On this date, August
24, 1941 Hitler ordered the cancellation of the T4 programme. I will post
information about this Involuntary Euthanasia Program (Adolf Hitler’s Directive) from Wikipedia and other links.
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This poster (from
around 1938) reads: "60,000 Reichsmark is what this person suffering from
a hereditary defect costs the People's community during his lifetime. Fellow
citizen, that is your money too. Read '[A] New People', the monthly magazine of
the Bureau for Race Politics of the NSDAP."
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Action T4
(German: Aktion T4,
pronounced [akˈtsi̯oːn
teː fiːɐ]) was the name used after World War II for Nazi Germany's non-voluntary euthanasia programme under
which physicians killed thousands of people who were "judged incurably
sick, by critical medical examination". In October 1939 Hitler signed a
"euthanasia decree" backdated to 1 September 1939 that authorized
Phillipp Bouhler and Karl Brandt to carry out the programme of euthanasia
(translated into English as follows):
"Reich Leader Bouhler and Dr. med. Brandt are charged with the responsibility of enlarging the competence of certain physicians, designated by name, so that patients who, on the basis of human judgment [menschlichem Ermessen], are considered incurable, can be granted mercy death [Gnadentod] after a discerning diagnosis."
In
addition to 'euthanasia' various other rationales for the programme have been
offered, including eugenics, Darwinism, racial hygiene, and cost effectiveness.
The
programme officially ran from September 1939 to August 1941 during which 70,273
people were killed at various extermination centres located at psychiatric
hospitals in Germany and Austria. After the official termination of the
programme physicians in German and Austrian facilities continued many of the
practices that had been instituted under the program right up until the defeat
of Germany in 1945. This 'unofficial' continuation of the Action T4 policies
led to more than 200,000 additional deaths. In addition, technology that was
developed under Action T4, particularly the use of lethal gas to effect large
scale murder, was transferred to the medical division of the Reich Interior
Ministry, along with transfers of personnel who had participated in the
development of the technology. This technology, the personnel and the
techniques developed to deceive victims were used in the implementation of
industrial killings in mobile death vans and established extermination camps.
The
name T4 was an abbreviation of Tiergartenstraße 4, the address of a villa in
the Berlin borough of Tiergarten, which was the headquarters of the Gemeinnützige
Stiftung für Heil- und Anstaltspflege (literally, "Charitable
Foundation for Curative and Institutional Care").[11] This
body operated under the direction of Reichsleiter
Philipp
Bouhler, the head of Hitler's private chancellery, and Dr. Karl Brandt,
Hitler's personal physician. This villa was destroyed, but a plaque set in the
pavement on Tiergartenstraße marks its location and historic significance.
Language
Euthanasia (from Greek: εὐθανασία;
"good death": εὖ, eu; "well" or "good" –
θάνατος, thanatos; "death") refers to the practice of
intentionally ending a life in order to relieve pain and suffering. Hitler's
directive to create the programme uses the German term "Gnadentod"
which translates to 'mercy death'.
The
Aktion T4 programme used the term 'euthanasia' as bureaucratic cover and in the
minimal public relations efforts (see poster above) to invest what was
essentially an outgrowth of eugenics with greater medical legitimacy. It is
clear that little, if any of the killing, however, was done to alleviate pain
or suffering on the part of the victims. Rather the bulk of the evidence,
including faked death certificates, deception to the victims and to the victims
families and widespread use of cremation indicates the killing was done solely
according to the socio-political aims and beliefs of the victimizers.
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Hitler's order for the
„Aktion T4“, which led to 70.000 people being killed.
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Background
The
T4 programme is thought to have developed from the Nazi Party's policy of
"racial hygiene", the belief that the German people needed to be
"cleansed" of "racially unsound" elements, which included
people with disabilities. Historians consider the euthanasia programme as
related to the evolution in policy that ordered the extermination of the Jews
of Europe.
Racial
hygienist ideas and social Darwinism
were widespread in many western countries in the early 20th century. Emerging
information about genetic diseases and conditions led people to think they
could prevent their being passed on to future generations. The eugenics
movement had many followers among educated people, being particularly strong in
the United States. The idea of sterilising those carrying hereditary defects or
exhibiting what was thought to be hereditary antisocial behaviour was widely accepted.
The United States, Sweden, Switzerland and other countries also passed laws
authorizing sterilization of certain classes of people. For example, between
1935 and 1975, Sweden sterilised 63,000 people on eugenic grounds.
The
policy and research agenda in racial hygiene and eugenics were actively
promoted by Emil Kraepelin, a convinced social-Darwinist. The eugenic
sterilization of persons diagnosed with (and viewed as predisposed to)
schizophrenia was advocated by Eugene Bleuler who presumed racial deterioration
because of mental and physical cripples in his Textbook of Psychiatry:
The more severely burdened should not propagate themselves… If we do nothing but make mental and physical cripples capable of propagating themselves, and the healthy stocks have to limit the number of their children because so much has to be done for the maintenance of others, if natural selection is generally suppressed, then unless we will get new measures our race must rapidly deteriorate.
