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Introduction To Nazi Euthanasia
The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary defines euthanasia as “the
action of inducing a quiet and easy death.” This grant of a “mercy
death” may occur with the consent of the individual concerned, is then termed
“voluntary” “euthanasia” and was the meaning originally given to the word.
However, euthanasia also came to be termed “involuntary”, as for example when
a patient is suffering from an incurable and painful disease, or is in a coma
and is considered unlikely to regain consciousness. In such circumstances, a
third party or parties may determine to put an end to the patient’s
suffering.
The circumstances are, in general, that the person involved is no
longer capable of making up his or her mind and/or to express his or her
ultimate wish. But Nazi ““euthanasia”” was quite different in conception and
practice from the dictionary definition, old or new. For it was derived, not
from humanitarian or compassionate reasoning, but from pseudo-scientific
theory and ruthless economic policy. The Nazis destroyed “life unworthy of
life” (lebensunwertes Leben) as they termed it, not as an
act of mercy, but as part of a strategy to murder that part of the population
least able to defend itself.
That policy was directed not only at German citizens, but at those of
other eastern European countries which fell under Nazi hegemony, particularly
Poland. The ““euthanasia”” programme formed an essential part of the evolving
Nazi policy of extermination on a massive scale. That policy reached its
apogee with the murder of the Jews, but had the programme arrived at its
intended conclusion, the eventual death toll would have been immeasurably
greater.
The Nazis did not create this twisted version of euthanasia. Its roots
lay in a selective reading of the evolutionary theories of Charles Darwin,
and the distorted “scientific” thinking to which this gave birth. The term
"eugenics", a thesis which has no scientific basis, was coined in
1881 by the British naturalist and mathematician Francis Galton. It was
described as "the science of the improvement of the human race by better
breeding."
This took the concept of “survival of the fittest”, a fundamental
element of Nazi ideology, to its logical conclusion. Eugenics developed
within the larger movement of Social Darwinism, which applied Darwin's
"struggle for survival" to human affairs. The fundamental tenet of
the eugenics movement was that restricting the ability of “inferior” people
to procreate whilst maximizing that of “superior” individuals, would benefit
society. Attention was focused on the feebleminded (an inaccurate term
covering everything from mental retardation to alcoholism), labelled as
idiots, imbeciles, or morons. It was suggested that there existed a
relationship between low intelligence and both immorality and crime.
The cause of the social problems of the time was deemed to be
inherited feeblemindedness and the resulting poverty by hereditary
degeneracy. It was concluded "Not all criminals are feebleminded, but
all feeble-minded persons are at least potential criminals. That every
feeble-minded woman is a potential prostitute would hardly be disputed by
anyone." Racism too, was not far from the minds of the
eugenicists. The "darker peoples of southern Europe and the
Slavs of eastern Europe are less intelligent than the fair peoples of western
and northern Europe" wrote one, adding that the "Negro
lies at the bottom of the scale" of intelligence. Harry
Hamilton Laughlin, director of the Eugenics Record Office in the United
States, compared” human racial crossing with mongrelisation in the animal
world" and argued that "immigrants from southern
and eastern Europe, especially Jews, were racially so different from, and
genetically so inferior to, the current American population that any racial
mixture would be deleterious."
The eugenics movement was international, (the world’s first
professorial chair in eugenics was established in 1909 at University College
London), but was particularly influential in Germany, where in his 1895 book,
“The Right to Death” (Das Recht auf den Tod), Adolf
Jost argued that if the state demanded the sacrifice of thousands of
individuals in wartime, it had the same “right” in times of peace to demand
the sacrifice of the impaired and non-productive, who were draining the state
of its resources. Twenty five years later in a book entitled “The
Permission to Destroy Life Unworthy of Life” (Die Freigabe der
Vernichtung lebensunwerten Leben), Karl Binding and Alfred
Hoche proposed that “unworthy life” included not only the incurably sick, but
many of the mentally ill and feebleminded, as well as retarded and deformed
children. Killing such people was “an allowable, useful act.” To
the eugenicists, such people appeared to have less intelligence, higher
levels of antisocial behaviour, and, accordingly, less human value than
worthier individuals, such as, naturally, the eugenicists themselves. They
were “burdensome existences”(Ballastexistenzen).
For Binding and Hoche, the right to live was not an entitlement but
was to be earned, and it was earned by being a useful economic contributor to
society. Writing of those with disabilities, and advocating “involuntary
euthanasia”, they continued: “Their life is absolutely pointless, but they
do not regard it as being unbearable. They are a terrible, heavy burden upon
their relatives and society as a whole. Their death would not create even the
smallest gap--except perhaps in the feelings of their mothers or loyal
nurses.” The unimaginable had occurred; physicians were being
encouraged, not to save life, but to take it.
Against such a background of pernicious nonsense masquerading as
legitimate scholarly research, it is hardly surprising that Adolf Hitler
became an early and enthusiastic supporter of this ““euthanasia”.” In Germany
the term "Race Hygiene" was in use long before the label of
“eugenics” became common, and the German Society for Race Hygiene (Deutsche
Gesellschaft für Rassenhygiene) was to eventually represent all
eugenicists.
