Bed
from the Sachsenberg psychiatric asylum
Courtesy of USHMM Photo Archives
The
T4 Euthanasia Program was a Nazi German effort --framed
as a euthanasia program-- to kill incurably ill,
physically or mentally disabled, emotionally distraught,
and elderly people. Adolf Hitler initiated this program
in 1939, and, while it was officially discontinued in
1941, killings continued covertly until the military
defeat of Nazi Germany in 1945.
In
October 1939, Adolf Hitler empowered his personal
physician and the chief of the Chancellery of the
Führer to kill people considered unsuited to live.
He backdated his order to September 1, 1939, the day
World War II began, to give it the appearance of a
wartime measure. In this directive, Dr. Karl Brandt and
Chancellery chief Philipp Bouhler were "charged with
responsibility for expanding the authority of
physicians
so that patients considered incurable,
according to the best available human judgment of their
state of health, can be granted a mercy
killing."
Within
a few months, the T4 Program --named for the Chancellery
offices that directed it from the Berlin address
Tiergartenstrasse 4-- involved virtually the entire
German psychiatric community. A new bureaucracy, headed
by physicians, was established with a mandate to kill
anyone deemed to have a "life unworthy of living." Some
physicians active in the study of eugenics, who saw
Nazism as "applied biology," enthusiastically endorsed
this program. However, the criteria for inclusion in this
program were not exclusively genetic, nor were they
necessarily based on infirmity. An important criterion
was economic. Nazi officials assigned people to this
program largely based on their economic productivity. The
Nazis referred to the program's victims as "burdensome
lives" and "useless eaters."
The
program's directors ordered a survey of all psychiatric
institutions, hospitals, and homes for chronically ill
patients. At Tiergartenstrasse 4, medical experts
reviewed forms sent by institutions throughout Germany
but did not examine patients or read their medical
records. Nevertheless, they had the power to decide life
or death.
While
the program's personnel killed people at first by
starvation and lethal injection, they later chose
asphyxiation by poison gas as the preferred killing
technique. Physicians oversaw gassings in chambers
disguised as showers, using lethal gas provided by
chemists. Program administrators established gas chambers
at six killing centres in Germany and Austria: Hartheim,
Sonnenstein, Grafeneck, Bernburg, Hadamar, and
Brandenburg. The SS (Nazi paramilitary corps) staff in
charge of the transports donned white coats to keep up
the charade of a medical procedure. Program staff
informed victims' families of the transfer to the killing
centres. Visits, however, were not possible. The
relatives then received condolence letters, falsified
death certificates signed by physicians, and urns
containing ashes.
A few
doctors protested. Some refused to fill out the requisite
forms. The Roman Catholic church, which had not taken a
stand on the "Jewish question," protested the "mercy
killings." Count Clemens August von Galen, the bishop of
Münster, openly challenged the regime, arguing that
it was the duty of Christians to oppose the taking of
human life even if this cost them their own
lives.
The
transformation of physicians into killers took time and
required the appearance of scientific justification. Soon
after the Nazis came to power, the Bavarian minister of
health proposed that psychopaths, the mentally retarded,
and other "inferior" people be isolated and killed. "This
policy has already been initiated at our concentration
camps," he noted. A year later, authorities instructed
mental institutions throughout the Reich to "neglect"
their patients by withholding food and medical
treatment.
Pseudoscientific
rationalizations for the killing of the "unworthy" were
bolstered by economic considerations. According to
bureaucratic calculations, the state could put funds that
went to the care of criminals and the insane to better
use&emdash;for example, in loans to newly married
couples. Proponents for the program saw incurably sick
children as a burden on the healthy body of the Volk, the
German people. "Wartime is the best time for the
elimination of the incurably ill," Hitler
said.
The
murder of the handicapped was a precursor to the
Holocaust. The killing centres to which the handicapped
were transported were the antecedents of the
extermination camps, and their organized transportation
foreshadowed mass deportation. Some of the physicians who
became specialists in the technology of cold-blooded
murder in the late 1930s later staffed the death camps.
They had long since lost all their moral, professional,
and ethical inhibitions.
Like
the Judenrat ("Jewish Council") leaders during the
Holocaust, psychiatrists were able to save some patients
during the T4 Program, at least temporarily, but only if
they cooperated in sending others to their death. The
handicapped killing centres developed gas chambers like
those later used at extermination camps. As the
extermination camps did later, the handicapped killing
centres installed ovens to dispose of dead bodies. The
death camps that followed took the technology to a new
level. The extermination camps could kill thousands at
one time and burn their bodies within hours.
On
August 24, 1941, almost two years after the T4 Program
was initiated, it appeared to cease. In fact, it had gone
underground and continued covertly during the war years.
While the program claimed over 70,000 victims during its
two years of open operation, the killing centres murdered
even more victims between the official conclusion of the
program and the fall of the Nazi regime in 1945. The
total number killed under the T4 Program, including this
covert phase, may have reached 200,000 or more. The
official conclusion of the T4 Program in 1941 also
coincided with the escalation of the Holocaust, the
culmination of Nazi programs to eliminate those deemed an
embarrassment to the "master race."
Survivors...
http://www.britannica.com/eb/article-9342909