Hitler's
ideology had embraced the enforcement of "racial hygiene" from his
early days. In his book Mein Kampf
(1924), Hitler wrote:
He who is bodily and mentally not sound and deserving may not perpetuate this misfortune in the bodies of his children. The völkische [people's] state has to perform the most gigantic rearing-task here. One day, however, it will appear as a deed greater than the most victorious wars of our present bourgeois era.
The
Nazis began to implement "racial hygiene" policies as soon as they
came to power. The July 1933 "Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily
Diseased Offspring" prescribed compulsory sterilisation for people with a
range of conditions thought to be hereditary, such as schizophrenia, epilepsy, Huntington's
chorea and "imbecility". Sterilisation was also mandated for chronic
alcoholism and other forms of social deviance. This law was administered by the
Interior Ministry under Wilhelm Frick
through special Hereditary Health Courts (Erbgesundheitsgerichte), which
examined the inmates of nursing homes, asylums, prisons, aged-care homes, and
special schools to select those to be sterilised.
It
is estimated that 360,000 people were sterilised under this law between 1933
and 1939. Within the Nazi administration, some suggested that the programme
should be extended to people with physical disabilities, but such ideas had to
be expressed carefully, given that one of the most powerful figures of the
regime, Joseph Goebbels, had a deformed right leg. Philipp Bouhler was
mobility-impaired as a result of war wounds to his legs. After 1937, the acute
shortage of labour in Germany arising from the demands of the crash rearmament
programme meant that anyone capable of work was deemed to be "useful"
and thus exempted from the law. The rate of sterilisation declined.
As
a related aspect of the "medical" and scientific basis of this
programme, the Nazi doctors took thousands of brains from euthanasia victims
for research.
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Portrait of Karl
Brandt as a defendant in the Medical Case Trial at Nuremberg. [Photograph
#06231]
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Philipp Bouhler, Head
of the T4 programme
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Implementation
Although
officially started in September 1939, Action T4 might have been initiated with
a sort of trial balloon. In late 1938, Adolf Hitler instructed his personal
physician Karl Brandt to evaluate a family's petition for the "mercy
killing" of their blind, physically and developmentally disabled infant
boy. The boy was eventually killed in July 1939. Hitler instructed Brandt to
proceed in the same manner in similar cases. The Reich Committee for the
Scientific Registering of Hereditary and Congenital Illnesses was
established on 18 August 1939, three weeks after the killing of the mentioned
boy. It was to prepare and proceed with the registration of ill children or
newborns identified as defective. Secret killing of infants began in 1939 and
increased after the war started. By 1941, more than 5,000 children had been
killed.
Hitler
was in favour of killing those whom he judged to be "unworthy of life".
In a 1939 conference with health minister Leonardo Conti and the head of the Reich
Chancellery, Hans Lammers, a
few months before the euthanasia decree, Hitler gave as examples of "life
unworthy of life:" severely mentally ill people who he believed could only
be bedded on sawdust or sand because they "perpetually dirtied
themselves", or who "put their own excrement into their mouths,
eating it and so on".
Both
his physician, Dr. Karl Brandt, and the head of the Reich Chancellery, Hans
Lammers, testified after the war that Hitler had told them as early as 1933, at
the time the sterilisation law was passed, that he favoured killing the
incurably ill, but recognised that public opinion would not accept this. In
1935, Hitler told the Reich Doctors' Leader, Dr. Gerhard
Wagner, that the question could not be taken up in peacetime:
"Such a problem could be more smoothly and easily carried out in
war", he said. He intended, he wrote, "in the event of a war
radically to solve the problem of the mental asylums". The initiation of
war also provided Hitler with the possibility of carrying out a policy he had
long favoured.
This
issue assumed new urgency in wartime according to the Nazi regime. People with
severe disabilities, even if sterilised, still needed institutional care. They
occupied places in facilities which, during war, would be needed for wounded
soldiers and people evacuated from bombed cities. They were housed and fed at
the expense of the state, and took up the time of doctors and nurses. The Nazis
barely tolerated this support in peacetime. Few supported care for such people
in wartime, especially in the last years of World War II when conditions
overall were so terrible in Germany. As a leading Nazi doctor, Dr. Hermann
Pfannmüller, said: "The idea is unbearable to me that the best, the flower
of our youth must lose its life at the front in order that feebleminded and
irresponsible asocial elements can have a secure existence in the asylum".
Even
before the Nazis came to power, the German eugenics movement had an extreme
wing, led by Alfred Hoche and
Karl Binding. As early as 1920 Binding had
advocated killing those with lives judged to be "life unworthy of
life" (lebensunwertes Leben). Germany in the years after World
War I was particularly susceptible to ideas of this kind. Darwinism was
interpreted by people in the movement as justifying the nation's promotion of
the propagation of "beneficial" genes and prevent the propagation of
"harmful" ones. Lifton notes: "The argument went that the best
young men died in war, causing a loss to the Volk of the best available
genes. The genes of those who did not fight (the worst genes) then proliferated
freely, accelerating biological and cultural degeneration". The
government, the eugenicists argued, must intervene to prevent this.
