Zehetner engl | Stolpersteine Wiener Neustadt

Burgplatz 1 (Military Academy) (moved 2014)

Johann Zehetner

Murder by electricity

Admitted to the Mauer-Öhling sanatorium on May 11, 1944; murdered on April 25, 1945, two weeks after the end of the war.

Father Johann Zehetner moved with his wife Christine and children Johann (1927) and Irma (1929) from Enns to the Military Academy at the end of 1934, where he was employed as a contract worker. At age five, son Johann was hit by a motorcycle and landed on the back of his head. Without hospital treatment, he stayed at home for two weeks. He attended three grades of elementary school, then, on the teacher’s advice, dropped out and remained home with the family.

In 1943, the district youth office ordered an examination at the university children’s clinic in Vienna. The doctors diagnosed a developmental delay of two or three years, physically and mentally. The assessment: “characteristically very pleasing, courteous, good-natured, agreeable, helpful.” They recommended placement in an institution where Johann could be prepared for a simple profession.

Soon after, the mother died. Johann was mostly left to his own devices and wandered a lot. In March 1943, a medical report categorized him as an “untaught imbecile” and arranged for his admission to the Mauer-Öhling sanatorium, where his father personally admitted him.
Care records state that Johann was assigned to various work groups but was „of little use.“ When employed in domestic work, he was calm and orderly but showed childish behavior.
At the beginning of October 1944, Johann Zehtner was sent for discharge to Wiener Neustadt. The discharge certificate marked him “completely unfit for service in the Wehrmacht.” The above photo of the young man originates from this document.

Entry of April 25, 1945: “Died of pulmonary tuberculosis.” Before, no indications of this illness appeared in the records.

Investigations by the Amstetten district gendarmerie command for the People’s Court trial against doctors and nurses in Mauer-Öhling and Gugging have clarified how Johann Zehetner actually died. He was killed by the murder doctor Emil Gelny using his modified electroshock therapy device, which, with additional electrodes, functioned like an electric chair.

Johann’s murder happened when Vienna and the Vienna Woods were already in the hands of the Red Army and the German Reich was only a heap of rubble. But at the beginning of April 1945, Emil Gelny still came by bicycle to Mauer-Öhling to kill 147 patients with his “invention”—Johann Zehetner was one of them.

Two years after Johann Zehetner’s murder, his father received a demand from the Wiener Neustadt magistrate for outstanding care fees of S 90 (equivalent to about 400 euros today).

Anton Blaha