In 1931, two years before Hitler’s assumption of power, Fritz Lenz,
professor of race hygiene at the University of Munich, declared: "Hitler
is the first politician with truly wide influence who has recognized that the
central mission of all politics is race hygiene and who will actively support
this mission." And support it he did. In 1934 Ernst Rüdin,
psychiatrist and author of the 1933 Nazi sterilization law stated: "The
psychiatrist and the healthy person are allies against the genetically
defective. The psychiatrist must render his service to the ultimate aim of a
hereditary pure, able and superior race." It took Samuel
Beckett to point out the irony in this Nazi obsession with the creation of a
race of “supermen.” An `Aryan’, he wrote, must be blonde like Hitler, thin
like Göring, handsome like Goebbels, virile like Röhm – and be named
Rosenberg.
At the 1929 party rally, Hitler had suggested that countless lives
could be eliminated by racial measures:
“If Germany was to get a million children a year and was to remove
700-800,000 of the weakest people, then the final result might even be an
increase in strength. The most dangerous thing is for us to cut off the
natural process of selection and thereby rob ourselves of the possibility of
acquiring able people. The first born are not always the most talented or
strongest people… As a result of our modern humanitarianism we are trying to
maintain the weak at the expense of the healthy.”
After attaining power in 1933, the Nazis began an extensive propaganda
campaign with the object of acquainting the German people with the benefits
of ““euthanasia”.” Via newspapers and magazines, radio and film, the
suggestion was made that life could be so much better for the productive many
if the non-productive few, who were such a burden to the nation, were simply
eliminated. Would it not be better for them if an end was put to their misery
and suffering?
But the road to state sanctioned murder was to be a gradual one. With
the early introduction of legislation (the 'Law for the Restoration of the
Professional Civil Service' of 7 April 1933), the Nazis thoroughly purged
long-established ethical and administrative public supervisory bodies. Less
than 6 months after his election in 1933, Hitler introduced the “Law for the
Prevention of Genetically Diseased Offspring.” It decreed compulsory
sterilization for persons characterized by a wide variety of disabilities. It
has been estimated that by 1939, 200,000-350,000 persons had been sterilized,
many of whom subsequently became victims of the ““euthanasia”” programme. In
the same year the Nazis enacted the “Law Against Dangerous Habitual
Criminals”, which further blurred the distinction between actual criminal
behaviour and the inappropriate social behaviour that characterized many
people with disabilities.
The law stipulated that these criminal asocials (asozialen) could
be committed to state asylums, held in indeterminate protective custody, and,
in the case of sex offenders, officially castrated. These and other laws
prepared the ground for the Nürnberg Laws of 1935, which, while directed
primarily at Jews, also regulated marriage among people with disabilities.
For example, the “Marriage Health Law” prohibited marriage between two people
if either party suffered from some form of mental disability, had a
"hereditary disease" as previously defined by law, or suffered from
a contagious disease, particularly tuberculosis or venereal disease. By
that time Hitler was already proposing that he would use the cover of war to
murder psychiatric patients in fulfilment of a long-held belief that he had
expressed in Mein Kampf. The war, Hitler reasoned, would provide
both a distraction and an excuse for officially killing those deemed undesirable.
If war should break out, he informed Gerhard Wagner, he would take up the
““euthanasia”” question and implement it.
By the end of 1938, the regime was receiving requests from the
families of newborn or very young children with severe deformities and brain
damage for the grant of a “mercy killing” (Gnadentod). In
particular, a petition was received in respect of an infant named Gerhard
Herbert Kretschmar, the so-called `Knauer’ child, who had been born on 20
February 1939, blind, with one leg and part of one arm missing, and who was
described as an “idiot.” Hitler ordered Karl Brandt, his personal physician,
to visit the child in a hospital at Leipzig. Brandt testified at his post-war
Nürnberg trial he had been instructed that if the facts provided by the
child’s father proved to be correct, he was to inform the physicians in
Hitler’s name that ““euthanasia”” could be carried out – which it was, on 25
July 1939.
It is arguable that the `Knauer’ case was the catalyst for all that
followed, although it could equally be argued that Hitler’s dedication to
““euthanasia”” was such that its introduction was inevitable at some point in
the mercifully brief history of National Socialism.
On his return to Berlin, Brandt was authorized by Hitler to proceed in
the same fashion with similar cases. Hitler did not wish to be publicly
associated with what even he considered to be a delicate matter, and so
Brandt was ordered to secretly organize a programme with the aid of Philip
Bouhler, head of the Chancellery of the Führer (KdF: Kanzlei
des Führer der NSDAP), an agency created by Hitler in 1934, ostensibly to
keep him in direct touch with the concerns of the population, but acting in
practice as Hitler’s private office. Under the direction of Bouhler, the KdF
was to acquire a more sinister purpose, for it was to be the conduit through
which first the ““euthanasia”” programme and subsequently the planned mass
extermination of Jews and others was to operate. Answerable to nobody except
Hitler, in 1939 Bouhler seized the opportunity to acquire authorisation to
administer the ““euthanasia”” programme through his deputy, Viktor Brack.
