The Rise of the Fourth Reich - ThereAreNoSunglasses

NAZI MIND CONTROL 185Loeb’s money, had become incorporated into the prestigious Kaiser WilhelmInstitute, and the growing Nazi leadership was paying attention toits science.Initially, they went for the most defenseless of the Germanpopulation—the children. On July 14, 1933, only six months after Hitlerwas named chancellor of the Reich, the Law for the Prevention of GeneticallyDiseased Children was passed. A leading proponent for this legislationwas Ernst Rudin, by then director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute.Leading the movement to eliminate “mental defectives” from the Germanpopulation were lawyer Karl Binding and the psychiatrist AlfredHoche, who popularized the chilling phrase “ lebensunwertes Leben”—or“life unworthy of life”—in a 1920 tract titled Die Freigabe der Vernichtunglebensunwerten Lebens, or “Lifting Controls on the Destruction ofLife Unworthy of Life.” “This text, arguably more than any other, madeavailable to the Nazi regime an ‘ethical’ rationale for ‘euthanasia.’ Althoughin the early days of the regime the public discussion would focuson the prevention of offspring with hereditary disease, hence sterilization,the destruction of life unworthy of life would spread as an unspoken principle,”wrote John Cornwell in his 2003 book Hitler’s Scientists: Science,War, and the Dev il’s Pact.The chosen means of prevention, enforced sterilization, was administeredby special “hereditary health courts,” made up of two doctors—usually psychiatrists—and one civil official, usually a judge close to theNazi Party, who acted as chairman. The Nazi euthanasia program was notcarried out in the open but instead by secret decrees, as Hitler steadfastlyrefused to seek a legal ruling, knowing that such a program was illegalunder existing laws.It is estimated that more than 400,000 people were sterilized as “lifeunworthy of life” between 1934 and 1945. “The projected total of 410,000was considered only preliminary, drawn mostly from people already ininstitutions; it was assumed that much greater numbers of people wouldeventually be identified and sterilized,” stated Robert Jay Lifton in TheNazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide.Lifton went on: “Not surprisingly, Fritz Lenz [whose eugenics workwas parroted by Hitler] carried the concept farthest in suggesting the