior employee for the Ministry of Trade and Supply in Schwerin in 1949, although his cover had already been blown in 1947. In the GDR, he was tried and sentenced to prison. He was released in 1956 and returned to Hamburg, where he had grown up. He died there in 1981.