In May 1939, Hitler had instructed Brandt to
pave the way for the killing of children by setting up a body entitled the
`Reich Committee for the Scientific Registering of Serious Hereditary and
Congenital Illnesses’. By a decree dated 18 August 1939, doctors and midwives
were ordered to report all cases of “deformed” newborn. Even before war came
in September 1939, the Nazis had thus established a government sanctioned
process for murder. Two laymen made a preliminary selection of cases, which
was then reviewed by three medical professors who determined the fate of the
child. If selected for ““euthanasia””, the child was transferred to one of a
list of special hospital wards for killing.
As early as July 1939, Werner Heyde, who was to play a prominent role
in the ““euthanasia”” programme, attended a meeting at which he learned of
the imminent killing of the adult mentally ill. As with the `Final Solution’,
““euthanasia”” provided a perfect confluence of the two essential elements of
National Socialist ideology – the biological and the economic.
A hospital director, Ludwig Schaich reported:
“When it became increasingly apparent, in the final years before 1939,
that war was imminent, we learned that there had been discussion in the Reich
Ministry of the Interior about putting the inmates of hospitals and nursing
homes for the mentally ill, the mentally deficient and epileptics on
drastically reduced rations in the event of war. When we objected that this
would mean condemning our patients to a slow but certain death by starvation,
they carefully began to sound out how the Home Mission would react if the
state were to contemplate the elimination of certain categories of sick
person in wartime, given that food supplies, once imports dried up, would no
longer suffice to feed the entire population.”
In a report prepared for Hitler in the summer of 1939, another of his
personal physicians, Dr Theodore Morell, having reviewed a survey carried out
in the 1920s of the parents of severely handicapped children, wrote: “A
number of parents expressed the view: `If only you had done it (i.e.,
““euthanasia””) and then told us that our child had died from
an illness.’ There is a lesson for us there. We need not suppose that we
cannot carry out any salutary measure without the consent of the sovereign
people.”
It was clear that the regime could expect no great negative reaction
to the programme from the general populace. A survey conducted in April 1941
revealed that 80% of the relatives of those murdered by the programme were in
agreement with the decision, 10% spoke out against it, and 10% were
indifferent.
It has been suggested that this policy of `official secrecy’, where
people knew while pretending not to know, and only a very few protested, was
an invitation to denial and moral indifference on the part of both the German
establishment and the German nation as a whole. It laid the foundation for a
similar reaction to the `Final Solution.’ If people did not protest at the
murder of their own relatives, they were hardly likely to do so when Jews,
Gypsies, and foreigners were slaughtered.
Although Hitler had already given verbal authorisation to the
“euthanasia” enthusiasts, he wished to avoid the passing of an official law.
However, he was pressed to confirm his instructions. In a dictatorship, no
debate was necessary, no act of government required. It was enough for Hitler
to simply issue a command (rarely explicit, and even more infrequently in
writing) for his wishes to attain the force of law. And so, in October 1939,
a brief decree was issued on Hitler’s private stationery and signed by him:
“Reich Leader Bouhler and Dr Brandt are charges with the
responsibility for expanding the authority of physicians, to be designated by
name, to the end that patients considered incurable according to the best
available human judgement of their state of health, can be granted a mercy
death. [Reichsleiter Bouhler und Dr. med. Brandt sind unter
Verantwortung beauftragt, die Befugnisse namentlich zu bestimmender Ärzte so
zu erweitern, dass nach menschlichen Ermessen unheilbar Kranken bei
kritischster Beurteilung ihres Krankheitszustandes der Gnadentod gewährt
werden kann.])
Those responsible for subsequent events later drew up several bills
that would have made ““euthanasia”” legal, but these were rejected by Hitler.
He believed (almost certainly correctly) that this would present an
unacceptable propaganda opportunity to the enemy. It was necessary to wait
until final victory had been achieved before passing such a law.
The decree was backdated to 1 September 1939 to coincide with the date
of commencement of the Second World War. After operating from a number of
different addresses, a permanent headquarters for the new organization was
established at Tiergartenstrasse 4 in Berlin. The premises were rented by the
KdF in early 1940 under the name of the`Reich Work Group of Sanatoria and
Nursing Homes’ (Reichsarbeitsgemeinschaft Heil- und Pflegeanstalten:
RAG).
The organization’s code name, T4, was taken from this address. Other
dummy organisations were set up under seemingly innocuous titles – the
`Charitable Foundation for Institutional Care’ (Gemeinnützige
Stiftung für Anstaltspflege: Stiftung ), the `Charitable Society for
the Transportation of the Sick Limited’ ('Gemeinnütziger
Krankentransport GmbH': Gekrat), the `Central Compensation
Office for Sanatoria and Nursing Homes(Zentralverrechnungsstelle Heil- und
Pflegeanstalten: ZVST).’ These names were all intended to
camouflage the true purpose of the murderous plan.
