Alice Ricciardi-von Platen RIP

Kyt · Apr 15, 2008

Alice Ricciardi-von Platen | Times Online Obituary

One effect of the trials held at Nuremberg after the Second World War was to bring to light just how thoroughly the Nazis had corrupted the mores of those who should have been the guardians of Germany’s conscience. The best-known instance of this was the Holocaust. Another, however, was that which had served as its template, the T4 policy of killing mentally and physically ill people. Its first historian was a German observer at those trials, Alice Ricciardi-von Platen.

T4 sprouted from the ill-digested mix of ideas that produced much of the Nazis’ racial ideology — pseudo-Darwinian theories of fitness, economic utilitarianism, eugenics and social cleansing. The notion of ridding Germany of bad seed had long been cherished by Hitler, and in the autumn of 1939, in a letter to Karl Brandt (later his personal physician) and to Philip Bouhler, a Chancellery official, he authorised the euthanasia of those deemed incurably ill.

The programme, which took its name from its Berlin offices at Tiergartenstrasse 4, was therefore never promulgated as a law nor, for similar reasons, publicised. At first its victims were those with congenital illnesses, but it soon absorbed the physically disabled, the chronically sick, the mentally disturbed and Jewish patients of all ages.

In 18 months from the start of 1940, 70,000 people were taken from hospitals to six centres and put to death. The method frequently used, the success of which attracted the attention of Heinrich Himmler, was the gas chamber. After growing protests T4 was suspended in 1941, although it continued covertly until the end of the war, by when its tally was perhaps as high as 120,000 deaths.

Alice Platen-Hallermund (as she then was) learnt something of this in 1941 while working as a doctor near Linz, Austria, close to one of the extermination centres at Schloss Hartheim; curiously, her postwar practice was based near another centre, at Hadamar, in Germany. In 1946 she was invited to join the German team observing the so-called Doctors Trial, presided over by American judges, which indicted Brandt and 22 others.

They were charged with crimes relating both to T4 and to experiments that they had authorised or carried out on prisoners of war and those in concentration camps. These included injection with viruses and poisons as well as Josef Mengele’s work on genetics. Sixteen of the defendants were convicted. Of them, seven, including Brandt, were sentenced to death. The trial led to the definition of the idea of informed consent to treatment by patients.

Alice Platen-Hallermund recounted the history of T4 in a short book, Die Tötung Geisteskranker in Deutschland (the killing of the mentally ill in Germany) in 1948. Using the evidence given at Nuremberg, she exposed both the methodology of the programme and also the willingness of many doctors to collaborate with it. Often they convinced themselves that this was a forward-looking approach to their patients’ best interests, when in fact by abrogating their responsibility to treat them as individuals they had abandoned the very basis of medicine.

Such hard truths were unpalatable to many Germans in the postwar climate where no one admitted to having been a party member — although the reality was that for reasons of convenience if not conviction most medics had had the relevant papers. Society still needed them after the war, and as a result the profession was able to close ranks, ensuring that Platen-Hallermund’s book was effectively suppressed and then forgotten for 30 years. Moreover, she and her fellow observers were ostracised, and ultimately prevented from pursuing their careers in Germany.

Born at Weissenhaus, Holstein, in 1910 into the Hanoverian aristocracy, Gräfin Alice Platen-Hallermund was the youngest of four daughters (one died in infancy) of a landowner with progressive ideals, and who deemed the use of “von” odiously Prussian. Her ancestors included Sophie von Platen, known to historians as “The Elephant”, and the putative half-sister and reputed mistress of King George I.

The family also had ties to the earls of Derby — Alice was named after the 17th Countess — and she spent much of her first years in England. English was her first language, and in its pronunciation she preserved the accents of Edwardian times into the 21st century.

The family returned to Germany after the First World War began, only for her father Carl to die in 1919. She was then educated at Salem, where she was influenced by Kurt Hahn’s moral outlook. For much of her life, too, she would follow a hot shower with a cold one. In 1934 she qualified as a doctor, having trained in part in Munich, where she witnessed the rise of the Nazis. This experience, combined with seeing the maltreatment of the mentally ill in her first post in Potsdam, impelled her to go into exile in Florence. She returned to Germany to give birth to a son, and moved to Austria during the war to be close to her mother. In 1946, she began working at Heidelberg for Victor von Weizsäcker, the pioneer of psychosomatic medicine.

After her experiences at Nuremberg and her book’s reception, Alice Platen-Hallermund decided to move to England in 1949, having been much impressed by the work of another émigré, the psychologist Siegmund Foulkes, with groups of soldiers in hospitals. She wanted to know more about child psychology as well, and subsequently worked at institutions at Shenley and Bexley.

Yet she found Britain no easier a place to get tenure, and in 1957 moved to Belgium after marrying Baron Augusto Ricciardi, a Neapolitan nobleman who was about to set up Italy’s tourist bureau in Brussels. Later he founded Libya’s tourism authority, before they settled in Rome and at Cortona, in Tuscany. She continued to work into extreme old age as a doctor and psychotherapist, and helped to start group analysis clinics and schools in Italy, Austria and Eastern Europe.

Alice Ricciardi-von Platen was rather more English than German in outlook. She was scrupulously fair (if capable of sharp words when necessary), a capable manager of people without seeming pushy, and possessed of an abiding curiosity. She was much admired by colleagues, and happy when her work on T4 was rediscovered by a younger generation of German historians.

She was awarded the German Cross of Merit, although it was the Italian edition of her book, published in 1993, that made her particularly proud. She was also sought out by those interested in her friendships with the likes of Thomas Mann’s son Golo and the Wittgenstein family. Nonetheless, she kept much of her past to herself.

Augusto Ricciardi died in 1982. Her son survives her.

Alice Ricciardi-von Platen, doctor and historian, was born on April 28, 1910. She died on February 23, 2008, aged 97
Click to expand...

Antipodean Andy · Apr 15, 2008

Interesting and sobering. The obit seems to have been written by someone who was quite close to Alice.

The mention of Himmler's attention being caught by the use of the gas chamber made me shudder. At the same time I was thinking of how ironic it was that Hitler ordered the killing of mentally ill and disabled people when, eventually, it appears he went down that path.

Given what Alice must have seen, settling in Tuscany, I imagine, would have been a pleasant relief.

Log in or Sign up

Alice Ricciardi-von Platen RIP

Kyt Άρης

Antipodean Andy New Member

Share This Page

Log in or Sign up

Alice Ricciardi-von Platen RIP

Thread Tools

Kyt Άρης

Antipodean Andy New Member

Share This Page

Useful Searches