Silent Horrors: Unmasking Nazi Euthanasia

The Nazi T4 campaign, responsible for the deaths of 6 million Jews, dissidents, and Roma, had its origins in a sinister practice perfected first on children and disabled Germans.

The image above – The SS used buses to transport patients to the Hadamar euthanasia center. The bus windows were painted to prevent people from seeing those inside Germany between May and September 1941

Part 1 in a series of 4 articles

By Stephen Pate – (Updated December 9, 2023)

The term “euthanasia” (literally, “good death”) usually refers to the inducement of a painless death for a chronically or terminally ill person who would otherwise suffer.

In the Nazi context, however, “euthanasia” represented a euphemistic term for a clandestine murder program which targeted the systematic killing of mentally and physically disabled patients living in institutional settings in Germany and German-annexed territories.

The so-called “Euthanasia” program was National Socialist Germany’s first program of mass murder, predating the genocide of European Jewry, which we call the Holocaust, by about two years. The effort represented one of many radical eugenic measures to restore the German nation’s racial “integrity.”

It endeavoured to end what eugenicists and their supporters considered “life unworthy of life”: those people who–they believed–because of severe psychiatric, neurological, or physical disabilities represented at once a genetic and financial burden upon German society and the state.

Child Euthanasia

“Euthanasia” centers, Germany 1940-1945 In Nazi usage, “euthanasia” referred to the systematic killing of those Germans whom the Nazis deemed “unworthy of life” because of alleged genetic diseases or defects. Beginning in the fall of 1939, gassing installations were established at Bernburg, Brandenburg, Grafeneck, Hadamar, Hartheim, and Sonnenstein.

In the spring and summer months of 1939, a number of planners–led by Philipp Bouhler, the director of Hitler’s private chancellery, and Karl Brandt, Hitler’s attending physician–began to organize a secret killing operation targeting disabled children.

On August 18, 1939, the Reich Ministry of the Interior circulated a decree compelling all physicians, nurses, and midwives to report newborn infants and children under the age of three who showed signs of severe mental or physical disability.

Video – Britannica

Beginning in October 1939, public health authorities began to encourage parents of children with disabilities to admit their young children to one of several specially designated pediatric clinics throughout Germany and Austria.

The clinics were, in reality, children’s killing wards where specially recruited medical staff murdered their young charges by lethal overdoses of medication or by starvation.

At first, medical professionals and clinic administrators incorporated only infants and toddlers in the operation, but as the measure’s scope widened, they included juveniles up to 17 years of age. Conservative estimates suggest that at least 5,000 physically and mentally disabled German children perished as a result of the child “euthanasia” program during the war years.

Patients were selected by doctors and transferred from clinics to one of these centralized gassing installations and killed. After public outrage forced an end to centralized killings, doctors instead administered lethal injections to those selected for “euthanasia” in clinics and hospitals throughout Germany. In this way, the “euthanasia” program continued and expanded until the end of the war.

Robert Wegemann’s story

Video – Britannica & Shoah Museum, Washington

“My mom and I were summoned to a, a part of the university clinic in Heidelberg, in Schlierheim, and there I was examined. And during the examination my mom was sitting on the outside of the room, and she overheard a conversation that the doctors would do away with me, uh, would ab…would abspritz me, which means that they would give me a needle and put me to sleep. My mom overheard the conversation and, uh, during lunchtime.

At the same time, the, uh, doctors were gone, she, uh, grabbed hold of me, we went down to the Neckar River into the high reeds, and there she put my clothes on, and from there on we really went into hiding because now we knew that they really were after us. So, uh, we went to my father’s father’s house where we also stayed until I started school.” Holocaust Museum

Born Mannheim, Germany 1937 – Robert and his family were Jehovah’s Witnesses. The Nazis regarded Jehovah’s Witnesses as enemies of the state to refuse to take an oath of loyalty to Adolf Hitler or serve in the German army. Robert’s family continued its religious activities despite Nazi persecution.

Shortly before Robert’s birth, his mother was imprisoned briefly for distributing religious materials. Robert’s hip was injured during delivery, leaving him with a disability. When Robert was five, he was ordered to report for a physical in Schlierheim. His mother overheard staff comments about putting Robert “to sleep.” Fearing they intended to kill him, Robert’s mother grabbed him and ran from the clinic. Nazi physicians had begun the systematic killing of those they deemed physically and mentally disabled in the fall of 1939.

Helene Melanie Lebel

Helene Melanie Lebel

Born Vienna, Austria September 15, 1911

Helene, the elder of two daughters born to a Jewish father and a Catholic mother, was raised as a Catholic in Vienna. Her father died in action during World War I when Helene was just 5 years old, and her mother remarried when Helene was 15. Known affectionately as Helly, Helene loved to swim and go to the opera. After finishing her secondary education, she entered law school.

1933-39: At 19, Helene first showed signs of mental illness. Her condition worsened in 1934, and by 1935 she had to give up her law studies and her job as a legal secretary. She suffered a major breakdown after losing her trusted fox terrier, Lydi. She was diagnosed as schizophrenic and was placed in Vienna’s Steinhof Psychiatric Hospital. Two years later, in March 1938, the Germans annexed Austria to Germany.

1940: Helene was confined in Steinhof and was not allowed home even though her condition had improved. Her parents were led to believe that she would soon be released. Instead, Helene’s mother was informed in August that Helene had been transferred to a hospital in Niedernhart, just across the border in Bavaria. In fact, Helene was transferred to a converted prison in Brandenburg, Germany, where she was undressed, subjected to a physical examination, and then led into a shower room.

Helene was one of 9,772 persons gassed that year in the Brandenburg “Euthanasia” center. She was officially listed as dying in her room of “acute schizophrenic excitement.”

Next – Nazi Doctors Amazingly Volunteer To Euthanize Disabled

Text and video copyright United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. “The Holocaust.” Holocaust Encyclopedia

See also: Images of Nazi Euthanasia & Eugenics.