The ultimate authority for the ““euthanasia”” operation was Hauptamt II
(Main Office II) of the KdF, headed by Viktor Brack. It was the
decision-making agency for all aspects of the “euthanasia” and
subsequent Aktion Reinhard policies. Although Bouhler was
titular head of the whole operation, in fact he had little to with it unless
his authority was needed in dealing with other government agencies. Brandt
dealt only with the medical aspect of the operation, and continued to run his
medical practice. Heinrich Lammers was head of the Reich Chancellery
and constantly carped about the lack of a legally proclaimed decree for
“euthanasia”, something Hitler absolutely refused to do. Martin Bormann, head
of the Party Chancellery, was kept well away from “euthanasia” matters
because it was well-known at the KdF that in his hands “euthanasia
would not stop at mental patients.” He was displeased at being
excluded because his brother Albert worked for the KdF and was also one of
Hitler's adjutants. Brack's deputy was Werner Blankenburg; Hefelmann was the
leading light at the Kdf for children's “euthanasia”. All the KdF staff
involved in “euthanasia” took the job on in addition to their normal
functions, and all were completely immersed in the business of murder.
Individuals recruited for the project were asked if they were prepared
to participate. None were coerced. Doctors were never ordered to kill
psychiatric patients and handicapped children. However, all participants were
required to confirm, by one means or another, their understanding of the
necessity to maintain absolute secrecy. Some were told that a ““euthanasia””
law existed, but could not be shown to them for the same reason of secrecy.
Few of those approached declined an invitation to become involved. It
was possible to refuse to participate in killing, or to end one’s
participation, as some did. So far as is known, nobody was executed or sent
to a concentration camp for doing so. All the T4 staff were initially
interviewed by Brack or Blankenburg, “even down to the tea-ladies.” The
recruitment of Dieter Allers may be regarded as typical. In 1939, Allers, a
young lawyer, was sent to Poland as an army training sergeant. In November
1940, his mother met Blankenburg in the street and when she told him that her
son was in the army, Blankenburg offered to give him a job at the KdF and
arranged for his discharge from the military. In January 1941, Allers was
appointed managing director of T4 by Brack. “Find men with courage to
implement”, and “nerves to endure” was mentioned in a speech by Brack on 23
April 1941.
Judging from their backgrounds, the majority of lower echelon staff
recruited to the program were of average intelligence with a basic standard
of education. They lacked the attributes or inclination to become members of
the SS or the police. The overall impression obtained from their personnel
backgrounds was that they were initially surprised at being selected as none
had applied to join T4; they were summoned and had no idea why, nor what they
would be doing. They were mostly employed at jobs such as doormen, telephone
operators, and general handymen and were gradually inveigled into the actual
killing process. There were, of course, exceptions to whom killing came
naturally, but in general the KdF, through their representative Christian
Wirth, bred a team of specialist murderers who could kill without any qualms
of conscience or, if they were troubled, continued to kill anyway. The later
hands-on, practical killers of European Jewry came predominantly from this
“euthanasia” cadre of `ordinary men’: chefs, carpenters, drivers, plumbers,
photographers, and nurses.
Even before the issue of the edict, the killing of Polish patients had
begun in what were to become the incorporated territories of Danzig-West
Prussia and the Warthegau, as well as that of German patients in
Pomerania and East Prussia. The units involved were the Eimann
commando, Einsatzkommando 16 and the Selbstschutz (a
paramilitary organization of Volksdeutsche). The Eimann
commando, orVolksdeutsche SS-Sturmbann E, was named after SS-Obersturmbannführer Kurt
Eimann, who was from Görlitz. In autumn 1939 the Sturmbann was
ordered to kill 1,400 patients from Pomerania in the wood of Piasnitz near
Neustadt in West-Prussia (today, woods close to the Piasnica River, near
Wejherowo). On 22 September 1939, the Eimann commando began
killing 2,000 Polish patients in the
mental hospital at Konradstein (today Kocborowo), south of Danzig (Gdansk.)
In the following months, thousands of Polish mental patients were
killed. Initially executions were by shooting, but in October, Dr Albert
Widmann, chief chemist of the Kripo (Criminal Police)
suggested the use of bottled carbon monoxide as a killing agent. The first
gas chambers were being constructed at Grafeneck and Brandenburg in late
November. By that time gassing experiments on mental patients utilizing both
carbon monoxide and an agent similar to Zyklon B had already
taken place at Fort VII in Posen (Poznan.) Eimann was sent to the SS-Standortkommandantur at
Lublin on 20 November 1941.
By January 1940, Polish patients were being gassed, not in stationary
gas chambers, but in mobile gas vans; bottled carbon monoxide was introduced
into a sealed compartment at the rear of the vehicle. The first of these vans
was operated by a commando headed by Herbert Lange, formerly the chief of
staff of Naumann’s Einsatzgruppe VI. Throughout the first
months of that year, Lange’s commando travelled around theWarthegau in
a van bearing a sign advertising `Kaiser’s Kaffeegeschäft’ (Kaiser’s
Coffee Company).
