Janice Anderson - War Crimes and Atrocities

Worse was to come as Brandt and Bouhler prepared to launch their so called ‘euthanasia’ programme on disabled adults. With the help of the minister for health, Dr Leonardo Conti, and the head of the SS medical department, Professor Werner Heyde, Nazi officials compiled a register of all institutionalized people in the country. Once this was done, they set about visiting the mental asylums and hospitals to claim their victims.

They began by taking inmates from an area of Poland recently invaded by Germany and shooting 7,000 of them, and went on to do the same in other Polish territories. Next, at Posen, they herded hundreds of inmates into an improvised gas chamber and gassed them to death, using carbon monoxide. This was an idea pioneered by Dr Albert Widman, the chief chemist of the German Criminal Police, and later taken up by SS Chief Heinrich Himmler to commit mass murder against Jews and other minority groups.

It is hard to imagine how the general public could have condoned such a programme of slaughter of the innocent, but as the privations of war began to make people’s lives difficult, there was less and less resistance to it. The government argued that besides ridding the state of the expense of paying for the care of mental patients, gassing inmates also had the advantage of freeing up the hospitals for wounded soldiers. Thus, the Nazi troops were also keen to carry on the work of murdering the nation’s most vulnerable people, especially in areas where war was being waged, such as in and around Poland. All in all, over 8,000 German patients were killed in this way, with the approval of Himmler and other high-ranking Nazi officials.

It was not long before Hitler began to set his sights on the incurably ill. Brandt had advised him before the war that the German people would never agree to a programme of killing all those with incurable illnesses, but now in the context of war the situation had changed. Accordingly, Hitler ordered Bouhler and Brack to allow physicians to effect a ‘mercy death’ on all those they deemed incurable.

This programme never had the force of law, but it was launched by a directive from the Führer and implemented by a team of doctors and psychiatrists, some of whom had worked on the previous programme and some of whom were new recruits. The team began by registering all inmates who had been in hospitals, retirement homes and so on for more than five years, and who were diagnosed as ‘criminally insane’. Those of ‘non-Aryan race’ were also selected for ‘assessment’. Next, a list of serious conditions, such as senile dementia, schizophrenia, syphilis and encephalitis, was issued to the institutions. Unfortunately, in many cases the staff from these homes assumed that selections were being made for labour camps and often overstated their patients’ disabilities to protect them from being called up, with devastating consequences. In other cases, staff refused to co-operate with the authorities, especially in homes that were run by Catholic or other religious organizations – only to find that the selection was made for them, and inmates were removed without their permission.

At first there was a system with a semblance of order, whereby three ‘experts’ were required to deliver the death verdict on a patient, but after a while doctors began to make decisions on their own initiative. In the early days of the scheme, victims were killed by lethal injection, but this proved a slow and expensive way to kill large numbers of people, so Hitler told Brandt to gas the patients with carbon monoxide instead. (Incredibly, Brandt later described this development as a ‘major advance’ for medical history.) Accordingly, gas chambers were set up at Brandenburg in 1940, then at other towns across Germany.

Teams of SS soldiers, dressed in white coats to make them look like medical staff, were drafted in to escort the mental patients to the ‘special treatment centres’ by bus. In many cases, patients were sent to ‘transit centres’ in hospitals to be ‘assessed’ on the way: this was really so that their families would lose touch with them and give up trying to visit them. Once at the centre, the patient would be gassed immediately and then burnt, with a pile of other bodies in a furnace. Then, in an extraordinary display of macarbre bureaucracy, the families would be sent an urn of the ashes from the furnace together with a falsified death certificate.

In 1940, the death toll at Brandenburg reached about 10,000 people; at other centres, such as Hartheim and Grafeneck, the figures were similar. In total, there were around 35,000 people killed under the Action T4 programme before it was closed down due to public opposition in August 1941. When this happened, the centres continued to operate, but their victims were now prisoners from concentration camps.

Hitler had been careful to avoid passing laws sanctioning the use of the T4 programme, fearing that public opinion would be against it. In particular, there was intense opposition from the Catholic community, who now formed nearly 50 per cent of the German population. High-ranking members of the legal profession, including judges, also protested. The Nazis responded by trying to keep the programme as secret as possible, but this was difficult since there were thousands of doctors, nurses and administrative staff involved in it; also, there were thousands of families who lost loved ones in the purges. As well as the fact that staff talked to their friends and relatives about what was going on at the centres, despite strict instructions not to, many families had begun to realize that the hastily issued death certificates they received to notify them of the patients’ deaths were false; for example, in one case, a patient was alleged to have died of appendicitis, when in fact he had already had his appendix taken out. In addition, those citizens who lived near the centres noticed that more and more busloads of patients were going in but none ever came out, and that there was a steady stream of smoke issuing from the furnaces. Gruesome incidents, such as clouds of ash and human hair falling on townspeople living near the centre at Hadamar, were clear indications of the carnage that was taking place; and it was reported that, in many places, children could be heard shouting about the gassings in the streets.

Not surprisingly, families began to take their loved ones away from mental asylums, hospitals and residential homes. There were also instances in which doctors worked to protect the patients from their fate. In other cases, staff took bribes to save the patients from the gas chambers. However, on the whole, the entire German medical profession cooperated with the T4 programme, either because they held the same beliefs as the Nazis about eugenics and ‘racial purity’, or because they were too afraid to protest.

Despite the support for the programme from the medical profession, it’s not surprising that the T4 programme could not last. Rumours began to be circulated that even wounded German soldiers would be subject to the T4 criteria and gassed, giving rise to public protests and increased opposition from outspoken members of the Catholic clergy. Protestant church leaders, who had hitherto supported the Nazis, also joined in the chorus of disapproval. In one instance, a Catholic bishop, Clemens von Galen, preached a rousing sermon against the killing of ‘poor, unproductive people’, and followed it up with a diatribe against religious persecution.

Naturally, the Nazis would have liked to arrest von Galen, but he, and others like him, had immense support from the general public. Thus the authorities were nervous of causing open revolt among the population against the regime. Matters reached a crisis point when Hitler himself was jeered at a public event in the town of Hof – the first time this had ever happened to him. He was reportedly furious, but he knew that his hands were tied: the Reich was busy fighting a foreign war and could not afford a major confrontation with the Church at that time. Faced with the choice of arresting and imprisoning hundreds of high-ranking Church and other leaders, which would have provoked public opinion against the party, or ended the T4 programme, the Führer chose the latter option. On 24 August, 1941, he personally ordered the closing down of the programme.