Georg Renno (1907 – 1997)

Georg Renno was born in Strasbourg and studied medicine in Munich and Heidelberg. After receiving his doctorate in 1933, he was an assistant doctor in the Leipzig-Dösen hospital under Hermann Paul Nitsche. In February 1940, Renno participated in Nitsche's experiments there to develop an unobtrusive method of killing using medicine. Some sixty patients were murdered there with Luminal.

In May 1940, Renno was deputy head of the Hartheim killing centre and its intermediate institution of Niedernhart. He checked the patients shortly before they were murdered in the gas chambers and was responsible for the introduction of the gas.

As of October 1941, Georg Renno headed the »children's ward« Waldniel/Süchteln. After falling ill with tuberculosis, he returned to Hartheim as its deputy director in 1943, where concentration camp prisoners were once again murdered in 1944.

After the war, Renno lived near Ludwigshafen and worked for the pharmaceutical company Schering. Only in the 1960s did he have to stand trial. He was not convicted: in 1975, the trial against him was shelved on account of his inability to stand trial. Even shortly before his death in 1997, he still claimed that he did »not feel guilty».