Over the next five years, Jekelius and his successors, Ernst Illing and Heinrich Gross, murdered 789 children at the facility, including 336 from the infants’ ward. Most of these children had been diagnosed with feeblemindedness, epilepsy, or schizophrenia—the three diagnoses that autistic children were most likely to receive in the days before autism was an accepted diagnostic category. Nonverbal patients were favored for extermination because they created extra work for the nurses; eventually children who were “simply annoying” were added to the list.
