Summary
In the autumn of 1939, Adolf Hitler signed a secret authorization to protect participating physicians, medical staff, and administrators from prosecution for their participation in euthanasia.
Phase 2 of Hitler’s euthanasia killed adults with disabilities with secret gassing and cremation.
Part 2 in a series of 4 articles
Euthanasia planners quickly envisioned extending the killing program to adult disabled patients living in institutional settings.
This photo originates from a film produced by the Reich Propaganda Ministry. It shows two doctors in a ward in an unidentified asylum. The existence of the patients in the ward is described as “life only as a burden.” Such propaganda images were intended to develop public sympathy for the Euthanasia Program.
In the autumn of 1939, Adolf Hitler signed a secret authorization to protect participating physicians, medical staff, and administrators from prosecution; this authorization was backdated to September 1, 1939, to suggest that the effort was related wartime measures.
Because the Führer Chancellery was insular, compact, and separate from the state, government, or Nazi Party apparatuses, Hitler chose this, his private chancellery, to serve as the engine for the “euthanasia” campaign.
Its functionaries called their secret enterprise “T4.” The operation took its code-name from the street address of the program’s coordinating office in Berlin: Tiergartenstrasse 4.
Dr. Philipp Bouhler, head of the T4 program
According to Hitler’s directive, Führer Chancellery director Phillip Bouhler and physician Karl Brandt undertook the killing operation’s leadership.
Under their auspices, T4 operatives established six gassing installations for adults as part of the “euthanasia” action: Brandenburg, on the Havel River near Berlin; Grafeneck in southwestern Germany; Bernburg and Sonnenstein, both in Saxony; Hartheim, near Linz on the Danube in Austria, and Hadamar in Hessen.
The slide is taken from a Nazi propaganda filmstrip promoting “euthanasia,” prepared for the Hitler Youth. The caption says: “Mentally ill Negro (English) 16 years in an institution costing 35,000 RM [Reichsmarks
The form’s sinister purpose was suggested only by the emphasis which the questionnaire placed upon the patient’s capacity to work and by the categories of patients which the inquiry required health authorities to identify: those suffering from schizophrenia, epilepsy, dementia, encephalitis, and other chronic psychiatric or neurological disorders; those not of German or “related” blood; the criminally insane or those committed on criminal grounds; and those who had been confined to the institution in question for more than five years.
Doctors were recruited to kill Germans with disabilities.
Smoke rising from the chimney at Hadamar, one of six facilities that carried out the Nazis’ Euthanasia Program. Hadamar, Germany, probably 1941. [Dioezesanarchiv Limburg (DAL), Papers of Father Hans Becker
Within hours of their arrival at such centers, the victims perished in specially designed gas chambers, disguised as shower facilities, utilizing pure carbon monoxide gas. Thereafter, T4 functionaries burned the bodies in crematoria attached to the gassing facilities. Other workers took the ashes of cremated victims from a common pile and placed them in urns to send to the victims’ relatives. The victims’ families or guardians received an urn, along with a death certificate and other documentation, listing both a fictive cause and date of death.
Hadamar cemetery for patients euthanized
Because the program was secret, T-4 planners and functionaries took elaborate measures to conceal its deadly designs. Even though in every case, physicians and institutional administrators falsified official records to indicate that the victims died of natural causes, the “euthanasia” program quickly become an open secret.
Given widespread public knowledge of the measure and in the wake of private and public protests concerning the killings, especially from members of the German clergy, Hitler ordered a halt to the euthanasia program in late August 1941. According to T4’s own internal calculations, the “euthanasia” effort claimed the lives of 70,273 institutionalized mentally and physically disabled persons at the six gassing facilities between January 1940 and August 1941.
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Text and photographs copyright United States Holocaust Museum. From United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. “The Holocaust.” Holocaust Encyclopedia.
See also: Images of Nazi Euthanasia & Eugenics.
Leticia Velasquez
Now the T4 program is being revived in Obamacare, with the IPABs defended by HHS Secretary Kathleen Sibelius. Independent Patient Advisory Boards will consist of 15 unelected members in DC which will decide which patients will receive what medical treatments. The decision will no longer be between a patient and his doctor, but by a faceless bureaucrat in DC.
Naziesque, isn’t it?
Stephen Pate
Probably an extreme reaction. Medical review boards exist in Canada, the UK and throughout the EU.
We don’t kill people in Canada because they are disabled. In the US, they pull the plug when you can’t pay.
Don’t tell me it isn’t true because I had to stand by and watch my brother taken off life support in California when his managed care system didn’t want to pay for long term care. He had a top of the line health insurance policy but those aren’t without limits. He was given so many days on life support and then – pay up or move the patient off the premises. It was a month long series of crisis. Another heart attack got him an extension of 2 or 3 days. It’s a very heartless system.
Peter
God bless Hitlers vegetarian cotton socks. Get rid of the useless and stupid early on. In an orderly, organised, documented and efficient way. Very Germanic. I mean, if the gene pool is actually going to improve these people need to go! As do people with regular colds out of season or people who have lop-sided ears (whoops…that’s me. And most people.) Genetic weakness should be eliminated – as it is in the wild. I mean a bad batch of new born mice and the mother eats them all.