Hegener was born in
Sensburg,
East Prussia, in 1905. He trained as a banker, working for
Dresdner Bank as an accountant. After losing his job because of the
Depression, he founded a dye works, which, however, went bankrupt. He joined the
Nazi Party in 1931. In 1937, an acquaintance enabled him to find a job at the
Reich Chancellery, and he was transferred to Hitler's Chancellery. With the beginning of the "child euthanasia" program, the first stage in the program that would become known after World War II as
Action T4, several front organizations were founded to conceal the involvement of Hitler's chancellery and of the Department of the Interior. One of these was a
Reichsausschuss zur wissenschaftlichen Erfassung von erb- und anlagebedingten schweren Leiden (Reich Committee for Research on Hereditary and Constitutional Susceptibility to Severe Diseases), which was a front for Hans Hefelmann and Department IIb. To transport people to be killed according to the program, the
Gemeinnützige Krankentransport GmbH (General Patients' Transport Corporation, known as
Gekrat) was organized, headed by Reinhold Vorberg of Department IIc. Hegener was responsible for logistics and obtained Post Office buses for Gekrat; as a result, Gekrat was internally referred to as "Hegener's Special Group". Hegener later provided an account of how the method of killing was decided: injections and overdoses of narcotics were ruled out as impractical and it was decided to use
carbon monoxide gas, filling a room at a suitably located clinic with the gas in order to terminate a large group at a time. This was the origin of the
gas chambers. Hegener was present at a test of the methodology that took place in January 1940 at the old jail in
Brandenburg an der Havel (later
Brandenburg Euthanasia Center) and was subsequently responsible for obtaining the necessary materials for constructing the gas chambers and cremation facilities at the "euthanasia centers", as well as for the delivery of the gas. He ordered what was needed both for the child killing program and for the adults, including the large amounts of drugs such as
phenobarbital used in the latter program. In addition, he and Hefelmann processed the forms that doctors and midwives were required to submit in case of an abnormal birth and determined which newborns were ineligible to be killed under the program. He later worked with
Viktor Brack on the adult "euthanasia" program and, after Hitler ordered it stopped in 1941, they both provided their expertise in starting up the program to gas the Jews in the
concentration camps. At the end of the war, Hegener took refuge together with Hefelmann in
Stadtroda, in
Thuringia, where the records concerning the child "euthanasia" program were also taken to be destroyed. He worked first in agriculture and later for a timber processing company. Under the slightly altered name of Richard Wegener, he obtained a position at the Ministry of Commerce and Transportation in
Mecklenburg. and gave evidence at the trials of
Franz Hofer, the former
Gauleiter of Tyrol-Vorarlberg, in the early 1960s, of Hefelmann in 1964, and of Allers in 1968. He died in
Altona, Hamburg, in 1981. ==References==