The commando also journeyed to East Prussia, where in a period of less
than three weeks more than 1,800 German and Polish patients were gassed. It
has been estimated that a total of 7,700 sick and handicapped patients fell
victim to this early, experimental killing phase. Following the invasion of
the former Soviet Union in 1941, many more mentally ill patients were
murdered in places such as Riga, Dvinsk, Aglona, Poltava, Mogilev, Kiev, and
so on.
During the first two years of the war, the ““euthanasia”” programme in
the Reich entered four distinctive but overlapping phases,
relating sequentially to the killing of infants, adults, institutionalised
Jews and concentration camp prisoners. 22 -28 special wards were established
in hospitals throughout the country for the murder of children. In time, this
programme was extended from infants to older children, and in some cases even
to teenagers. By the end of the war, approximately 5,000 children had been
killed. A visitor to the Reich Committee institution at Eglfing-Haar
described the cynicism with which the director, Dr Hermann Pfannmüller,
boasted of his methods, openly admitting that among the children to be
murdered were some who were not mentally ill. They were simply the children
of Jewish parents. “No Jews are allowed in my institution!” Pfannmüller
proudly declared.
The strategy for adult “euthanasia” was much more comprehensive.
The Interior Ministry had issued another decree on 21 September 1939,
requiring medical facilities to complete a questionnaire in respect of all
patients who (a) suffered from an extensive list of medical conditions and
were unable to work; or (b) had been institutionalized for more than five
years; or (c) had been committed as criminally insane: or (d) were
non-`Aryan’. As with children, whether or not an individual was condemned to
die was supposedly decided by a panel of physicians. That was by no means
always the case. Dr Rudolph Boeckh, head physician of the asylum at
Neuendettelsau, protested at the manner in which the medical commission had
behaved at his establishment: “… The commission did not examine one
single patient out of the 1,800 concerned… They merely questioned the nursing
staff, whose opinions were recorded on the forms… Cases were observed in
which the opposite of the staff member’s true statement was recorded on the
questionnaire…”
Not all doctors were prepared to become part of the nefarious plan,
although there was often a disquieting acceptance of the principle involved.
When approached to become head of the children’s “euthanasia” programme at
Eglfing-Haar by the aforementioned Pfannmüller, Dr Friedrich Hölzel declined,
writing: “… It is one thing to approve of measures of the state with
full conviction, and another to carry them out oneself in their final
consequences. I am reminded of the difference which exists between a judge
and an executioner…” But in general, the medical establishment was
deeply implicated in the “euthanasia” programme. Heinrich Bunke gave the
following explanation for accepting the invitation to join T4 as a physician
: "It provided the opportunity to collaborate with experienced
professors, to do scientific work, and to complete my education [Ausbildung]."
By the late 1930s, the regional health departments and administrators
of the psychiatric institutions had been completely taken over by Party
officials who used their political affiliation to browbeat those who remained
non-political. During the T4 “euthanasia” phase at the Eichberg Institution -
which also provided victims for the Hadamar killing centre - Dr Walter
Schmidt, a fanatical Nazi bureaucrat, strutted around in SS uniform with
pistol at his side supervising the daily murder of patients. Schmidt,
described by one male nurse as a “hothead and psychopath,” gave
orders to his nurses to shoot dead any patient who attempted to escape. The
non-medical middle managers, often recruited from the police, were motivated
by personal considerations of advancement and ideological commitment; they
were the arbiters of life and death.
Unlike the children, who had been murdered in the main by lethal
doses of medication or starvation, the much greater number of adults to be
liquidated demanded a more efficient killing system. Following Dr Widmann’s
expert advice and the experience gained at Posen, it was decided to use
bottled carbon monoxide in stationary gas chambers situated in six killing
centres - Grafeneck, Brandenburg, Bernburg, Hadamar, Hartheim and
Pirna-Sonnenstein (only four of which were in operation at any given time.)
Each killing centre was assigned a code that was to be used in all
telephone conversations and written communications with the T4 central
offices:
"A" was assigned to Grafeneck, "B" to Brandenburg,
"C" to Hartheim, "D" to Sonnenstein, "Be" to
Bernburg and "E" to Hadamar.
An experimental gassing was carried out at the former
Brandenburg-Havel prison in either December 1939 or at the beginning of
January 1940. Among those present were Drs Horst Schumann (later director of
Grafeneck and then Sonnenstein, subsequently notorious for his medical
experiments on prisoners at Auschwitz), and Irmfried Eberl (later director of
Brandenburg and subsequently first Commandant of Treblinka.) 18-20 asylum
inmates were herded into a rudimentary gas chamber which had been constructed
under the supervision of Christian Wirth, a name which was to loom large in
events to come. The onlookers watched closely as the inmates died from carbon
monoxide poisoning. 4-6 further inmates were administered lethal injections,
but when the poison had little immediate effect, these inmates were also
gassed. The experiment was considered a success.
