How Nazi Doctors Used Disabled Children To Study Euthanasia
From “The Nazi Anatomists” by Emily Brazelon
By 1944, German anatomists had accepted the bodies of thousands of people killed by Hitler’s regime.
Beginning in 1933, all 31 anatomy departments in the territory the Third Reich occupied—including Poland, Austria, and the Czech Republic as well as Germany—accepted these corpses.
Unlike the research of Nazi scientists who became obsessed with racial typing and Aryan superiority, (anatomist) Stieve’s work didn’t end up in the dustbin of history.
The tainted origins of this research—along with other studies and education that capitalized on the Nazi supply of human body parts—continue to haunt German and Austrian science, which is only now fully grappling with the implications. Some of the facts, amazingly, are still coming to light. And some German, Austrian, and Polish universities have yet to face up to the likely presence of the remains of Hitler’s victims—their cell and bone and tissue—in university collections that still exist today.
“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 for systematic killing mentally and physically disabled patients living in institutional settings in Germany and German-annexed territories.
Courtesy of Haeferl. Creative Commons
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 which aimed to restore the racial “integrity” of the German nation. It endeavored 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 a financial burden upon German society and the state. Hitler’s euthanasia program murdered disabled first“
The wall of denial began to crack, though, when a German historian and journalist, Götz Aly, persisted in applying for access to the Max Planck Institute’s specimen collection. Once he got inside, Aly identified some of the T-4 euthanasia victims and started pushing for the burial of the specimens. It was a novel idea.
The Max Planck Society admitted that its collection contained the tissue of euthanasia victims—including 700 children.
Heinrich Gross, “Gross the Scythe” Nazi doctor who did experiments on children with disabilities
And there was more: a link between university scientists and Heinrich Gross, the doctor who headed the infants’ ward of Spiegelgrund, the children’s wing of the Vienna Psychiatric Hospital, during the war.
Gross did painful experiments on living children there, some of whom died as a result. One child who survived said the children called Gross “the Scythe”; another remembered that his arrival on the ward “was like a cold wind coming.”
All told, 772 children were killed at Spiegelgrund, about half of them from Gross’ ward. In 1948, he was charged with murder. But the penal code he was prosecuted under did not define murder to include disabled people because they were “not capable of reasoning.” He was found guilty only of manslaughter, and when Gross appealed and won, the prosecutor chose not to retry him.
Hildebrandt has counted about 2,000 execution victims of Nazi-era anatomy who have been individually identified. She points out that still, “existing memorials rarely name individuals.” Weindling has been trying to identify the victims of all Nazi-era medical experiments, including those from the T-4 euthanasia killings. He has been blocked by the rules for German archives, which dictate that the names may not be released for privacy reasons because they were once psychiatric patients.
Dr. Julius Hallervorden worked at the euthanasia centers and removed brains from the murdered victims
Other anatomists ensconced in the academy, meanwhile, got away with terrible crimes even when the Allies had direct knowledge of them.
In June 1945, a Boston neurologist named Leo Alexander, a consultant for the United States secretary of war, visited Julius Hallervorden, a doctor and member of the Nazi Party who in 1938 became head of the neuropathology department of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Brain Research (one of the world’s pre-eminent psychiatric research centers, with a building financed in the 1920s by the Rockefeller Foundation).
Hallervorden showed Alexander a collection of 110,000 brain samples from 2,800 people. Hallervorden said that with the director of his institute, Hugo Spatz, he had harvested the brains of victims of the T-4 killings—the Nazi program to gas psychiatric patients at six “euthanasia” centers in Germany and Austria.
“Hallervorden was present at the time of the killings and removed brains from the murdered victims,” Seidelman writes.
For the rest of this story see Slate The Nazi Anatomists How the corpses of Hitler’s victims are still haunting modern science—and American abortion politics.
Post-war, the Nazi doctors were often revered as experts in their field. In 1992, Neurology called Julius Hallervorden a “dedicated, fastidious pioneer neuroscientist.”
In all, between 200,000 and 250,000 mentally and physically handicapped persons were murdered from 1939 to 1945 under the T-4 and other “euthanasia” programs. The magnitude of these crimes and the extent to which they prefigured the “Final Solution” continue to be studied. Further, in an age of genetic engineering and renewed controversy over mercy killings of the incurably ill, ethical and moral issues of concern to physicians, scientists, and lay persons alike remain vital. Nazi Euthanasia Program: Persecution of the Mentally & Physically Disabled
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