JUDAICA - Wisdom In Torah

euthanasia
and a reduced standard of care. But this was only the beginning.
In 1935 Adolf Hitler told Gerhard Wagner, the Reich physicians’
leader, that once war began he would implement the
killing of the disabled. As Germany unleashed World War II
and Nazi policy became more radical, the regime crossed the
line separating traditional eugenic policies from killing operations.
Although this radical decision had been initiated by the
political leadership, the scientific and medical community did
not oppose it, because the idea had circulated since at least
1920, the year the jurist Karl Binding and the psychiatrist Alfred
Hoche published The Authorization for the Destruction
of Life Unworthy of Life.
The first Nazi killing operation was directed against institutionalized
disabled patients. It started with the killing of
infants and young children born with mental or physical disabilities.
Hitler appointed Dr. Karl Brandt, his escorting physician,
and Philipp Bouhler, who headed the Chancellery of
the Fuehrer (Kanzlei des Fuehrers, or KdF), to direct the killing
operation, and they in turn designated Viktor Brack, chief of
Office II in the KdF, as the person to implement the Fuehrer’s
order. The so-called children’s euthanasia was top-secret and
was carried out in various hospitals. There the children were
placed in so-called special children’s wards; they were killed
with an overdose of common barbiturates, and sometimes
also through starvation diets.
In September 1939, the killing operation was expanded
to include adults. Hitler first appointed Leonardo Conti, state
secretary for health in the Reich Ministry of Interior, to direct
adult euthanasia, telling him in the presence of Hans Heinrich
Lammers and Martin Bormann “that he considered it appropriate
that life unfit for living of severely insane patients should
be ended by intervention that would result in death.” Conti
accepted the assignment, but he did not remain in charge
long; within a few weeks, Hitler replaced him, turning once
again to Brandt and Bouhler as his plenipotentiaries, so that
Brack and the KdF could administer adult euthanasia alongside
that for children. To avoid implicating the Chancellery,
the staff administering the euthanasia killings moved from the
KdF into a confiscated Jewish villa at Tiergarten Street number
4 and euthanasia was thus soon known as Operation T4,
or simply as T4.
The method used to kill the children could not be used
to kill the far larger number of adults. To accomplish its task,
T4 therefore constructed killing centers, including gas chambers
and crematoria, and developed a killing technique to select,
transport, and “process” the victims. And always the killers
robbed the corpses of their victims, taking gold teeth and
bridge work to enrich the state as well as internal organs to
enrich “scientific research.” For this purpose, T4 established
six killing centers – Brandenburg, Grafeneck, Hartheim, Sonnenstein,
Bernburg, and Hadamar – but only four were ever
operational at the same time. To hide the killings, T4 used subterfuge
to fool the relatives; the killing centers camouflaged
as hospitals wrote letters of condolence and issued fraudulent
death certificates.
In their 1920 book, Binding and Hoche had argued
that euthanasia could only function if the act of this kind
of mercy death would be decriminalized, so that physicians
would not have to fear prosecution under the murder statute,
paragraph 212 of the German penal code, which remained
in force throughout the Nazi period. Since Hitler absolutely
refused to consider promulgating a euthanasia law, the KdF
decided to ask Hitler for written orders, so that they could
convince physicians to collaborate. In October 1939, Hitler
finally signed a document, more an authorization than an
order, that had been prepared by the KdF. But to emphasize
that war would not only alter the international status of the
Reich but also herald “domestic purification,” he predated it
to September 1, 1939, the day World War II began. Prepared
on Hitler’s personal stationery, as if mass murder was his “private
affair,” but never promulgated or published in any legal
gazette, this authorization did not actually have the force of
law, but served, nevertheless, as the “legal” basis for the killing
operation.
The imposed secrecy did not prevent news of the murder
of the disabled to reach the general population. The unrest
of victims’ relatives posed a danger to the regime, and in August
1941 Hitler therefore ordered a stop to the gassing of
the disabled. This order did not, however, end the killing of
the disabled; only their gassing in killing centers stopped.
Children’s euthanasia continued without interruption; adults
were murdered in regular hospitals spread throughout the
Reich. The T4 killing centers also continued to operate for
several years; they were used to kill concentration camp inmates
under a killing enterprise known as Operation 14 f13.
The Austrian killing center Hartheim near Linz continued in
operation until late in 1944 for the killings under 14f13 and
later for the murder of prisoners from the nearby Mauthausen
concentration camp. Furthermore, a selected number of
T4 male staff members were dispatched to Lublin to operate
the killing centers of Operation Reinhard: Belzec, Sobibor,
and Treblinka. One of those was the Austrian physician Irmfried
Eberl, medical director of the T4 killing centers in Brandenburg
and Bernburg, who served as the first commandant
of Treblinka.
After the war, the perpetrators argued that Jews were
never killed in Operation T4, since they did not “deserve”
mercy death, and this was believed at the Nuremberg and
later trials. But this was not true. Jewish institutionalized disabled
patients were included alongside non-Jewish victims
from the beginning. In the spring of 1940, however, a decision
was made on the highest level to kill Jewish patients as a
group. They were concentrated in a number of central institutions,
and killed in the closest killing center. But for
the Jews there were no letters of condolence; the Jews were
supposed to disappear without a trace. In the end, however,
T4 did issue fraudulent death certificates long after the
victims had been killed; this permitted T4 to extort money
for weeks, even months, for upkeep of the already murdered
Jewish patients. To accomplish this, T4 claimed the patients
570 ENCYCLOPAEDIA JUDAICA, Second Edition, Volume 6