Friedrich Mennecke (1904 – 1947)

Friedrich Mennecke was born the son of a stonemason in Gross-Freden in today's Lower Saxony in 1904. He came from a Social Democratic family home; his father returned ill from World War I and died in 1923. Mennecke initially completed an apprenticeship and worked as a merchant before starting to study medicine in 1927. In 1932, he joined the NSDAP and the SS. After taking the state examination, obtaining a doctorate and doing medical training, he became an assistant physician in Eichberg State Hospital in 1935 and, four years later, at the age of 35, assumed the running of the facility. In parallel, he was promoted to SS-Hauptsturmführer and Ortsgruppenleiter of the NSDAP. Due to a »special mission« for the »Chancellery of the Führer«, Mennecke was dismissed from the Wehrmacht in 1940.

Subsequently, he worked as a T4 expert and selected thousands of patients and  concentration camps inmates to be murdered in the T4 killing centres. He handed over the management of the »children's ward« set up at Eichberg to his senior physician. In 1943, he was called up again and worked – interrupted by stays in a miltary hospital – as a military doctor until 1945.

In the »Eichberg trial«, the district court of Frankfurt am Main sentenced him to death in 1946. He died in the state detention centre in Butzbach before the sentence could be enforced.