The_Holokaust_-_origins,_implementation,_aftermath

PSYCHIATRY, SOCIETY AND NAZI “EUTHANASIA”
Bethel Sarepta, was himself a Nazi ‘old fighter’ suggests that political affiliation
was not necessarily a guide to how individuals behaved in these circumstances. 45
A few asylums tried to hide vulnerable individuals or arrange for their families to
take them home with them. However, discharge depended upon the willingness of
families to take them in, the response sometimes being that there was no more
room in the inn. 46 In the absence of co-operation from families, most asylums
contented themselves with the fact that they had haggled over the life of this or
that patient, for T-4 were clever enough to countenance a degree of plea bargaining.
In the case of the network of Bodelschwingh asylums at Bielefeld, the eminence
of both the director and some of the patients, including Göring’s brother-in-law
(according to Heyde he was ‘definitely a case for euthanasia’), meant that T-4
sanctioned the use of Bethel’s own ‘in-house’ criteria for selection. 47 The fact that
individual churchmen, notably Bishop Galen of Münster, protested against these
policies (over a year after he was informed about them by, inter alios, Dr Karsten
Jaspersen) has received more attention than the fact that T-4 obviously solicited a
justificatory memorandum from an academic Roman Catholic theologian before
they commenced operations. More damagingly, the Roman Catholic hierarchy
entered into negotiations with T-4 to secure an ‘opt-out clause’ for Catholic asylum
staff and the last sacraments for Catholic victims, negotiations which were only
broken off when the Church’s chief negotiator, Bishop Wienken, went so ‘native’
in his dealings with T-4 as seriously to embarrass his superiors. 48 One should bear
in mind the fact that the Roman Catholic Church’s concern with administering the
last sacraments was often coupled with its priests’ refusal to give Christian burial
to the ashes of victims of the ‘euthanasia’ programme, on the grounds that they
had been cremated.
In total, T-4 murdered over 70,000 people, with many of them entering a gas
chamber equipped with a towel and a toothbrush. A final report translated the
monthly murder rate into graphic form, while precisely enumerating how much
money or which commodities, such as butter, bread, coffee or marmalade had been
saved through the ‘disinfection’ of 70,273 persons, figures whose monetary
equivalents were then extrapolated down to 1951. 49
Following a cessation of mass gassings in August 1941, the T-4 medical
assessors were turned loose on the inmates of concentration camps, where under
‘Aktion 14fl3’ they proceeded to ‘select’ persons whom the SS deemed to be ‘sick’,
or people whose race or record they disapproved of. 50 There is no evidence that
the doctors involved were even conscious of having stepped across the threshold
from the medical into the infernal. That same autumn, Viktor Brack, the economist
who ran the T-4 operation, had an interview with Himmler, who had once employed
him as a driver. Himmler allegedly said that
Hitler had some time ago given him the order for the extermination of
the Jews. He said that preparations had already been made, and I think
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