Euthanasia goes underground with expansion to include SS killings of hospital patients getting ready for the mass killing of Jews, political dissidents and other inferior races.
Part 3 of a 4 part series
By Stephen Pate – Hitler’s call for a halt to the T4 action did not mean an end to the “euthanasia” killing operation.
Personnel of T4, the agency created to administer the Nazi Euthanasia Program. Berlin, Germany,
The child “euthanasia” program continued as before.
Moreover, in August 1942, German medical professionals and healthcare workers resumed the killings, albeit in a more carefully concealed way than before.
More decentralized than the first gassing phase, the renewed effort relied closely upon regional exigencies, with local authorities determining the killing’s pace.
In Part 1, Hitler started his euthanasia program by having doctors terminate children with disabilities. Hitler’s euthanasia program murdered the disabled first.
In Part 2, emboldened by their success, the program was expanded to adults; however, opposition from the Roman Catholic Church moved the program underground. Autumn 1939 Hitler enlists doctors in disabled euthanasia.
Emmi G., a 16-year-old housemaid, was diagnosed as schizophrenic. She was sterilized and sent to the Meseritz-Obrawalde euthanasia center, where she was killed with an overdose of tranquillizers on December 7, 1942.
Employing drug overdose and lethal injection–already successfully used in child euthanasia–in this second phase as a more covert means of killing, the “euthanasia” campaign resumed at a broad range of custodial institutions throughout the Reich.
Many of these institutions also systematically starved adult and child victims. The “Euthanasia” Program continued until the last days of World War II, expanding to include an ever more comprehensive range of victims, including geriatric patients, bombing victims, and foreign forced labourers.
Historians estimate that the “Euthanasia” Program, in all its phases, claimed the lives of 250,000 individuals.
German-occupied east
Persons with disabilities also fell victim to German violence in the German-occupied East. Although the Germans confined the “Euthanasia” Program, which began as a racial hygiene measure, to the Reich proper–that is, to Germany and the annexed territories of Austria, Alsace-Lorraine, the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, and the Warthegau in former Poland, the Nazi ideological conviction which designated these persons “life unworthy of life” made institutionalized patients targets of shooting actions in Poland and the Soviet Union.
Here, the killings of disabled patients were SS and police forces’ work, not of physicians, caretakers, and T4 administrators who implemented the “Euthanasia” Program itself. In Pomerania, West Prussia, and occupied Poland, SS and police units murdered some 30,000 patients by the autumn of 1941 to accommodate ethnic German settlers (Volksdeusche) transferred there from the Baltic countries and other areas.
SS and police units also murdered disabled patients in mass shootings and gas vans in occupied Soviet territories. Thousands more died, murdered in their beds and wards by SS and auxiliary police units in Poland and the Soviet Union.
These murders lacked the ideological part attributed to the centralized “Euthanasia” Program, for, by and large, the SS was apparently motivated primarily by economic and material concerns in killing institutionalized patients in occupied Poland and the Soviet Union.
The SS and the Wehrmacht quickly used the hospitals emptied in these killing operations as barracks, reserve hospitals, and munitions storage depots. In rare cases, the SS used the empty facilities as a formal T4 killing site; an example is the “euthanasia” facility Tiegenhof, near Danzig (today Gdansk).
Rehearsal for genocide
The cemetery at Hadamar where victims of euthanasia killing at Hadamar were buried. This photograph was taken toward the end of the war. Hadamar, Germany, April 1945.
The “euthanasia” program represented in many ways a rehearsal for Nazi Germany’s subsequent genocidal policies.
The Nazi leadership extended the ideological justification conceived by medical perpetrators to destroy the “unfit” to other categories of perceived biological enemies, most notably to Jews and Roma and Sinti (Gypsies).
Planners of the so-called Final Solution later borrowed the gas chamber and accompanying crematoria, specifically designed for the T4 campaign, to murder Jews in German-occupied Europe.
T4 personnel who had shown themselves reliable in this first mass murder program figured prominently among the German staff stationed at the Operation Reinhard killing centers of Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka.
Like those who planned the physical annihilation of the European Jews, the “euthanasia” program planners imagined a racially pure and productive society and embraced radical strategies to eliminate those who did not fit within it their vision.
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Next Over 250,000 Killed By Nazi Euthanasia During WWII
Resources
Text and photographs copyright United States Holocaust Museum
From United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. “The Holocaust.” Holocaust Encyclopedia.
Friedlander, Henry. The Origins of Nazi Genocide: From Euthanasia to the Final Solution. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995.
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Aly, Götz, Peter Chroust, and Christian Pross. Cleansing the Fatherland: Nazi Medicine and Racial Hygiene. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994.
Bryant, Michael S. Confronting the “Good Death”: Nazi Euthanasia on Trial, 1945-1953. Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2005.
Burleigh, Michael. Death and Deliverance: “Euthanasia” in Germany c. 1900-1945. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.
Gallagher, Hugh Gregory. By Trust Betrayed: Patients, Physicians, and the License to Kill in the Third Reich. Arlington, VA: Vandamere Press, 1995.
Sherry
Could the current economic problems of the world lead to the murder of the disabled and the elderly as was done in Germany in WW2?
Is the cutting funds to transplant patients in Arizona and the denial of treatment to cancer patients in Oregon some of the first signs of this?
I just turned 65. How long may I live until I may be murdered?
What about our disabled veterins (Wounded Warriers)? My father who died in 2008 was one. Hitler labeled the disabled veterins of WW1 as “Enemies of the State” and had them murdered.
My sister is mentally ill. What may happen to her?
Perhaps I am overreacting. I don’t know.
Stephen Pate
I think you are correct in assuming that changing world economies put people living with disabilities at risk. We need to be vigilant to protect rights won under the ADA and the United Nations Convention. There is still much more that needs to be done to avoid the mistakes of the past.