Heil- und Pflegeanstalt Kaufbeuren

Ernst Lossa was born in Augsburg on 1 November 1929. His father, Christian Lossa, belonged to the Yenish minority and earned his living as a travelling tradesman. His mother, Anna, died from pulmonary tuberculosis on 24 September 1933, when Ernst was only three years old. He had two sisters, Amalie and Anna, and a younger brother named Christian.

The Yenish were regarded by the Nazi regime as socially and racially undesirable. Ernst’s father was imprisoned in Dachau Concentration Camp between 1936 and 1938. According to Amalie, he had been taken into so-called “protective custody” after confronting an SS man. With their mother dead and their father imprisoned, Ernst and his sisters were placed in a children’s home in Augsburg-Hochzoll. Amalie later recalled that they were frequently insulted and discriminated against because of their family background.

Institutionalisation

On 15 February 1940, ten-year-old Ernst was transferred to a youth institution at Markt Indersdorf near Dachau. The authorities described him as “uneducable” and accused him of stealing food, running away and taking a bicycle. Although assessments recognised that Ernst possessed normal intellectual abilities and a clear mind, his behaviour was increasingly interpreted through the racial and psychiatric prejudices of the period.

His difficulties adapting to institutional life were treated not as the understandable behaviour of a vulnerable child separated from his family, but as evidence of an alleged permanent character defect. A psychiatric assessment declared him “unfit for the community” and portrayed his stealing as a supposedly congenital compulsion. Such labels had no legitimate medical foundation. They transformed poverty, trauma and disobedience into reasons for continued confinement.

Ernst was not institutionalised because he had a serious psychiatric illness. He was condemned because Nazi society considered his background and behaviour undesirable.

On 20 April 1942, Ernst was transferred to the Kaufbeuren sanatorium and nursing home. Staff members later remembered him as an intelligent, lively and good-natured boy. He continued to take things, but witnesses recalled that he sometimes stole food to give to patients who were starving.

Kaufbeuren-Irsee

Kaufbeuren-Irsee was the largest psychiatric institution in Swabia and became deeply involved in the Nazi murder of disabled and mentally ill people. Under director Valentin Faltlhauser, patients were deliberately killed through lethal medication, neglect and systematic starvation.

These murders continued after the centralised phase of Aktion T4 had officially ended in August 1941. Unlike the six central Aktion T4 killing centres, Kaufbeuren-Irsee did not operate a gas chamber. Patients were instead murdered individually or allowed to die slowly through starvation and deliberate medical neglect.

On 5 May 1943, Ernst was transferred to Kaufbeuren’s branch institution at the former Irsee monastery. By then, he appears to have understood that patients around him were being deliberately killed.

His awareness of the murders, combined with his refusal to conform and his attempts to help other patients, may have contributed to the decision to kill him.

The Murder of Ernst Lossa

During the night of 8–9 August 1944, Ernst was told that he would receive an injection against typhus. Instead, while he was sleeping, nurse Pauline Kneissler, acting on the orders of institution director Valentin Faltlhauser, administered a lethal injection of morphine-scopolamine in the presence of male nurse Paul Heichele. Ernst struggled against death for several hours before dying on 9 August 1944. He was fourteen years old.

His official death certificate concealed the murder by recording bronchopneumonia as the cause of death. Ernst’s medical file described him using the degrading Nazi psychiatric label “asocial psychopath,” presenting the deliberate killing of a healthy child as the natural consequence of an illness. Ernst Lossa was not murdered because he was incurably ill. He was murdered because the Nazi state had decided that a poor, institutionalised Yenish boy who refused to conform had no place in its imagined racial community.

Ernst’s murder later became important evidence in post-war investigations into the crimes committed at Kaufbeuren-Irsee. His story is now one of the best-known individual examples of the decentralised killings that continued in psychiatric institutions after the official suspension of Aktion T4.

Persecution Disguised as Medicine

Following the Nazi seizure of power, disabled people and others classified as “hereditarily diseased” became targets of state persecution. The Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring, enacted in July 1933, led to the forced sterilisation of hundreds of thousands of people. The persecution subsequently escalated from compulsory sterilisation to systematic murder. Children and adults with disabilities, psychiatric conditions or socially undesirable backgrounds were transported to killing centres, starved, neglected or deliberately poisoned with overdoses of medication.

Ernst’s life reveals how Nazi racial ideology, social prejudice and corrupted medicine worked together. A child who had lost his mother, been separated from his family and subjected to years of discrimination was transformed by bureaucratic language into a supposed danger to society and ultimately murdered by the people responsible for his care.

Today, the former Irsee institution houses the Schwäbisches Bildungszentrum Irsee. A Stolperstein outside the former monastery and annual commemorations preserve Ernst’s memory and that of the other patients murdered there.