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." |
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 ReichsleiterPhilipp 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. |
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 Darwinismwere 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 Frickthrough 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 |
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] |
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-OberführerWerner 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
Gassing
Technology and Personnel Transfer
Victim numbers
Opposition
Church action
Postwar legacy
The Doctors' Trial
Others involved in the programme
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