These
views had gained ground after 1930, when the Depression caused sharp cuts in
funding to state mental hospitals, creating squalor and overcrowding. Most
German eugenicists were already strongly nationalist and anti-Semitic, and
embraced the Nazi regime with enthusiasm. Many were appointed to positions in
the Health Ministry and German research institutes. Their ideas were gradually
adopted by the majority of the German medical profession, from which Jewish and
communist doctors were soon purged.
During
the 1930s, the Nazi Party carried out a campaign of propaganda in favour of
"euthanasia". The National Socialist Racial and Political Office
(NSRPA) produced leaflets, posters and short films to be shown in cinemas,
pointing out to Germans the cost of maintaining asylums for the incurably ill
and insane. These films included The Inheritance (Das Erbe, 1935), The
Victim of the Past (Opfer der Vergangenheit, 1937), which was given a major
premiere in Berlin and was shown in all German cinemas, and I Accuse (Ich
klage an, 1941), which was based on a novel by Dr Hellmuth Unger, a consultant
for the child euthanasia program. Catholic institutions, which could be
expected to resist the killing of their patients, were progressively closed and
their inmates transferred to already overcrowded state institutions. There the
squalid conditions provided further ammunition for campaigns in favour of
euthanasia.
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| Schönbrunn Psychiatric Hospital, 1934. Photo by SS photographer Friedrich Franz Bauer. |
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Portrait of Viktor
Brack as a defendant in the Medical Case Trial at Nuremberg. [Photograph
##07333], Porträt von Viktor Brack als Angeklagter im Nürnberger Ärzteprozess.
[Fotografie#07333]
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Killing
of children
Main
article: Child euthanasia in Nazi Germany
Extermination
centres were established at six existing psychiatric hospitals: Bernburg, Brandenburg, Grafeneck, Hadamar, Hartheim, and Sonnenstein. They played a crucial
role in developments leading to the Holocaust.
In
the summer of 1939, the parents of a severely deformed child (identified in
2007 as Gerhard Kretschmar), born near Leipzig, wrote to Hitler seeking his
permission for their child to be put to death. Hitler approved this and
authorized the creation of the Reich Committee for the Scientific Registering
of Serious Hereditary and Congenital Illnesses (Reichsausschuss zur
wissenschaftlichen Erfassung erb- und anlagebedingter schwerer Leiden),
headed by Karl Brandt, his personal physician, and administered by Herbert
Linden of the Interior Ministry and SS-Oberführer Viktor Brack. Brandt
and Bouhler were authorized to approve applications to kill children in similar
circumstances, though Bouhler left the details to subordinates such as Brack
and SA-Oberführer Werner Blankenburg.
This
precedent was used to establish a programme of killing children with severe
disabilities; the 'guardian' consent element soon disappeared. From August
1939, the Interior Ministry began registering children with disabilities,
requiring doctors and midwives to report all cases of newborns with severe
disabilities. Those to be killed were identified as "all children under
three years of age in whom any of the following 'serious hereditary diseases'
were 'suspected': idiocy and Down syndrome (especially when associated with
blindness and deafness); microcephaly; hydrocephaly; malformations of all
kinds, especially of limbs, head, and spinal column; and paralysis, including spastic
conditions". The reports were assessed by a panel of medical experts, of
whom three were required to give their approval before a child could be killed.
The
Ministry used various deceptions to gain consent from parents or guardians,
particularly in Catholic areas, where parents were generally uncooperative.
Parents were told that their children were being sent to "Special
Sections" for children, where they would receive improved treatment. The
children sent to these centres were kept for "assessment" for a few
weeks and then killed by injection of toxic chemicals, typically phenol; their
deaths were recorded as "pneumonia". Autopsies were usually
performed, and brain samples were taken to be used for "medical
research." This apparently helped to ease the consciences of many of those
involved, since it gave them the feeling that the children had not died in
vain, and that the whole programme had a genuine medical purpose.
Once
war broke out in September 1939, the programme adopted less rigorous standards
of assessment and a quicker approval process. It expanded to include older
children and adolescents. The conditions covered also expanded and came to
include
"various borderline or limited impairments in children of different ages, culminating in the killing of those designated as juvenile delinquents. Jewish children could be placed in the net primarily because they were Jewish; and at one of the institutions, a special department was set up for 'minor Jewish-Aryan half-breeds'".
At
the same time, increased pressure was placed on parents to agree to their
children's being sent away. Many parents suspected what was really happening,
especially when it became apparent that institutions for children with
disabilities were being systematically cleared of their charges, and refused
consent. The parents were warned that they could lose custody of all their
children, and if that did not suffice, the parents could be threatened with
call-up for "labour duty". By 1941, more than 5,000 children had been
killed. The last child to be killed under Action T4 was Richard Jenne on 29 May
1945 in the children's ward of the Kaufbeuren-Irsee state hospital in Bavaria,
Germany, more than three weeks after troops from the U.S. had occupied the town.