Gekrat, was created to ship the victims by bus to the killing centres. A
fleet of buses (usually three at each killing centre) was hired from the
Reich Post Office. The Gekrat bus drivers were all SS-NCOs
recruited from the concentration camps. The gas was supplied by the
Ludwigshafen plant of I G Farben (today Badische Anilinund
Sodafabriken: BASF) to the KdF, who traded under the name
“Jennerwein” (Brack) and “Brenner” (Blankenburg). From the autumn of 1940, in
order to maintain secrecy, patients were no longer transferred direct to the
killing centres, but were first taken to transit institutions. Most of the
deceptive practices that were later used in the death camps in Poland were
first in evidence in the ““euthanasia”” programme. For example, at Hadamar,
only minutes before they were taken to the gas chamber, the victims were
given a stamped postcard on which to report to relatives a safe arrival at
their destination.
A similar killing method applied in all of the centres. At his trial
at Nürnberg, Viktor Brack had described the simple design of the gas
chambers : "No special gas chambers were built. A room suitable
in the planning of the hospital was used, a room attached to the reception
ward.... That was made into a gas chamber. It was sealed, it was given
special doors and windows, and then a few metres of gas pipe were laid, some
kind of pipe with holes in it. Outside of this room there was a bottle, a
compressed bottle, with the necessary apparatus, necessary instruments, a
pressure gauge, etc." Apparently, it was Bouhler who suggested that the gas chamber at Brandenburg
should be disguised as a shower room, a deception that was to become a common
feature of Nazi killing centres.The gas chambers were approximately 3m x 5m x 3m
high. Benches lined the walls, hiding a 3cm perforated pipe that encircled
the chamber. Usually in batches of 40-60 at a time, the patients were told
they were to enter this "inhalation room" for therapeutic
reasons.
Troublesome or resistant patients were sedated or manhandled into the
chamber by brute force. Initially,
in accordance with orders from the KdF, the gassing apparatus was operated by
the medical director at each ““euthanasia”” institution, who became known as
the Vergasungsarzt('gassing doctor'.) Within 5 minutes, the victims were
unconscious, and within 10 to 15 minutes, all were dead. After a wait of
approximately 1 hour, the chamber was ventilated and the bodies were
transferred either to the autopsy room or to the crematorium for
incineration. Prior to cremation, however, the bodies were plundered.
Gold-filled teeth and dental bridges were broken from the corpses' mouths for
smelting. Organs, especially fresh brains, were collected at autopsies. The brains were processed by the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Institute
of Neurological Research in Berlin and the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Institute of
Psychiatry in Munich (today the Max-Planck-Institutes). Not all
bodies of children had been immediately cremated. Autopsies were conducted on
some in the interests of "science" by doctors attempting to find
causes for the child's disability. Autopsy activities of this kind provided
experience for novice surgeons, who often received academic credit for their
efforts.
As in the death camps which were to follow, the logistical problems of
burning the bodies far outweighed the relatively simple killing method.
Between two and eight bodies were cremated at a time. After cremation,
residual bone was crushed in mills or by mallets on specially constructed
worktables. Each killing centre had a so-called special registry
office, from where a standard falsified death certificate and letter of
condolence were sent to victim’s next-of-kin.
A list of causes that could explain a sudden natural death was
available. Relatives were informed that it had been necessary to cremate the
body for public health reasons; the ashes of the deceased were available upon
request. Nazi functionaries and German bureaucrats were stereotypically
precise and efficient when it came to keeping records about mass murder.
Originals or copies of all paperwork generated by the killing program were
retained, including record books and lists for internal T4 use, correspondence
with outsiders, and the medical records of the killed patients. To organize
the paperwork, each killing centre kept a death book (Sterbebuch),
sometimes known as the book of patients (Krankenbuch).
In the midst of this carnage, local authority representatives convened
on 3 April 1940. The main speaker at this gathering was Viktor Brack.
According to the notes of one of those present at the meeting, Brack was
explicit about the social and economic benefits of “euthanasia”:
“In many hospitals and nursing homes of the Reich there are countless
people with incurable diseases of every kind, people who are of no use at all
to the rest of humanity, who are only a burden on society, incurring endless
costs for their maintenance, and there is absolutely no prospect of these
people ever recovering and becoming useful members of society again. They sit
and vegetate like animals, they are social misfits undeserving of life – and
yet physically they are perfectly healthy human beings who may well live on
for many more years. They eat the food that could be given to others, and in
many cases they need twice or three times as much nursing care. The rest of
society needs to be protected against these people. Given that we need to
make provision now for keeping healthy people alive, it is all the more
necessary to get rid of these creatures first, even if only to take better
care for now of the curable patients in our hospitals and
nursing homes. The space thus freed up is needed for all kinds of things
essential to the war effort: military hospitals, civilian hospitals and
auxiliary hospitals.”
On 9 October 1939, a meeting of the organisers of the programme had
been held, at which a formula was presented by which the number of future
potential Reich “euthanasia” victims could be calculated.
The basis of the calculation was the ratio 1,000:10:5:1, meaning that for
every 1,000 of the population, ten would require psychiatric treatment. Of
those requiring treatment, five would receive this as in-patients, and one of
those in-patients would fall within the scope of the programme. That is to
say, one in every 1,000 of the population would be subject to ““euthanasia”.”
