Background
Werner Heyde was bom in Forst/Lausitz on 25 April 1902, the son of a manufacturer.
Werner Heyde was bom in Forst/Lausitz on 25 April 1902, the son of a manufacturer.
An SS medical doctor (he eventually held the rank of SS Colonel), Heyde had joined the NSDAP in 1933 and rapidly emerged as the top expert in ‘mercy-killing’ in the Third Reich.
In 1939 he was selected to head Organization T4. based at Tiergartenstrasse 4, in a suburb of Berlin (the nub of the entire administration of the euthanasia programme), which strove to implement Hitler's orders concerning the ‘destruction of worthless life'. Some 100,000 German men, women and children were killed under his directions as head of the Reich Association for Hospitals and Sanatoria by special doctors using lethal injections, starvation, carbon monoxide and ‘Zyklon B' gas. Heyde also headed a travelling circus of psychiatrists who investigated the emotional life of concentration camp inmates at Dachau, Buchenwald and other camps, selecting both Jews and ‘Aryans’ for execution in his institutes. Sentenced to death in absentia by a German court in 1946, he escaped into the British zone by slipping off the back of an American army truck taking him for interrogation to Nuremberg and settled down to practise under the alias of Dr Fritz Sawade in Flensburg, Schleswig-Holstein. Employed as a labour court medical expert and official consultant by the Chief Medical Officer of Schleswig-Holstein, he was knowingly shielded by top State officials who knew his real identity and preserved a conspiracy of silence about his past.
On 12 November 1959 the eminent psychiatrist gave himself up to a court at Frankfurt. He was to have been the main defendant in the biggest post-war euthanasia trial held at Limburg County Court, but on 13 February 1964, five days before his trial was due to start, Dr Heyde committed suicide in his cell at Butzbach prison, hanging himself with his trouser belt from a radiator pipe.