Killing
of adults
Brandt
and Bouhler soon developed plans to expand the programme of euthanasia to
adults. In July 1939, they held a meeting attended by Dr. Leonardo
Conti, Reich Health Leader and state secretary for health in the Interior
Ministry, and Professor Werner Heyde, head of the SS medical department. This
meeting agreed to arranging a national register of all institutionalised people
with mental illnesses or physical disabilities.
The
first adults with disabilities to be killed by the Nazi regime were not
Germans, but Poles. The SS men of Einsatzkommando
16 cleared the hospitals and mental asylums of the Wartheland, a region of
western Poland which was earmarked for incorporation into Germany and
resettlement by ethnic Germans following the German conquest of Poland. In the
Danzig (now Gdańsk) area, some 7,000 Polish inmates of various institutions
were shot, while 10,000 were killed in the Gdynia area. Similar measures were
taken in other areas of Poland destined for incorporation into Germany. At
Posen (occupied Poznań), hundreds of patients were killed by means of carbon
monoxide gas in an improvised gas chamber developed by Dr Albert
Widmann, chief chemist of the German Criminal Police (Kripo). In December
1939, the SS head, Heinrich Himmler, witnessed one of these gassings, ensuring
that this invention would later be put to much wider uses.
The
idea of killing "useless" mental patients soon spread from occupied
Poland to adjoining areas of Germany, probably because Nazi Party and SS officers
in these areas were most familiar with what was happening in Poland. These were
also the areas where Germans wounded from the Polish campaign were expected to
be accommodated, which created a demand for hospital space. The Gauleiter
of Pomerania, Franz Schwede-Coburg, dispatched 1,400 patients from five
Pomeranian hospitals to Poland, where they were shot. The Gauleiter of
East Prussia, Erich Koch, likewise had 1,600 patients killed. In all,
more than 8,000 Germans were killed in this initial wave of killings. These
were carried out on the initiative of local officials, although Himmler
certainly knew and approved of them.
The
official programme for killing adults with mental or physical disabilities
began with a letter from Hitler issued in October 1939. The letter charged
Bouhler and Brandt with "enlarging the authority of certain physicians, to
be designated by name, in such a manner that persons who, according to human judgement,
are incurable, can, upon a most careful diagnosis of their condition of
sickness, be accorded a mercy death." The letter was backdated to 1
September to provide legality to the killings already carried out, and to link
the programme more definitely to the war, giving it a rationale of wartime
necessity. This letter, which provided the sole legal basis for the programme,
was not a formal "Führer decree", which in Nazi Germany had the force
of law. Hitler deliberately bypassed Health Minister Conti and his department,
who were held to be insufficiently imbued with National Socialist ruthlessness
and who might have raised awkward questions about the legality of the
programme. He entrusted it to his personal agents Bouhler and Brandt.
The
programme was administered by Viktor Brack and his staff from Tiergartenstraße
4, under the guise of the "Charitable Foundation for Cure and
Institutional Care", and supervised by Bouhler and Brandt. Others closely
involved included Dr Herbert Linden, who had been heavily involved in the
children's programme; Dr Ernst-Robert Grawitz, chief physician of the SS; and August
Becker, an SS chemist. These officials chose the doctors who were to carry
out the operational part of the programme. They were chosen for their political
reliability, professional reputation, and known sympathy for radical eugenics.
They included several who had proved their worth in the child-killing
programme, such as Unger, Heinze, and Hermann Pfannmüller. The new recruits
were mostly psychiatrists, notably Professor Carl
Schneider of Heidelberg, Professor Max de
Crinis of Berlin and Professor Paul
Nitsche from the Sonnenstein state institution. Heyde became the
operational leader of the programme, succeeded later by Nitsche.
In
early October all hospitals, nursing homes, old-age homes, sanatoria were
required to report all patients who had been institutionalised for five years or
more, who had been committed as "criminally insane", who were of
"non-Aryan race", or who had been diagnosed with any of a list of
specified conditions. These included schizophrenia, epilepsy, Huntington's chorea, advanced syphilis, senile
dementia, paralysis,
encephalitis
and "terminal neurological conditions generally". Many doctors and
administrators assumed that the purpose of the reports was to identify inmates
who were capable of being drafted for "labour service". They tended
to overstate the degree of incapacity of their patients, to protect them from
labour conscription – with fatal consequences. When some institutions
refused to co-operate, teams of T4 doctors (or in some cases Nazi medical
students) visited them and compiled their own lists, sometimes in a very
haphazard and ideologically motivated way. At the same time, during 1940 all
Jewish patients were removed from institutions and killed.
As
with the child inmates, the adult cases were assessed by a panel of experts,
working at the Tiergartenstraße offices. The experts were required to make their
judgments solely on the basis of the reports, rather than on detailed medical
histories, let alone examinations. Sometimes they dealt with hundreds of
reports at a time. On each they marked a + (meaning death), a -
(meaning life), or occasionally a ? meaning that they were unable to
decide. Three "death" verdicts condemned the person concerned. As
with reviews of children, over time these processes became less rigorous, the
range of conditions considered "unsustainable" grew broader, and
zealous Nazis further down the chain of command increasingly made decisions on
their own initiative.
