euthanasia programme

euthanasia programme, Nazi organization for the systematic killing of mentally and physically handicapped children and adults which was officially launched in 1939.

Like many phenomena of the Third Reich, the roots of the so-called ‘euthanasia’ programme lay in the radical and ruthless way in which German society was developing even before Hitler came to power in 1933. Among the many German victims of the Allied food blockade during the First World War were numerous inmates of mental homes who were neglected by the authorities and their families, and during these years about 100,000 mentally ill people died of diseases caused by hunger and lack of hygiene. This massive number of deaths, while creating problems for those who had to cope with them, did free hospital and nursing resources to help the army medical service cope with 60,000 military neurological cases created by the fighting. But the horrors of trench warfare also resulted in so many out-patients needing psychiatric and psychological care that the army's medical organization was overwhelmed. When the war was lost, hundreds of thousands of forlorn and desperate men were left to roam the streets. These men were accused by right-wing Germans of being responsible for Germany's collapse, and it was alleged that many of the more unstable radical agitators were drawn from among them.

This traumatic experience of mental illness by a nation already under stress had a profound influence on Nazi ideology. Applying anthropological, political, and military criteria, the Nazis—and their conservative allies—classified the population into ‘superior’ and ‘inferior’ human beings. In their eyes the ‘inferior’ group profited by war. They argued that while the élite were being lost on the battlefields, those who had psychological defects survived in disproportionate numbers because they were not front-line soldiers. The so-called destruction of army, state, and society by the psychologically sick in 1918, and the rapid post-war increase of inmates in mental hospitals, were considered sufficient evidence that modern warfare created a situation where the least able, not the fittest, survived. In 1929 Hitler publicly stated that in his opinion the best way of improving the German race, and creating a generation which would win the next war, was to eradicate 700,000 ‘inferior’ children; and, to restore the quality and toughness of the German race, his first legislative act on coming to power in January 1933 was to order the sterilization of the carriers of hereditary mental diseases. In the following years the criteria for this treatment were gradually extended to all those categorized as ‘inferior’ human beings and, ultimately, between 300,000 and 400,000 Germans were sterilized.

However, during the first six years of the Nazi regime there were those who were so morally opposed to its ideology that they prevented Hitler taking any further steps towards murder. They succeeded in doing this by enforcing an interpretation of the criminal law which led to an explicit ban on the killing of mentally handicapped members of the national community (the Volksgemeinschaft). Nevertheless, in 1935, Hitler reached an agreement with the Nazi Doctors' Command (the Reichsarzteführung) for the ‘worthless’ to be murdered once war had created the opportunity to carry out this programme. With this agreed, propaganda about the advantages of ‘mercy killing’ was started—which eventually culminated in the famous film Ich klage an! (‘I accuse’)—and early in 1938 the ‘workshy’ and ‘anti-social’ elements of the population began to be rounded up and put in concentration camps.

In the summer of 1939 Hitler assigned his assistant Philipp Bouhler to the ‘mercy killing’ operation, a task which broke all the laws and regulations of the Third Reich and which was detested by the majority of Germans in both peace and war. Knowing how it was regarded by the public, Bouhler formed a secret organization with headquarters at 4 Tiergartenstrasse in Berlin. Its codename, T.4, originated from this address, and those who manned its departments called the work which they carried out ‘the action’. By arguing that early psychiatric casualties of the coming war would need adequate treatment (something the Army demanded, anyway, after its experiences in 1918), and that those civilian insane who were too poor to afford private treatment should not suffer the same cruelties as before, T.4 obtained sufficient medical and nursing staff to kill 70,000 insane patients. It proceeded to organize the search, registration, concentration, and transportation of them, while at the same time deceiving concerned relatives, and the companies with whom the victims were insured, as to their ultimate fate. Those selected were transferred to hospitals run by doctors sympathetic to the aims of T.4, and consultants in them decided which patients were capable of working and which should be killed. The latter were sent to special institutions at Grafeneck, Hadamar, Bernburg, Brandenburg, Sonnenstein, and Hartheim where they were gassed. From January 1940 to August 1941, 70,237 insane or senile Germans were ‘disinfected’ in this manner and thousands more were shot by SS units who wanted their accommodation for themselves.

Despite the strict secrecy in which T.4 worked, and the threats which met any enquiries from the public, the church authorities, or the courts, this mass murder came to light in August 1941. By that time T.4 had accomplished its objectives. When a courageous sermon by the bishop of Münster enraged the public against the killings, Hitler casually agreed that they should cease; but this did not stop the killing of ‘inferior’ Germans. In general the food rations in mental hospitals were reduced to the 1914–18 level which produced a level of suffering similar to what had occurred during the First World War. Though many specialists in gassing were transferred to implementing the Final Solution there were still enough to kill, in what was called Aktion 14 f 13, some 20,000 concentration camp inmates who were diagnosed by T.4 doctors to be mentally deficient. Also, about 20,000 misshapen and ‘mongoloid’ babies, and infants suffering from certain hereditary defects, were transferred to special hospitals (Kinderfachabteilung) where they were secretly killed by injections or overdoses of drugs. In other hospitals affiliated to T.4, doctors and nursing staff sympathetic to its aims killed another 20,000 patients in an operation codenamed Aktion Brandt. Occasionally, severely wounded soldiers were also ‘redeemed’ by Aktion Brandt, and the army, eager to prevent a recurrence of the unstable conditions in 1918, was a silent accomplice in Aktion 14 f 13 as it conveniently annihilated the so-called ‘left-wing neurotics’ who had been sent to concentration camps after army punishment battalions had failed to discipline them.

When, in 1941–2, German morale began to decline, those who committed even the smallest offences were judged by both the civilian and the military courts as ‘inferior’, and therefore of jeopardizing the war effort (Wehrkraftzersetzung), and innumerable Germans accused of this offence paid for it with their lives (see also Germany, 3). In fact, during the war years beliefs based on the ‘mercy killing’ programme became all-pervading. In 1943, for example, Admiral Dönitz, when he refused to revoke the death sentence on a condemned soldier, stated that the man's asthma was far from being a reason for clemency because it endangered the Volksgemeinschaft.

Wolfgang Petter