The Evening Star (January 14, 1946)
Conti, Hitler’s ‘mad doctor,’ tells of lying in suicide note
NUERNBERG (AP) – Dr. Leonardo Conti, Hitler’s “mad doctor” whose suicide three months ago in the Nuernberg Palace of Justice jail was kept secret by American Army authorities, wrote a farewell note to his family that he was taking his life because he had lied under American interrogation.
The hysterical suicide message, scrawled by the Nazi health leader who decreed the killing of hundreds of thousands of persons in his lust for “race purity,” apparently was never delivered. His suicide was disclosed yesterday.
Asked whether any notification was sent Mrs. Conti after her husband’s body was buried secretly last October, Col. B. C. Andrus, commander of the internal security detachment guarding the jail, said: “As far as my records show she was not.”
Died before Ley
Conti garroted himself with his shirt 20 days before Dr. Robert Ley, Nazi labor boss, took his own life in a nearby cell block. Conti’s grave was marked erroneously as “Italian” and his name was abbreviated to “L. Conti.”
He had been confined in the jail as a prosecution witness against Wilhelm Frick.
Col. Andrus refused to say why Conti’s death was kept secret.
Conti, once the ruthless administrator of a gigantic program for the extermination of inmates of German public institutions and foreign slaves physically unable to work, begged for the “mercy of God” in his suicide note.
“I part from my life because I made a false statement under oath,” he wrote. “I was out of my senses.”
The stocky SS-Gruppenfuehrer had served directly under Hermann Goering, Wilhelm Frick and Heinrich Himmler as chief of Reich health.
Dr. Robert M. W. Kempner of Lansdowne, Pennsylvania, a German-born attorney who prepared the case against Frick, said he never had been informed by the American Army’s internal security guard of the manner of Conti’s death. Dr. Kempner intended to announce in court when the Frick case was reached, probably today, that Conti was dead. This would have been the first public hint from any official source of the Nazi scientist’s fate.
An American soldier serving in the jail last October said Conti, in a fit of despondency, climbed on a chair, tied a shirt sleeve around his neck, fastened the shirt to one of six metal spikes stuck in the wall around the window of his solitary cell and then slumped off the chair.
Autopsy performed
On October 5, Conti’s name appeared for the last time on the roster of the “internee wing” of the jail submitted to higher Army officers by Col. Andrus. On October 6, the body was delivered to a laboratory of the American 116th General Hospital. An autopsy performed there showed Conti died of strangulation.
Conti advocated “guinea pig” experimentation with human beings. His career was a mixture of fanatical politics and weird scientific whims. A Rightist radical while he was a college student in 1918, Conti established the anti-Semitic Kampfbund and early joined Hitler’s Nazi movement.
Born in Lugano, Switzerland, of Italian-Swiss heredity, Conti spearheaded the medical wing of the cult of the so-called Nordic supermen and Aryan supremacy.
Started ‘mercy’ killing
As state secretary for health in the Reich Ministry of the Interior, he relentlessly attacked Jewish doctors, forcing them by stringent legislation to go abroad. In 1939, he helped promulgate secret decrees empowering German jails, insane asylums, homes for the aged and other institutions to kill inmates under the guise of “mercy.”
He sponsored a variety of experiments in which humans were killed to determine the effects of bacteria and poison and supported wide-scale sterilization of the “biologically unfit.” In 1943, Conti assumed the task of liquidating foreign slave workers after they became broken physically.