Gassing
At
first patients were killed by lethal injection, the method established for
killing children. The method was soon considered too slow and inefficient for
killing adults, who needed larger doses of increasingly scarce and expensive
drugs and were more likely to need restraint. Hitler recommended to Brandt that
carbon monoxide gas be used. At his trial, Brandt described this as a
"major advance in medical history". The first gassings took place at Brandenburg
Euthanasia Centre in January 1940, under the supervision of Widmann,
Becker, and Christian Wirth, a Kripo (criminal police) officer who was later to
play a prominent role in the "final solution" extermination of the
Jews. Viktor Brack was head of these operations.
Once
the efficacy of this method was established, it became standardised and was
instituted at a number of centres across Germany. In addition to Brandenburg,
these included Grafeneck Castle
in Baden-Württemberg (10,824 dead), Schloss
Hartheim near Linz in Austria (over
8,000 dead), Sonnenstein
Euthanasia Centre in Saxony
(15,000 dead), Bernburg
Euthanasia Centre in Saxony-Anhalt and Hadamar
Euthanasia Centre in Hesse (14,494 dead). These centres were also
used to kill prisoners transferred from concentration camps
in Germany and Austria.
Patients
were transferred from their institutions to the killing centres in buses,
called the Community Patients Transports Service, operated by teams of SS men
wearing white coats, to give an air of medical care. To prevent the families
and doctors of the patients from tracing them, the patients were often first
sent to transit centres in major hospitals where they were supposedly assessed.
They were moved again to "special treatment" (Sonderbehandlung) centres. Families
were sent letters explaining that owing to wartime regulations, it was not
possible for them to visit relatives in these centres. Most of these patients
were killed within 24 hours of arriving at the centres, and their bodies
cremated. For every person killed, a death certificate was prepared, giving a
false but plausible cause of death. This was sent to the family along with an
urn of ashes (random ashes, since the victims were cremated en masse).
The preparation of thousands of falsified death certificates took up most of
the working day of the doctors who operated the centres.
During
1940, the centres at Brandenburg, Grafeneck and Hartheim killed nearly 10,000
people each, while another 6,000 were killed at Sonnenstein. In all, about 35,000
people were killed in T4 operations that year. Operations at Brandenburg and
Grafeneck were wound up at the end of the year, partly because the areas they
served had been cleared and partly because of public opposition. In 1941,
however, the centres at Bernburg and Sonnenstein increased their operations,
while Hartheim (where Wirth and Franz Stangl were successively commandants)
continued as before. As a result, another 35,000 people were killed before
August 1941, when the T4 programme was officially shut down by Hitler. Even
after that date, however, the centres continued to be used to kill
concentration camp inmates: eventually some 20,000 people in this category were
killed.
In
1971 the Austrian-born journalist Gitta Sereny conducted a series of
interviews with Franz Stangl, who was in prison in Düsseldorf after having been convicted of
co-responsibility for killing 900,000 people as commandant of the Sobibor
and Treblinka
extermination camps
in Poland. Stangl gave Sereny a detailed account of the operations of the T4
programme based on his time as commandant of the killing facility at the
Hartheim institute. He described how the inmates of various asylums were
removed and transported by bus to Hartheim. Some were in no mental state to
know what was happening to them, but many were perfectly sane, and for them
various forms of deception were used. They were told they were at a special
clinic where they would receive improved treatment, and were given a brief
medical examination on arrival. They were induced to enter what appeared to be
a shower block, where they were gassed with carbon monoxide (this ruse was
later used on a much larger scale at the extermination camps).
Technology
and Personnel Transfer
See
also: Category:Action T4 personnel and T4-Gutachter
After
the official end of the euthanasia programme in 1941 the technology developed,
many of the personnel, and the techniques used to deceive victims, were
transferred to the national medical division of the Reich Interior Ministry.
All of these were then put to further use in the widespread industrial killings
of the Eastern European lands and in the Extermination Camps.
Victim
numbers
|
Number of victims of Action T4
(official data)
1940 – September 1941 |
|||||
|
T4
Center
|
operation
|
number of victims
|
|||
|
from
|
to
|
1940
|
1941
|
total
|
|
|
20
January 1940
|
December
1940
|
9,839
|
---
|
9,839
|
|
|
8
February 1940
|
October
1940
|
9,772
|
---
|
9,772
|
|
|
21
November 1940
|
30
July 1943
|
---
|
8,601
|
8,601
|
|
|
6
May 1940
|
December
1944
|
9,670
|
8,599
|
18,269
|
|
|
June
1940
|
September
1942
|
5,943
|
7,777
|
13,720
|
|
|
January
1941
|
31
July 1942
|
---
|
10,072
|
10,072
|
|
|
grand total:
|
35,224
|
35,049
|
70,273
|
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|
Source:
Document 87, P. 232 cit. in Ernst Klee. Dokumente zur
"Euthanasie", 1985.
