Janice Anderson - War Crimes and Atrocities

The programme was administered by qualified doctors, nurses and other trained medical staff, including Hitler’s own personal physician, Dr Karl Brandt. The director of the operation was Philipp Bouhler, the head of Hitler’s private chancellery. The T4 programme was often referred to as a programme of ‘euthanasia’, implying that the victims wished to be put to death to end their suffering, but that was not the case. In the majority of cases, the victims wanted to live, and most were not in extreme pain. Moreover, in most cases, their families desperately wanted to keep their relatives alive and had cared for them for many years. Despite this, Hitler was determined to carry through the programme, partly because of his crazed belief that only perfect human beings, as he saw it, should be allowed to inhabit the planet, and partly to save money: at the time the programme was launched, Germany was undergoing extensive rearmament in preparation for World War II.

In retrospect, it seems hardly believable that such a barbaric plan, including the murder of all mentally and physically disabled people, should have been conceived by a political leader and put into action by trained medical personnel. However, that is what happened between 1939 and 1941 in Nazi Germany, under the ‘T4 Action’ programme set in motion by the so-called ‘General Foundation for Welfare and Institutional Care’.

Eventually, after meeting a great deal of resistance to the programme, not just from the victims’ families but from political, religious and other figures, Hitler realized that he was not going to be able to mobilize public opinion against the disabled in the same way that he had done against the Jews, so the policy was abandoned in 1941; but by this time, between 75,000 and 100,000 individuals had been cold-bloodedly murdered in one of the most shameful war crimes in history.

The T4 Action programme appears to have been directly ordered by Hitler himself, as part of his policy of enforcing ‘racial hygiene’. Hitler had a horror of mental illness, perhaps because he was afraid of his own tendency towards it, and there are accounts that he often ranted about how disgusting mentally ill people were. He seemed particularly fixated on those who were incontinent, or ‘put their own excrement in their mouths’ as he expressed it. In addition, he was horrified by physical deformity and believed that anyone with any kind of abnormality should not have children and should be sterilized to prevent such an occurrence.

The Führer, and other members of the Nazi regime, had been influenced by the writings of the late 19th-century scientist Adolf Jost, who had argued that euthanasia – that is the right to end a person’s life to relieve suffering – should be the decision of the state not the individual. From this, it was a short step for Hitler to maintain that the state could choose who was to live and who to die. But in truth, the Nazi T4 programme had nothing to do with euthanasia at all, at least as most people understand it. Firstly, those chosen were not in a great deal of physical pain; and secondly, they were not put to death in a merciful way but subjected to a great deal of abuse and neglect. They were rounded up, separated from their loved ones, held as frightened prisoners in horrifying conditions and then put to death.

The T4 programme was also connected to the eugenics movement, which had become popular in Europe and the USA at the turn of the 20th century. According to this theory, selected breeding could improve the quality of the human race. Some countries, such as Sweden, had already passed laws to encourage sterilization of all those in the population with hereditary defects. In Sweden, thousands of people had been sterilized as a result. In 1933, Germany followed suit, passing a more draconian law ‘for the prevention of hereditarily diseased offspring’, which enforced sterilization for individuals with a range of mental conditions, from epilepsy and schizophrenia to alcoholism.

Under Interior Minister Wilhelm Frick, officials from what were known as Hereditary Health Courts visited psychiatric hospitals, special schools, retirement homes and prisons, assessing individuals and selecting them for the programme. In this way, over 360,000 individuals were sterilized. The enforced sterilization of people with any kind of physical disability was also considered, until it was pointed out that one of the most powerful figures of the Nazi administration, Joseph Goebbels, himself had a club foot. There were also moves to sterilize people whose disabilities were not congenital, despite the fact that this was totally illogical.

Besides holding the opinion that anyone with a disability was not ‘worthy of life’ and should be done away with, Hitler also favoured killing the incurably ill. However, his medical advisors, such as Brandt, tactfully put it to him that he would not be able to persuade the German public to go along with such an idea. Hitler then argued that, should war break out, the task of disposing of the mentally and physically disabled would be considerably eased, because people would be pressured by poverty and would see that resources needed to go towards the war effort rather than towards caring for these individuals. Unfortunately, he was to be proved right.

In May 1939, as Hitler prepared to invade Poland, a couple near Liepzig wrote to him to gain permission to have their severely deformed child put to death. Encouraged by this, Hitler authorized the setting up of the Reich Committee for the Scientific Registering of Serious Hereditary and Congenital Illnesses, whose directors were Dr Brandt, Philipp Bouler and an SS Officer, Viktor Brack. The task of this committee was initially to approve voluntary applications from parents and carers of disabled children for their charges to be put to death. However, the brief eventually came to be enlarged, in the most sinister way. Under the new programme, all severely disabled children under three were required to be killed, whether their parents wished this or not.

The disabilities listed by register included Down’s syndrome, malformations, various spastic conditions and so on. In a parody of scientific rigour, three doctors had to give their consent to killing the child, and various other bureaucratic procedures had to be undergone. The selected children were then taken away from their parents to ‘Special Sections’ for assessment, where they were kept for a few weeks before being killed by lethal injection. Their deaths were recorded as pneumonia, and their brains and other body parts were removed for ‘scientific research’. Strange as it may seem, this so-called ‘research’ helped many of the medical staff involved in the programme feel more comfortable about what they were doing.

With the outbreak of war, the remit of the programme became wider. Older children and adolescents were now included, and a wider variety of abnormalities and malfunctions were ‘assessed’, until the programme expanded to include any kind of problem or difficulty, such as delinquent behaviour. By 1940, the mere fact of a child being Jewish, or an ‘Aryan–Jewish half-breed’ could qualify him or her for the Special Sections.

By now, parents were beginning to realize the horrific truth about what was happening to their children, but there was little they could do to resist. In many cases, they were terrorized into surrendering their children to the authorities: for instance, they were often threatened that they would lose custody of all their children if they refused to comply with the programme. Accordingly, many parents felt they had no option but to do as they were asked, and by 1941, 5,000 children had been killed under the programme.