Applying this ratio to the population of the Reich as a
whole resulted in an aggregate figure of 65,000 -70,000 potential victims.
This figure proved to be an under-estimate. In 1942, the statistician Edmund
Brandt (one of many bureaucrats to find employment with the post-war West
German government) prepared an analysis entitled “What has so far been
accomplished by the various institutions in terms of disinfection?”
The “institutions” were the six principle killing centres (it has been
estimated that there were more than 100 such establishments overall.)
“Disinfection” was a code word for murder. By Brandt’s calculations, between
January 1940 and August 1941, when the killings were officially suspended,
precisely 70,273 patients had been murdered by gassing. Brandt went on to
calculate the savings made in food, clothing and accommodation on the
assumption that those murdered had been allowed to survive for a further ten
years. Based on the average daily needs for an institutional inmate, he
estimated that the killing of these sick persons, incapable of labour –
“useless mouths” in Nazi terminology – would yield precisely 885,439,800
Reichsmarks in savings by 1951. It has been calculated that as many as 33% of
the beds occupied by the mentally sick in the pre-war period had been made
available through “euthanasia.”
At least 20,000 further victims had been killed by that time by means
of lethal injection. In fact, despite a pause, the killing in various guises
continued until the end of the war. So far as children were concerned, it
never stopped at all. Some sources suggest that the taken together, the total
number of victims of the ““euthanasia”” programme may have reached 160,000.
Indeed, a figure as high as 200,000 has been quoted by some historians. In
short, what had been conceived by the eugenicists as the extermination of the
medically 'incurable', concluded with the killing of those who, for whatever
reason, were either unable to contribute to the economic well being of
the Reich, or were considered undesirable, politically or
racially.
Initially no distinction was made between Jewish and non-Jewish adult
patients. But in April 1940 local health authorities were required to provide
details of all Jewish patients within their jurisdictions. Beginning in
January 1940, these Jewish patients were transferred to the killing centres
and gassed. Ludwig "Israel" Alexander was the first person and the
only Jew listed on the Eglfing-Haar transport list of twenty-five men
destined for Grafeneck on 18 January 1940. The name "Israel," which
all male Jews were forced to take on after 1 January 1939, indicates that
Alexander was considered Jewish under the Nürnberg racial laws. Alexander was
thus probably the first handicapped Jewish patient murdered in the gas
chamber of a ““euthanasia”” killing centre.
From 1941 Jewish patients were sent to the Generalgouvernement,
and there either shot or killed in gas vans. In reply to enquiries from the
families of the murdered, Gekrat stated that the victims
gassed in Brandenburg or liquidated in Poland had been sent to an asylum in
Chelm (sometimes referred to as “Cholm”), in the Lublin District of Poland, and
even mailed death notices from Chelm containing fictitious dates of death in
order to add to the deception. Aktion Cholm, as it was
known, proved particularly lucrative for T4, since it was not only possible
to collect the gold teeth and jewellery of the deceased, but also their
hospital fees, which continued to be received for some months after the
actual date of death. By this stage, the medical condition of Jewish patients
had become irrelevant. They were killed simply because they were both Jewish
and a patient. Very shortly, one of those qualifications also disappeared.
Selected members of the staff of T4 began killing Jews on a gigantic scale at
the Nazi death
camps in Poland solely because they were Jews.
The fourth manifestation of ““euthanasia”” was the so-called “Aktion
14f13.” This was the code name given to the extension of T4
operations to the concentration camps. Doctors visited the camps, but did not
conduct medical examinations. Prisoners were ostensibly assessed by similar
criteria to those applied to the handicapped. In practice, those who had
artificial limbs, wore spectacles or had “unsatisfactory” personal histories,
were routinely selected for extermination. Again, simply being Jewish was
enough to incur a death sentence. Those prisoners selected were transported
to either Hartheim, Sonnenstein, or Bernburg for gassing. By the war’s end
the victims of Aktion 14f13 probably numbered about 20,000.
By the summer of 1941, knowledge of the ““euthanasia”” programme had
become widespread, in part because the killings were taking place on German
soil. The Nazis were quick to learn the lesson. Future killing centres would
be established far away, where possible in isolated areas. Aware of growing
public disquiet, and in the wake of explicit sermons preached by a number of
churchmen, in particular Bishop Clemens August Graf von Galen of Münster, on
24 August 1941, Hitler ordered the suspension of adult ““euthanasia””. But
children’s ““euthanasia””, Aktion 14f13, and the so-called “wild”
““euthanasia”” of adults in hospitals continued. The suspension should more
accurately be called a pause for reorganization.
Indeed, one expert has expressed the opinion that more victims of
““euthanasia”” perished after the official order to cease than had been
killed before it was issued. Thereafter, gas chambers at the killing centres
functioned on a greatly reduced scale, but thousands of patients were
murdered by means of lethal drugs or starvation at mental hospitals like
Eichberg, Meserlitz-Oberwald, Kaufbeuren and many others. The
extermination of the incurably ill, according to T4 psychiatrist Friedrich
Panse, put all perpetrators in a state of being "drunk with
elation". In 1973, The University Clinic of Psychiatry,
Düsseldorf, published an obituary of Panse, who "expertly
guided" patients into the gas chambers. Their paean culminated
with the sentence. "A life in the service of the suffering
people...is completed." Paul Nitsche, psychiatric head of
mass murder, once commented: "Isn’t it wonderful to get rid of
all the ballast collecting in the asylums? Now we can perform some real
therapy."