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Opposition
Hitler
and his aides were aware from the start that a programme of killing large
numbers of Germans with disabilities would be unpopular with the German public.
Although Hitler had a fixed policy of not issuing written instructions for
policies relating to what would later be classed by the United Nations and
other parties as crimes against humanity, he made an exception when he provided
Bouhler and Brack with written authority for the T4 programme in his
confidential October 1939 letter. This was apparently to overcome opposition
within the German state bureaucracy. The Justice Minister, Franz Gürtner, had to be shown Hitler's
letter in August 1940 to gain his cooperation.
Hitler
told Bouhler at the outset that "the Führer's Chancellery must under no
circumstances be seen to be active in this matter." He recommended caution
in Catholic areas, which after the annexations of Austria and the Sudetenland in 1938 included nearly half
the population of Greater Germany; public opinion could be expected to be
hostile. In March 1940 a confidential report from the SD in Austria warned that the killing
programme must be implemented with stealth "in order to avoid a probable
backlash of public opinion during the war".
Opposition
persisted within the bureaucracy. Lothar Kreyssig, a district judge and
member of the Confessing Church,
wrote to Gürtner protesting that the T4 programme was illegal (since no law or
formal decree from Hitler had authorised it). Gürtner replied, "If you
cannot recognise the will of the Führer as a source of law, then you cannot
remain a judge", and had Kreyssig dismissed.
In
the Concordat of 1933
between Germany and the Holy See, the
Catholic Church had agreed to withdraw from all political activity. In 1933 the
prospect of state-sanctioned mass killing of German citizens had not occurred
to the Church. Such a challenge to fundamental Christian belief in the sanctity
of human life posed a serious dilemma for German Catholics. In 1935 the Church
had protested in a private memorandum against proposals to pass a law
legalising euthanasia: this was one reason the law was not enacted. August von Galen, the Bishop of Munster
accused the government of breaking the law and publicly condemned the policy.
Fr Bernhard Lichtenberg protested the policy to the Nazis chief medical
officer.[68] The regime took the program
underground.
In
January 1939, Viktor Brack commissioned a paper from Dr Joseph Mayer, Professor of Moral Theology at the University of
Paderborn, on the likely reactions of the churches in the event of a state
euthanasia programme being instituted. Mayer – a longstanding euthanasia
advocate – reported that the churches would not oppose such a programme if
it was seen to be in the national interest. Brack showed this paper to Hitler
in July, and it may have increased his confidence that the
"euthanasia" programme would be acceptable to German public opinion.
(When Gitta Sereny interviewed Mayer shortly before his death in 1967, he
denied that he had approved of killing people with disabilities, but since no
copies of this paper are known to survive, this cannot be determined.) This
turned out not to be the case. The T4 programme was the sole example of an action
by the Nazi regime which provoked large-scale public protests.
It
was impossible to keep the T4 programme secret: thousands of doctors, nurses
and administrators were involved in it, and the majority of those killed had
families who were actively concerned about their welfare. Despite the strictest
orders to maintain secrecy, some of the staff at the killing centres talked
about what was going on. In some cases families could tell that the causes of
death in certificates were false, e.g. when a patient was claimed to have died
of appendicitis, even though his appendix had been surgically removed some
years earlier. In other cases, several families in the same town would receive
death certificates on the same day. In the towns where the killing centres were
located, many people saw the inmates arrive in buses, saw the smoke from the
crematoria chimneys, noticed that no bus-loads of inmates ever left the killing
centres, and drew the correct conclusion. In Hadamar, ashes containing human
hair rained down on the town. In May 1941 the Frankfurt County Court wrote to
Gürtner describing scenes in Hadamar where children shouted in the streets that
people were being taken away in buses to be gassed.
During
1940 rumours of what was taking place spread, and many Germans withdrew their
relatives from asylums and sanatoria to care for them at home – often with
great expense and difficulty. In some places doctors and psychiatrists
co-operated with families to have patients discharged, or, if the families
could afford it, had them transferred to private clinics where the reach of T4
did not extend. Other doctors agreed to "re-diagnose" some patients
so that they no longer met the T4 criteria. This risked exposure when the Nazi
zealots from Berlin conducted inspections. In Kiel, Professor Hans Gerhard
Creutzfeldt managed to save nearly all of his patients. For the most part,
however, doctors co-operated with the programme, either from ignorance as to
its true nature, agreement with Nazi eugenicist policies, or fear of the regime.
During
1940 protest letters were sent to the Reich Chancellery and the Ministry of
Justice, some of them from Nazi Party members. The first open protest against
the removal of people from asylums took place at Absberg in Franconia in
February 1941, and others followed. The SD report on the incident at Absberg
noted that "the removal of residents from the Ottilien Home has caused a
great deal of unpleasantness", and described large crowds of Catholic
townspeople, among them Party members, protesting against the action.
Opposition to the T4 policy sharpened after the German attack on the Soviet
Union in June 1941, because the war in the east produced for the first time
large-scale German casualties, and the hospitals and asylums began to fill up
with maimed and disabled young German soldiers. Rumours began to circulate that
these men would also be subject to "euthanasia."
