Georg Fehta, a.k.a. Klaus Petersen

For several years, it seemed as if everything was turning out well for Georg Fehta and that he would get a new chance in life as Klaus Petersen. He was barely six months old, when he was placed in foster care with the Petersen family in Berlin-Mitte in July 1921. Children in foster care did not necessarily have positive experiences; families also took in children to supplement their income with the allowance provided by the municipality. However, this does not seem to have been the case for Georg Fehta, now Klaus Petersen. According to his welfare records, he developed well, played and romped with other children, and attended kindergarten. The foster parents described him as good-natured and affectionate. In September 1927, they intended to adopt Georg Fehta – but in the end, that never happened.

Klaus Petersen, a.k.a. Georg Fehta, attended public school for only three weeks before being withdrawn from school. Since then, his foster parents taught him privately at home. However, in 1930, Georg's past – or rather that of his biological parents, of which the foster parents had not been informed – caught up with him. Georg Fehta's biological mother, Maria Fehta (née Kuczwalli), was originally from Poland. She had presumably moved to Berlin sometime after the war, perhaps even with big dreams, but fate treated her badly. She was forced into prostitution, and the pimp, Josef Geisen, was also the father of Georg Fehta, who was born on November 26, 1920. The mother had contracted a syphilis infection, which had affected her newborn son: he suffered from congenital syphilis. Four weeks after his birth, Georg Fehta was separated from his mother and placed in an orphanage. Before coming to the foster family, he had been treated at the Berlin Charité Hospital with treatments on arsenic-based drugs such as Salvarsan in the hope of halting the disease. This proved illusory. In 1927, his health deteriorated to the point that he became paralysed in the legs, and further treatment at the Charité was unsuccessful. From 1928 onwards, hospital stays in Berlin became more frequent, until, in autumn 1930, Georg Fehta became a permanent institutional patient.

Paralysis of the legs was only part of his illness. From 1927 onwards, the foster parents also noticed that Klaus Petersen, a.k.a. Georg Fehta, began to change in character: he became shy and fearful, cried often, and hardly spoke. Most notably, he became extremely restless, prompting his foster mother to seek advice at the Wittenauer Heilstätten (Psychiatric Hospital(s) Wittenau) in early January 1930, where she was advised to admit the child to the Kinderheilanstalt Buch (Children's Psychiatric Hospital Buch). She took him there on January 3, 1930. However, when a malaria treatment – at the time a new method developed by Julius Wagner-Jauregg (1857–1940) for treating secondary and tertiary syphilis by inducing a febrile malaria infection to activate the patient’s immune system – was considered, the foster mother took Klaus Petersen, a.k.a. Georg Fehta, home again that same evening.

However, Klaus Petersen, a.k.a. Georg Fehta, was not spared. From mid-January to early May 1930, he was treated at the Rudolf Virchow Hospital, where he had to undergo a (first) malaria treatment and a smear treatment with Salvarsan. Georg Fehta’s actual "institutional career" – his journey through various institutions – began on September 19, 1930. After an attack of rage and two days of "great restlessness", Georg Fehta was admitted to the children's clinic in Buch for a second time. There, another malaria treatment became a traumatic ordeal for the nine- or ten-year-old child: it severely weakened him, and he experienced numerous side effects such as skin bleeding and peeling. Georg Fehta also contracted scarlet fever and later whooping cough, which was treated with a vaccine serum and lasted until April 1931. The foster mother had apparently protested against the malaria treatment, but to no avail. Shortly thereafter, the foster parents disappeared from the medical records and were never mentioned again. In contrast, attention shifted to the biological parents. On the one hand, this was likely an attempt to hold them financially responsible for the cost of Georg Fehta's institutionalization; on the other hand, their history of social deviance became part of the child's story as well.

From then on, his case record contains regular short entries, first from the children's clinic in Buch and, since September 1933, from the Landesanstalt (Psychiatric State Hospital) Lübben. He remained there until June 1936, when he was transferred to the Landesanstalt Potsdam on 23 June. There, for the first time in a long while, he received more detailed attention, and the tone in which he was described began to change. In hindsight, it is clear that the malaria treatments had been unsuccessful; Georg Fehta could only articulate a few words. However, he had other abilities – he liked to dance. A report from 1937 noted that "he stands up and moves in dance steps while humming melodies to himself and laughing."

As part of the closure of the Landesanstalt Potsdam, Georg Fehta was eventually transferred to the Landesanstalt Görden, where the child psychiatrist Friederike Pusch (1905–1980) documented her neurological re-examination at the end of July 1939. In this context, a pneumoencephalography was carried out – a painful diagnostic procedure in which brain fluid was replaced with air to make brain structures visible in X-rays. In Georg Fehta's case, the procedure clearly served research purposes only, exposing him to health risks and side effects. The phrasing Pusch used in her assessment was identical to that which she would later use to justify the killing of patients in the children’s and decentralized "euthanasia" program.

Until October 1938, his physical condition had remained relatively stable despite many earlier treatments and illnesses. The adolescent had even gained weight, albeit with some fluctuations. However, this changed in February and again in May 1939. Within just a few months (from February to September), Georg Fehta lost eleven and a half kilos, indicating severe neglect – a deliberate starvation. On September 25, 1939, only the patient's condition was documented, which also reflects the nursing and medical neglect. On September 30, 1939, physician Friederike Pusch merely recorded the death in the medical records. However, in the autopsy report she suspiciously noted a different date of death: October 1, 1939. The autopsy report also documented severe emaciation and extensive bedsores, providing further evidence of neglect. The cause of death was given as renal pelvis tuberculosis, although this had not been mentioned previously in the medical records.

Nothing further is known about Georg Fehta’s biological mother, Maria Fehta, who is not mentioned again in the medical records. His biological father, derogatorily referred to in the files as “the breeder” (Erzeuger), had multiple criminal convictions. He married in 1931 and was divorced again in 1936. When the welfare authorities demanded child support for Georg Fehta, Franz Josef Geisen denied paternity in December 1938. The family circumstances makes it highly unlikely that any relatives were present at the child’s burial on the institutional cemetery in Görden, where he was laid to rest on October 4. Abandoned by his family and utterly dependent on the goodwill – or ill will – of caregivers and doctors in the institutions, Georg Fehta was an ″easy″ victim, one for whom no further or bothersome inquiries from relatives were to be expected, and who could be left to die. Not even a falsified report to obscure the death was needed.

Georg Fehta’s brain was dissected, preserved and photographed, with the photographs being pasted into the medical records. It was then thoroughly examined by Werner-Joachim Eicke (1911–1988). Eicke was a research associate at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Brain Research in Berlin-Buch, but was seconded to the Landesanstalt Görden as a prosector. He eventually sent the specimens to Berlin-Buch, where they were investigated further by Julius Hallervorden (1882–1965), head of the Department of Neuropathology. From Berlin-Buch, histological slide specimens of Georg Fehta’s brain were relocated to Dillingen in 1944 and were later moved again to Gießen and Frankfurt. Ultimately, without any special marking or mention of Georg Fehta’s name, they were presumably buried in 1990 in the Waldfriedhof (cemetery) in Munich.