The German Euthanasia Program

 

Influenced by the writings of eugenicists, Hitler considered it necessary for Germany’s racial health and military effectiveness to eliminate mentally and genetically defective citizens. On July 14, 1933, the National Socialist regime introduced compulsory sterilization for Germans thought to be suffering from hereditary weaknesses. Some 360,000 Germans had been sterilized by the time World War II broke out. Abortion on eugenic grounds was also legalized in 1935. It was not until the outbreak of the Second World War, however, that National  Socialist Germany fully implemented its euthanasia program.111 

The first official German euthanasia occurred when Gerhard Herbert Kretschmar was killed on July 25, 1939. This boy was born on Feb. 20, 1939, and was blind, lacked one leg and part of one arm, and seemed to be an idiot. The child’s parents contacted the Chancellery of the Fuehrer and requested the child be put to sleep. After seeing documents and photographs of the child, Hitler instructed Dr. Karl Brandt to investigate the matter and consult with the child’s pediatricians. Once all of the doctors agreed that the diagnosis corresponded with the conditions outlined in the parents’ petition, Brandt authorized the killing of the child.112 An estimated 5,000 German children were euthanized during the war.113   

In August 1939 Hitler let it be known to his close associates that he approved any measure which could be seen as delivering handicapped patients from pain and suffering. Probably in the late autumn or winter of 1939, Hitler backdated a document to Sept. 1, 1939, that authorized the euthanasia program. The authorization states: “Reich Leader Bouhler and Dr. Med Brandt are charged with the responsibility of enlarging the powers of specific physicians, designated by name, so that patients who, on the basis of human judgment, are considered incurable, can be granted mercy death after the most careful assessment of their condition.”114  

German doctors determined that carbon monoxide gas was the most painless and humane way to euthanize people. The use of carbon monoxide gas therefore became the standard technique to kill people in the adult euthanasia program, with the first killings probably beginning in January 1940. Richard von Hegener observed that patients would lose consciousness within two to three minutes of the gas entering the room. Within five minutes all of the patients had fallen into a “kind of sleep.” The gas was left running for half an hour before a physician, protected by a gas mask, entered the room, examined the bodies, and pronounced that all of the patients were dead.115

The German euthanasia program, codenamed “Action T-4”, was conducted at former hospitals taken over exclusively for use as killing centers, as well as at hospitals that continued their previous functions. Each hospital was responsible for killing patients from a specific region of Germany. The patients were normally killed in groups of 15 to 20, although occasionally many more people were crowded into the gas chambers. By one estimate, 80,000 adults were euthanized at six different hospitals in Germany during the war.116  

By August 1941, public pressure on the National Socialist regime to end the euthanasia program was mounting. Public knowledge of the euthanasia program and the growing criticism from churches, the judiciary, and the state bureaucracy were among the key factors in bringing an end to the first phase of the euthanasia operation. Church leaders, and especially Bishop Clemens August Graf von Galen, made it internationally known that National Socialist Germany was killing handicapped children and adults on an unprecedented scale. In a sermon on Aug. 3, 1941, Galen openly attacked the hypocrisy and the economic rationale for killing handicapped people. Instead of punishing Galen, Hitler ordered a stop to the euthanasia program on Aug. 24, 1941.117  

Despite Hitler’s order to stop the euthanasia program, a second phase of the program developed later in the war. In the period between 1941 and 1944, an estimated 35,000 patients were evacuated and deported from various mental institutions to make room for physically ill and wounded soldiers and civilians. Thousands of these evacuated mental patients were euthanized. Mentally ill patients were also now killed in their own institutions without being transferred. The number of patients to be euthanized was not centrally organized, but was at the discretion of the relevant asylum director.118

The euthanasia operation intensified in 1944, and more and more patients became victims of the killing program. Allied air raids and failing communication lines made it difficult for any centralized control of the euthanasia operation. The German euthanasia program continued primarily because of a lack of hospital space and beds. Compared to the millions of German soldiers and civilians who had died in the war, the fate of thousands of mental patients who added nothing to the war effort seemed of little importance. Unlike in 1940 and 1941, after five years of war the opposition to the euthanasia program from the churches, the judiciary, and the general population had greatly diminished.119 

Although Hitler had authorized the euthanasia program in a document backdated to Sept. 1, 1939, there was no official law allowing euthanasia because Hitler thought such a law would feed opposition to the program. The entire project was kept secret to the greatest extent possible. In this regard, doctors falsified every death certificate to cover-up the killing program. The key principle in choosing the false cause of death was medical credibility: assigning a disease consistent with a patient’s medical history that he or she could have contracted. Designated causes of death could include almost anything—infectious diseases, pneumonia, stroke, heart attack, or diseases of other major organs. This falsification of medical records indicates that the German euthanasia program was an illegal operation that had to be kept secret from the general public to maintain its existence.120  

The use of carbon monoxide gas chambers in the German euthanasia program is a well-documented reality. Their use constitutes a crime against the German people. However, traditional historians improperly state that the use of carbon monoxide gas chambers in the adult euthanasia program was a precursor to the use of homicidal gas chambers in the German concentration camps. As discussed in Chapter Eight, no documentary or forensic evidence exists that homicidal gas chambers were ever used in the German concentration camps.

One revisionist historian states in regard to the lack of documentary evidence of the existence of homicidal gas chambers in German concentration camps:

The German authorities kept astonishingly detailed records of every aspect of camp affairs. Remarkably, though, there is no contemporary documentary evidence of homicidal gassings or of a policy of mass extermination in the camps. Not a single contemporary German document mentions or even refers to killings of Jews in gas chambers. Nor are there any contemporary plans or diagrams of extermination gas chambers. There is similarly no documentary proof that any of the various rooms or buildings said to have been execution gassing facilities were, in fact, ever used as such.121

111 Evans, Richard J., The Third Reich at War, 1939-1945, London: Penguin Books, 2008, pp. 77-78.

112 Schmidt, Ulf, Karl Brandt: The Nazi Doctor, New York: Continuum Books, 2007, pp. 118-119.

113 Evans, Richard J., The Third Reich at War, 1939-1945, London: Penguin Books, 2008, p. 81.

114 Schmidt, Ulf, Karl Brandt: The Nazi Doctor, New York: Continuum Books, 2007, pp. 125, 132-133.

115 Ibid., pp. 138-139.

116 Evans, Richard J., The Third Reich at War, 1939-1945, London: Penguin Books, 2008, pp. 82, 85, 89-90.

117 Schmidt, Ulf, Karl Brandt: The Nazi Doctor, New York: Continuum Books, 2007, pp. 162-163, 166-167. See also Evans, Richard J., The Third Reich at War, 1939-1945, London: Penguin Books, 2008, pp. 99-100.

118 Ibid., pp. 223, 239.

119 Ibid., pp. 222, 242-244, 249.

120 Lifton, Robert Jay, The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide, New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1986, pp. 64, 74.

121 “Extermination Camp Propaganda Myths,” in Gauss, Ernst (ed.), Dissecting the Holocaust: The Growing Critique of Truth and Memory, Capshaw, AL: Thesis and Dissertations Press, 2000, p. 287.

Germany’s War: The Origins, Aftermath and Atrocities of WWII

By John Wear