Church
action
During
1940 and 1941 some Protestant churchmen protested privately against T4, but
none made any public comment. Bishop Theophil Wurm, presiding the Evangelical-Lutheran
Church in Württemberg, wrote a strong letter to Interior Minister
Frick in March 1940. On 4 December 1940 Reinhold Sautter, Supreme Church
Councillor of Württemberg's State Church, reproached the Nazi Ministerial
Councillor Eugen Stähle for the murders in Grafeneck Castle. Stahle retorted with the
Nazi government opinion, that "The fifth commandment: Thou shalt not kill,
is no commandment of God but a Jewish invention" and no longer had any
validity.
Others
who privately protested were the Lutheran theologian Friedrich
von Bodelschwingh, director of the Bethel Institution
for epileptics at Bielefeld; and Pastor
Paul-Gerhard
Braune, director of the Hoffnungstal
Institution near Berlin. Both used their connections with the regime
to negotiate exemptions for their institutions: Bodelschwingh negotiated
directly with Brandt and indirectly with Hermann Göring, whose cousin was a
prominent psychiatrist. Braune had meetings with Justice Minister Gürtner, who
was always dubious about the legality of the programme. Gürtner later wrote a
strongly worded letter to Hitler protesting against it; Hitler did not read it,
but was told about it by Lammers. In general, the leaders of the Protestant
church were more enmeshed with the Nazi regime than was the case for Catholics,
and they were unwilling to criticise its actions.
The
Catholic Church, which since 1933 had pursued a policy of avoiding
confrontation with the Nazi regime in the hope of preserving its core
institutions, became increasingly unable to keep silent in the face of mounting
evidence about the killing of inmates of hospitals and asylums. Leading
Catholic churchmen, led by Cardinal Michael von Faulhaber of Munich, wrote
privately to the government protesting against the policy. In July 1941 the
Church broke its silence when a pastoral letter from the bishops was read out
in all churches, declaring that it was wrong to kill (except in self-defence or
in a morally justified war). This emboldened Catholics to make more outspoken
protests.
A
few weeks after the pastoral letter was read out, the Catholic Bishop of
Münster in Westphalia, Clemens August Graf von Galen,
publicly denounced the T4 programme in a sermon. He telegrammed his text to
Hitler, calling on
"the Führer to defend the people against the Gestapo". "It is a terrible, unjust and catastrophic thing when man opposes his will to the will of God", Galen said. "We are talking about men and women, our compatriots, our brothers and sisters. Poor unproductive people if you wish, but does this mean that they have lost their right to live?"
Historian
Robert Lifton says of this sermon:
"This powerful, populist sermon was immediately reproduced and distributed throughout Germany – indeed, it was dropped among German troops by British Royal Air Force pilots. Galen's sermon probably had a greater impact than any other statement in consolidating anti-'euthanasia' sentiment."
Another
Bishop, Franz Bornewasser of Trier,
also sent protests to Hitler, though not publicly. In August Galen was even
more outspoken, broadening his attack to include the Nazi persecution of
religious orders and the closing of Catholic institutions. He attributed the
heavy allied bombing of Westphalian towns to the wrath of God against Germany
for breaking His laws. Galen's sermons were not reported in the German press,
but were widely circulated in the form of illegally printed leaflets. Local
Nazis asked for Galen to be arrested, but Goebbels told Hitler that such action
would provoke open revolt in Westphalia.
By
August the protests had spread to Bavaria. According to Gitta Sereny, Hitler
was jeered by an angry crowd at Hof – the only time he was opposed in
public during his 12 years of rule. Despite his private fury, Hitler knew that
he could not afford a confrontation with the Church at a time when Germany was
engaged in a life-and-death war, a belief which was reinforced by the advice of
Goebbels, Martin Bormann, head of the Party Chancellery, and Heinrich Himmler,
head of the SS. Robert Lifton writes: "Nazi leaders faced the prospect of
either having to imprison prominent, highly admired clergymen and other protesters –
a course with consequences in terms of adverse public reaction they greatly
feared – or else end the programme." Himmler said: "If operation
T4 had been entrusted to the SS, things would have happened differently",
because "when the Führer entrusts us with a job, we know how to deal with
it correctly, without causing useless uproar among the people."
On
24 August 1941 Hitler ordered the cancellation of the T4 programme. He issued
strict instructions to the Gauleiters to avoid further provocations of the
churches for the duration of the war. The invasion of the Soviet Union in June
provided new opportunities to use the T4 personnel. Many were transferred to
the east to begin work on a vastly greater programme of killing: the
"final solution of the Jewish question". But the winding up of the T4
programme did not end the killing of people with disabilities. From the end of
1941, the killing became less systematic. Lifton documents that the killing of
both adults and children continued to the end of the war, on the local initiative
of institute directors and party leaders. The methods reverted to those
employed before use of the gas chambers: lethal injection, or simple
starvation. Kershaw estimates that by the end of 1941 75,000 to 100,000 people
had been killed in the T4 programme. Afterward tens of thousands of
concentration camp inmates, and people judged incapable of work, were killed in
Germany between 1942 and 1945. (This figure does not include the Jews who were
deported to their deaths in 1942 and 1943). The Hartheim and Hardamar centres,
for example, continued to kill people sent to them from all over Germany until
1945.
