Irmfried Eberl

Irmfried Eberl was an Austrian psychiatrist, born in Bregenz on 8 September 1910 and dead in 1948, whose career is recorded in medical history as a case of a physician taking part in mass killing. He joined the Nazi Party on 8 December 1931 while still a medical student at the University of Innsbruck, graduated in medicine in 1933, gained his doctorate a year later, and trained and practised as a psychiatrist. On 1 February 1940 he became medical director of the killing facility at Brandenburg, part of the Aktion T4 euthanasia programme directed at people with mental disorders, and in autumn 1941 he took the same position at the Bernburg killing centre. When T4 personnel were moved to Poland he served briefly at Chełmno and then, from 11 July 1942 until his dismissal on 26 August 1942, was the first commandant of the Treblinka extermination camp as an SS-Obersturmführer. He was arrested in January 1948 and hanged himself the following month to avoid trial. The atlas records him as a documented example of psychiatry's complicity in atrocity, not as a model of healing.