The_Holokaust_-_origins,_implementation,_aftermath

PSYCHIATRY, SOCIETY AND NAZI “EUTHANASIA”
policies, Hölzel felt that it was another matter to carry them out in person, a
distinction which reminded him of ‘the difference which exists between a judge
and executioner’. He thought he was too weak, and too concerned with helping
his patients, to be able to ‘carry this out as a systematic policy after cold-blooded
deliberation’. 37 Pfannmüller never pressed him any further on the matter. In total,
as many as 6,000 children were killed in this programme, with the age range being
quietly raised to encompass adolescents.
Hitler’s wartime authorisation of an adult ‘euthanasia’ programme was
conceived as an economy measure, a means of creating emergency bed-space,
and hostels for ethnic German repatriates from Russia and eastern Europe, which
anticipates and mirrors the linkages between ‘resettlement’ and murder later evident
in the Holocaust. 38 These were not chimerical, futuristic or metaphorical goals
merely designed to remobilise the movement’s flagging dynamism, but a series of
definite aims, coldly determined in advance after a great deal of co-ordination
between like-minded individuals. In the eastern areas of the Reich, SS units under
Eimann and Lange were sub-contracted to shoot psychiatric patients in a parallel
operation. The Chancellory of the Führer established an elaborate covert
bureaucracy based at Tiergartenstrasse 4 (hence the code-name ‘Aktion T-4’),
whose task was to organise the registration, selection, transfer and murder of a
previously calculated target group of 70,000 people, including chronic
schizophrenics, epileptics and long-stay patients. This apparatus was run by a
group of economists, agronomists, lawyers and businessmen, with an expanded
pool of academics and psychiatrists, under Werner Heyde and from 1941 Paul
Nitsche, whose task was to handle the medical side of mass murder. 39
Together, this odd assortment of highly educated, morally dulled, humanity
set about registering and selecting victims; finding asylums to serve as
extermination centres; establishing an effective means; and last but not least, a
staff of people willing and able to commit mass murder. Both Herbert Linden, the
desk officer responsible for state asylums in the Ministry of the Interior, and his
regional equivalents, such as Walter ‘Bubi’ Schultze in Munich or Ludwig Sprauer
in Stuttgart, proved co-operative since they had been advocating such policies
for several years anyway. These men either identified suitable asylums, such as
Grafeneck, or recommended doctors, orderlies and nurses whose track record and
level of objectified ideological commitment singled them out as potential T-4
material. 40 Heyde volunteered the names of former students. The SS, which for
various reasons remained at one remove from these policies, provided seasoned
hard-men who could cope with the physicality of mass murder. Teams of these
people were despatched to six killing centres. The doctors who monopolised killing
were given perfunctory briefing sessions in Berlin, and then gradually inducted
into murder, progressing from observing the procedures to carrying them out
themselves. Most of them were quite young, socially insecure and hugely
impressed by major academic names (de Crinis, Heyde, Carl Schneider, etc.) and
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