Postwar
legacy
The
Doctors' Trial
Main
article: Doctors' Trial
In
December 1946, an American military tribunal (commonly called the Doctors'
Trial) prosecuted 23 doctors and administrators for their roles in war
crimes and crimes against humanity. These crimes included the systematic
killing of those deemed "unworthy of life", including the mentally
disabled, the institutionalized mentally ill, and the physically impaired.
After 140 days of proceedings, including the testimony of 85 witnesses and the
submission of 1,500 documents, in August 1947 the court pronounced 16 of the
defendants guilty. Seven were sentenced to death and executed on 2 June 1948. They
included Dr. Karl Brandt and Viktor Brack.
The
indictment read in part:
14. Between September 1939 and April 1945 the defendants Karl Brandt, Blome, Brack, and Hoven unlawfully, willfully, and knowingly committed crimes against humanity, as defined by Article II of Control Council Law No. 10, in that they were principals in, accessories to, ordered, abetted, took a consenting part in, and were connected with plans and enterprises involving the execution of the so called "euthanasia" program of the German Reich, in the course of which the defendants herein murdered hundreds of thousands of human beings, including German civilians, as well as civilians of other nations. The particulars concerning such murders are set forth in paragraph 9 of count two of this indictment and are incorporated herein by reference.
Also
in 1945, American forces tried seven staff members of the Hadamar killing centre for the killing of
Soviet and Polish nationals, which was within their jurisdiction under
international law, as these were the citizens of wartime allies. (Hadamar was
within the American Zone of Occupation in Germany. This was before the December
1945 Allied resolution supporting prosecution of "crimes against
humanity" for such mass atrocities.) Alfons Klein, Karl Ruoff and Wilhelm
Willig were sentenced to death and executed; the other four were given long
prison sentences. In 1946, newly reconstructed German courts tried members of
the Hadamar staff for the murders of nearly 15,000 German citizens at the
facility. A lead doctor and nurse were convicted.
Others
involved in the programme
See
also: Category:Action T4 personnel and T4-Gutachter
- August Becker, initially sentenced to three years after the war, in 1960 was tried again and sentenced to 10 years in prison. He was released early due to ill health and died in 1967.
- Werner Blankenburg, lived under an alias and died in 1957.
- Philipp Bouhler, committed suicide in captivity, May 1945.
- Werner Catel, was cleared by a de-nazification board after World War 2 and was head of pediatrics at the University of Kiel. He retired early after his role in the T4 program came to light.
- Leonardo Conti, hanged himself in captivity, October 6, 1945.
- Dr Ernst-Robert Grawitz killed himself shortly before the fall of Berlin in April 1945.
- Dr Herbert Linden, 1945, suicide. Overseers of the program were initially Herbert Linden and Werner Heyde. Linden was later replaced by Hermann Paul Nitsche.
- Dr Fritz Cropp d. April 6, 1984, Bremen. A Nazi official, in 1933, in Oldenburg, Cropp was appointed the country medical officer of health. Two years later, in 1935, he transferred to Berlin, where he worked as a ministerial adviser in the Division IV (health care and people care) in the Ministry of the Interior. In 1939, he became Assistant Director. Fritz Cropp was involved in the Nazi "euthanasia", the so-called action T-4, in 1940. He was Herbert Linden's superior. He was responsible for patient transfers.
- Werner Heyde, after having escaped detection for 18 years, killed himself in 1964 before being brought to trial.
- Dr Heinrich Gross was tried twice. One sentence was overturned and another was suspended; he died in 2005.
- Lorenz Hackenholt, vanished 1945.
- Erich Koch served time in prison from 1950 to his death in 1986.
- Erwin Lambert, died in 1976.
- Dr Friedrich Mennecke died in 1947 while awaiting trial.
- Philipp, Landgrave of Hesse, the governor of Hesse-Nassau, was not tried for his part in the T4 programme; he died in 1980.
- Paul Nitsche was tried and executed by an East German court in 1948.
- Professor Carl Schneider hanged himself in his prison cell in 1946, while awaiting trial.
- Franz Schwede was sentenced to 10 years in prison in 1948 and was pardoned in 1956; he died in 1960.
- Dr. Ernst Illing was the director of the Vienna Psychiatric-Neurological Clinic for Children Am Spielgrund, where he killed about 200 children, sentenced to death on July 18, 1946
- Dr. Marianne Türk, was a doctor at Vienna Psychiatric-Neurological Clinic for Children Am Spielgrund where, together with Ernst Illing, she killed 200 children. She was sentenced to 10 years prison on July 18, 1946.
The
Ministry for State Security of East Germany had around 30,000 files of the T4
project stored away in their archives. Those files became available to the
public in the 1990 German Reunification, leading to a new wave of research on
these wartime crimes.
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