Psychiatric hospital
In September 1941 and in the first half of January 1942 the patients of the Mogilev interregional psychiatric hospital were liquidated. From the first days of the occupation of the city, the food supply to the medical institution was minimised: the Nazi invaders sentenced the patients to starvation (K. Gerlach. Calculated murders).
In September 1941, the chief of "Einsatzgruppe U" and later head of the Imperial Criminal Police Department, Nebe, ordered "Einsatzkommando-8" to conduct experiments in Mogilev to kill mentally ill people with gas and explosives. During these experiments, between 500 and 600 patients were killed in 13 hours on a single day - all were "incapacitated", including Jews. The killing was carried out by feeding the exhaust fumes of several cars and lorries into a hermetically sealed room. Some prisoners and medical staff were shot. The killing technology, tested in psychiatric hospitals in Minsk and Mogilev, contributed to the development of the gas van, in which people locked in the truck body died of exhaust gas poisoning.
The victims were selected on the basis of lists of those unable to work. Jewish patients were handed over to the killers by a medical worker. The importance attached to the action of 16 September 1941 is confirmed by the presence of a number of high-ranking persons: the chief of Einsatzgruppe B, SS Obergruppenführer A. Nebe, his adjutant Schultz, the doctor of Einsatzgruppe B, Dr Batista, Dr A. Widmann, the chief interpreter of Einsatzgruppe B of Einsatzkommando 8, Hauptsturmführer A. Priba, and, apparently, a part of this team of the SS Sturmbannführer.
The preparations for the liquidation of the Mogilev mental patients were filmed. In particular, the film shows the building where the murder took place, a car with the licence plate "Pol 51628" and a lorry "Adler" (licence plate "Pol 28545"), to which two hoses were connected (through which gas was supplied from the engine to the room), as well as medical attendants and several people (including three children) who became victims of the criminal experiment. The murders of the mentally ill in Mogilev figured in several post-war trials in the FRG and GDR.
The monument to the victims of the Mogilev Psychiatric Hospital by sculptor Minkov was unveiled in 2009. The idea to create the monument appeared in the early 1990s, when German specialists came to Belarus. Gerrit Heuendorf, an employee of the Institute of History and Ethics of Medicine of the Technical University of Munich, took part in the installation of the monument.
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From the memoirs of Anna Savutina, a senior nurse at the regional psychiatric hospital:
"I know from my mother how in 1941 the patients of the psychiatric hospital and the chief doctor, the Jew Meir Kliptsan, were killed. His family was evacuated, most of the doctors left. Before the Germans came to Mogilev, he organised that those patients who had relatives were taken home by their families. He changed into hospital pyjamas and stayed to help patients with severe mental pathology. He was warned that he could be massacred because he was the head doctor, a communist and a Jew. He was hiding in the attic. They say there was a traitor who betrayed him.
People were gassed in the huge basement of the children's ward. After that he and the sick were loaded on a car and taken to the Pecherski forest, where they were killed in the pits. One medical attendant went to the ditch at night after the shooting. They tried to find the chief doctor to rebury him, but they found him only at dawn. The pit was big."