It wasn't an ordinary WWII love story. It started quite dramatically. He, she and the gas chamber. Except ... she was Hitler's sister, he was a Nazi doctor to die, and her cousin was called gassing.
In January 1932, Adolf Hitler's distant cousin, Aloisia Veit, started freaking out. She had been working as a maid in a Viennese hotel for a long time, but day by day she felt worse and worse. She was acting very strangely and claimed that ghosts were chasing her down the halls of the building. In February, by a court decision, she was placed in a psychiatric hospital, where doctors pronounced schizophrenia. For nine years she suffered chained to a metal bed with straps. She even asked for poison to shorten her torment.
Meanwhile, Germany began to change and according to Nazi ideology, mentally ill people were considered unworthy to live and defile the race of "superman". Hitler, belonging to a degenerate family, which was full of idiotic and mentally disturbed people due to marriage by close relatives and drunkenness, loathed his origin.
Aloisia Veit, although she was Hitler's cousin, could not count on special treatment (source:public domain).
The Nuremberg racial laws, signed by the Fuhrer of the Third Reich, sealed the fate of people like Aloisia. Frau Veit was given the number 2155 and was taken to the facility in Hartheim, which was replaced by the Nazis from the Pallottine Sisters' center for people with physical and mental disabilities for euthanasia .
In this beautiful castle in upper Austria, she was led to the gas chamber where she was killed in December 1940.
Doctor Erwin Jekelius, a murderer in a white coat, who wanted to become Hitler's brother-in-law (source:public domain; colorization:Rafał Kuzak).
Euthanasia was carried out on a personal order by Hitler, and the director of the facility, a Transylvanian German Erwin Jekelius, was responsible for its execution. Although the Führer entrusted the doctor with the mission of getting rid of his sick cousin, whom he shamefully hid from the world, he did not consider him good enough to enter his family.
Handicapped she, psychopathic he…
Hitler's sister Paul, who had started to use the name Wolf on Adolf's orders, maintained that she knew nothing of his atrocities. In 1946, when she was found and interrogated by the Americans, she argued that Hitler remained her brother after all, though she saw him very rarely. But sisterly love was one-sided.
In childhood, Adolf would beat her, and in his adult life he considered her an idiot . Even so, perhaps because of the age difference (Adolf was seven years older than Paula) and his early orphaning, the woman treated him, in a way, like a father. So when she got engaged, she asked her brother for permission to marry.
Paula Hitler's chosen one was none other than Erwin Jekelius, who was responsible for the gassing of her cousin . However, the couple met on a completely different occasion. There are two versions of what was the reason for their first meeting.
Hartheim Castle, it was there that Dr. Erwin Jekelius murdered those who, according to the Nazis, "did not deserve to live" (photo:Isiwal; lic. CC ASA 3.0).
According to the first, Paul showed up to him, wanting to save someone who was in danger of being transported to Hartheim. The second says that Hitler's sister was slightly handicapped and sought help at the Jekelius clinic . On the spot, she was to be charmed by a psychiatrist, who had the opinion of a real womanizer.
Although the scenery and circumstances were not favorable (the walls of a mental hospital are not among the most romantic places in the world), the mass murderer and Hitler's sister fell in love with each other. This resulted in a romance. This strange couple finally decided to get married. It was supposed to be a great honor for Jekelius, he finally married the sister of the Fuhrer himself.
It is worth emphasizing here that, years later, Paula tried to maintain that she had little to do with her brother's National Socialist ideology (after all, she did not even belong to the NSDAP). Despite this, it did not bother her that the beloved had about four thousand lives. Among the victims of Jekelius were nearly eight hundred little patients from the Spiegelgrund children's clinic, where he, along with other Nazi murderers, was "purifying the German race." They even killed several-year-old children by injection or with the help of a gas chamber.
How dare you!
After Pauli proposed, Erwin Jekelius went to Berlin to ask for her hand from Hitler. Not everything went according to the lovers' plan. When Adolf found out about his sister's marriage plans, he went berserk.
The desire to become Hitler's brother-in-law ensured Erwin Jekelius a ticket to the Eastern Front, and then a long stay in a labor camp. This was definitely not how he imagined his future (photo:Gerald Praschl; license CC ASA 3.0).
He ordered the Gestapo men to arrest the would-be wifey and immediately send him to the Eastern Front, where he was to work as a doctor. Although, unlike many Germans, he managed to survive, he spent many years in a gulag when he was captured.
Paula Hitler, that's what Dr. Jekelius fell in love with (source:public domain).
Paula, whom her brother separated from her fiancé, never married and had no children. She calmly lived to see her days in Bavaria, and her grave was taken care of by ... SS veterans.
There is also a more prosaic explanation as to why Jekelius ended up on the Eastern Front. Swedish journalist Steve Sem-Sandberg in his book "The Chosen", balancing on the verge of prose and documentary, describes that at some point patients from rich and influential families began to disappear from under murderous wings.
The knowledge of his activities on the side finally reached the Reich Chancellery and his superiors were to send a psychiatrist to the Soviet Union as a punishment. And which version of events do you think is more likely?