Wintergreen: Suppressed Murders

"In this report, which was marked "confidential" it also states Dr. Clarenz had admitted that the victims had been assigned to the German agricultural industry as well as the arms sector; they were brought to him from locations throughout the administrative district of Lower Bavaria. He further admitted that on 1 January 1945, a shortage of anesthetics had lead to abortions being performed without the administration of ether. Due to the extreme pain experienced by the women, additional personnel were present in the operating room in order to “forcefully” restrain the patients while he performed the abortions on them."

Available July 2004

Wintergreen
Suppressed Murders

Anna Elisabeth Rosmus
Translated from the German by Imogen von Tannenberg

When local officials in and around the German city of Passau were forced after the Second World War to mark the graves of some of the victims of Nazi terror in commemoration of the crimes committed by a nation, they chose the cheapest ground cover available—wintergreen. With bitter irony the title Wintergreen refers simultaneously to the easy cover-up of these crimes in the collective memory of a people who were observers, bystanders, facilitators, and even participants.

With the same commitment to exposing Nazi crimes that has made her books Against the Stream and Out of Passau so widely read, Anna Elisabeth Rosmus uncovers the wartime fate of foreign workers, their children, prisoners of war, and Jewish citizens in Wintergreen: Suppressed Murders. The renowned human rights activist, whose search for the truth about the Nazi state inspired the Academy Award–nominated film The Nasty Girl, recounts a horrific story of slave labor, forced abortions, and mass murder that took place in and around her Bavarian hometown. Until Rosmus began her work, the citizens of the region had successfully avoided acknowledging these atrocities for decades.

In Wintergreen, Rosmus documents the treatment of women from Poland, Russia, Ukraine, and other Easter European countries who were deported to Germany and put to work as forced laborers. She tells how doctors performed abortions—at times without anesthesia—on these women despite the illegality of such practices for German women and strong opposition by the local and highly influential Roman Catholic church. Rosmus describes the mistreatment of the infants in so-called children's homes, where they were intentionally fed spoiled food and the mortality rates were notoriously high.

With an impending German surrender, Passau and its environs witnessed additional carnage. Rosmus sheds light on the united effort of the Hitler Youth, secret police, militia, and German Wehrmacht to massacre thousands of Russian prisoners of war who were being held in the region. The Nazis and their sympathizers forced some prisoners to dig their own graves before being shot; others they threw into the Inn River to drown. In nearby Pocking-Waldstadt, Nazis murdered Jews held in a concentration subcamp, dumping some bodies from moving trains and placing others in hastily dug graves. As disturbing as these crimes are, Rosmus finds just as unsettling the local population's ability to gloss over these acts or to believe that they never happened at all.

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