Hitlers attitude towards the handicapped?
In October 1939 Adolf Hitler did something extremely unusual. He
signed a document which linked him directly with a course of action
which could reflect badly on him - the so called 'adult euthanasia'
policy of killing selected disabled patients. The document, which
allowed his physician, Dr Brandt, and one of his secretariat,
Philipp Bouhler, to pursue a policy of 'mercy killing' was
backdated - significantly - to 1 September 1939, the day the Nazis
invaded Poland.
The reason Hitler signed the document was because it was proving
hard for his subordinates to push forward with something as radical
as the killing of the disabled without some form of authorization.
For this document did not mark the start of the campaign against
the disabled - the policy of 'euthanasia' was already in
operation.
Indeed, the idea of 'Vernichtung lebensunwerten Lebens'
(destruction of life not worthy of life) had been around since the
1920s and had taken additional force as an extension of the
eugenics movement. Eugenics, whose prime idea was that only
genetically 'suitable' people should be allowed to have children,
had followers in many countries in the first half of the Twentieth
Century, notably in America where several states - like Indiana -
enacted legislation which made it legal to sterilize certain
mentally ill individuals.Not surprisingly, given his core belief in
the notion of the 'survival of the fittest', Hitler embraced the
ideas of 'conventional' eugenics, but wanted to take them to an
extreme level. In a propaganda film like 'Opfer der Vergangenheit'
(Victims of the Past), shown in 1937, the Nazi vision was made
clear. Patients in mental asylums were revealed as suffering in
their own minds, whilst the commentary made clear the cost to the
state of keeping these people in care. The implication was obvious
- if these people did not exist then the Nazi state would be much
better off.
The route by which this ideological notion - that it would be
better to remove the seriously disabled - became a practical
reality reveals a great deal about how policy could be made in the
Nazi state. Sometime early in 1939 the father of a severely
disabled child wrote a petition to Hitler asking that his son
should be killed - a so called 'mercy' killing. The petition landed
in the Fuehrer's Chancellery, controlled by an ambitious Nazi
called Philipp Bouhler and staffed by his no less ambitious
underlings. The petition was chosen from thousands of others to be
seen personally by Hitler. When he saw it he ordered Dr Brandt to
consult with the child's doctors and then, subsequently, the child
was killed. Hitler then authorized other children to be dealt with
the same way. Eventually, around 8,000 children were killed, mostly
by poisonous injections.
In the summer of 1939, Hitler let it be known that he would
approve of adult patients who had severe mental illnesses being
treated in the same way. Significantly he said that medical
resources could be put to better use in any forthcoming war.i
Bouhler and Viktor Brack, his deputy, were keen to turn their
Fuehrer's wishes into practical policy and soon a variety of
organisations with reassuring names (like 'Community Patients'
Transport') were established, all based in a house at Number 4
Tiergartenstrasse. Thus, the killing programme that developed was
known as T4.
It was in order to give formal legitimation to this operation
that Hitler signed the document he did in October 1939. Then, over
the next 20 months, the T4 team organized the killing of 70,000 to
90,000 disabled people. In order to deal with this many people a
new system of murder was developed. In several asylums, like
Sonnenstein in east Germany, special fake 'shower' rooms were
built. Once the patients entered these rooms, any suspicions lulled
because they thought they were about to take a shower, carbon
monoxide gas was pumped into the room in order to kill them. This
technique, pioneered in the killing of the disabled, was later to
appear in modified form as a method of murdering the Jews.
This so-called 'adult euthanasia' scheme was extended in 1941 to
concentration camps in a programme known as 14f 13. Prisoners, who
had been selected as too sick to work, were transported to the
euthanasia killing centres. In fact, the first Auschwitz prisoners
to be gassed in the summer of 1941 were not selected because they
were Jews, but because - following 14f 13 - they were sick, and
they were not gassed in the camp (no such facility yet existed) but
transported to Sonnenstein to be murdered.ii Perhaps not
surprisingly given Nazi ideology, German Jews in mental asylums
were, from the spring of 1940, killed under the adult euthanasia
scheme without selection by doctors, and in occupied Poland a
similar widening of the killing criteria was made so that all the
inmates in mental asylums could be killed. In Poland another new
method of killing was devised, the gas van. Mental patients were
put in the back of a lorry and taken for a drive. Once under way
the driver would turn a switch and the carbon monoxide gas from the
engine exhaust would be pumped back into the sealed area where the
patients were crammed. At the end of the journey, they were dead.
By May 1940 around 10,000 Polish mental patients had been killed in
this way in the Germanized areas of West Prussia and the
Warthegau.
Within Germany, after opposition from church leaders (notably
Bishop Galen), Hitler called a halt to the euthanasia action in
August 1941, but many of the T4 staff simply moved on to use their
killing expertise in the murder of the Jews. Most notable was
Christian Wirth, a committed Nazi and policeman in Stuggart, who
had been one of the earliest members of T4 and had helped organize
a gassing demonstration in a mental asylum in Brandenburg in
January 1940.iii He would now go on to help build Belzec, the first
killing centre for Jews which used fixed gas chambers. Then in
August 1942 he was appointed to the job of Inspector of three death
camps (Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka).
The Nazi euthanasia scheme developed because enthusiastic,
committed underlings attempted to make real the 'vision' of their
leader, Adolf Hitler. Something similar would happen with the
development of the Nazis' 'Final Solution' - the extermination of
the Jews - only this time, of course, Hitler would be careful not
to leave any paper trail behind.