GERHARD KLOOS (3.5.1906 – 22.4.1988)

Gerhard Kloos came from Saxon-Regen. After leaving school in 1924, he studied medicine in Graz, Innsbruck and Hamburg. He gained his doctorate in psychiatry in Hamburg in 1931. He spent his time as a junior doctor at the Hamburg-Langenhorn asylum. He then went to clinics in Munich and Freiburg. During the Nazi era, he became a member of the NSDAP. After contracting TB, he became a doctor at the Haina sanatorium. In 1938, he married Doris Gräfin von Posadowsky-Wehner.

From July 1939 to spring 1945, he was in charge of the Stadtroda asylum. He developed a »graduated treatment plan«, according to which the sick were to be put to death through forced labour, malnutrition and refusal of therapy. He also transferred young people to the Moringen concentration camp. In 1942, he set up a »paediatric ward«. Sufferers were murdered there and in other wards of the Stadtroda institution under his leadership. He was also an assessor at the Hereditary Health Court and thus also involved in forced sterilisations.

After the end of the war, he was only briefly interned and then went to Heidelberg and Kiel. In 1949, he was denazified as »unencumbered«. In 1952, he was given an adjunct professorship at the University of Kiel. In 1954, he took over as Medical Director of the Lower Saxony State Hospital in Göttingen and became an expert witness in restitution proceedings. From 1958, he lectured at the Technical University of Braunschweig.

Gerhard Kloos appeared as a defence witness for Hans Heinze. He certified that Hans Hefelmann was unfit to stand trial. Preliminary proceedings initiated against him in 1962 were dropped in 1963.

The GDR Ministry for State Security began investigations in 1964, after Gerhard Kloo’s successor Erich Drechsler had initially exonerated him. In 1966, the investigation was also closed in the GDR. Too many doctors who had been involved in the murder of the sick would have been implicated.

Gerhard Kloos was first publicly attacked for his involvement in the murder of the sick in 1983. He then sued his critic Helmut Becker. The trial ended in 1985 with Becker’s acquittal. After that, the murder investigation was reopened. In March 1988, the public prosecutor’s office in Celle forwarded a corresponding request for legal assistance from the senior public prosecutor’s office in Göttingen to the public prosecutor general of the GDR. At the same time, the Ministry for State Security became active and wanted to analyse internal material on the patient murders in Stadtroda. After Gerhard Kloo’s death on 22 April 1988, the proceedings were discontinued.