The extent to which the medical profession had rationalised their
homicidal behaviour is perhaps best illustrated by the testimony of defendants
at their post-war Nürnberg trial. Valentin Faltlhauser insisted that, for
him, “the decisive motive was compassion.” Paediatrician
Ernst Wentzler stated, “I had the feeling that my activity was something
positive, and that I had made a small contribution to human progress.” Karl
Brandt affirmed the following:
“Do you think it was a pleasure for me to receive the order to permit
“euthanasia”? For fifteen years I had toiled at the sickbed and every patient
was to me like a brother. I worried about every sick child as if it had been
my own...I fully realize the problem; it is as old as mankind, but it is not
a crime against man nor humanity. It is pity for the incurable, literally. Here
I cannot believe like a clergyman or think as a jurist. I am a doctor, and I
see the law of nature as being the law of reason. In my heart there is a love
of mankind, and so it is in my conscience. That is why I am a doctor!...Death
can mean deliverance. Death is life - just as much as birth. It was never
meant to be murder.”
The courts were not fooled by this apparent display of
contrition. Telford Taylor, chief of counsel for the prosecution at Nürnberg,
described the prominent physicians who were tried and convicted of murder in
the following terms:
“The defendants...are charged with murder, tortures and other
atrocities committed in the name of medical science...[They] did not kill in
hot blood, nor for personal enrichment...they are not all perverts. They are
not ignorant men. Most of them are trained physicians and some of them are
distinguished scientists. The perverse thoughts and distorted concepts which
brought about these savageries are not dead. They cannot be killed by force
of arms. They must not become a spreading cancer in the breast of humanity.
They must be cut out and exposed.”
“Euthanasia” was vital to the development of Nazi genocidal policy. It
paved the way both in method and personnel. Bottled carbon monoxide was
replaced by petroleum engine exhaust fumes and hydrocyanic acid. Polish
killing centres succeeded their German and Austrian counterparts. Victims
were delivered from every part of occupied Europe instead of merely from
the Reich. Not the least significant aspect of the “euthanasia”
programme was the indication it provided, both to Hitler, as well as to
government and Party leaders, of just how much could be achieved behind the
mask of `official secrecy’. And most importantly, T4 supplied the kernel of
professional killers who were to undertake Aktion Reinhard in
Poland.
These men were long term exponents of the physical process of
murder and the disposal of corpses. Some had been recruited because they were
considered ideologically reliable, or were recommended by a relative or
friend. Others began their careers in the concentration camps or the police.
All quickly became desensitized killers, rapidly descending into a
criminal nightmare of sadistic brutality and death. Almost 100 of them were
made available to Odilo Globocnik in Lublin to operate the gas chambers of
Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka. When the time arrived and the final decision
had been made to implement the Jewish genocide, the KdF was able to draw upon
the experience and technical support of T4 personnel to carry their plans
through to completion
But as a number of eminent historians have pointed out, the symbiosis
between ““euthanasia”” and the `Final Solution’ went beyond these obvious
connections. Killing the handicapped and the Jews were two sides of the same
coin. The former action was intended to remove from the German race its
“imperfections”; the latter was designed to destroy Nazism’s greatest
perceived enemy.
The dual functions were inseparable, two essential aspects of what
Hitler liked to call hisWeltanschauung, his “world view.” Where that
“world view” was to lead will be examined in the following pages.
Sources:
Aly, Götz and Heim, Susanne. Architects of Annihilation – Auschwitz
and the Logic of Destruction, Phoenix, London, 2003
Browning, Christopher R. The Origins of the Final Solution – The
Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy, September 1939 – March 1942, William
Heinemann, London, 2004.
Burleigh, Michael. The Third Reich – A New History, Pan Books, London,
2001.
Friedlander, Henry. The Origins of Nazi Genocide: From “euthanasia” to
the Final Solution, University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 1995.
Gutman, Israel, ed. Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, Macmillan
Publishing Company, New York, 1990
Kershaw, Ian. Hitler 1936-45: Nemesis, Allen Lane, The Penguin Press,
London, 2000.
Kogon, Eugen, Langbein Hermann, Rückerl, Adalbert,eds. Nazi Mass
Murder – A Documentary History of the Use of Poison Gas, Yale University
Press, New Haven and London, 1993.
Lifton, Robert Jay. The Nazi Doctors – Medical Killing and the
Psychology of Genocide, Papermac, London, 1990.
Mostert, Mark P. Useless Eaters: Disability as Genocidal
Marker in Nazi Germany, Journal of Special Education. Volume: 36. Issue: 3.
Pages Number: 155+, 2002.
Copyright: WAG H.E.A.R.T 2007
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