Misplaced Pages

#317682

89-555: Roll calls were a key component of the daily regimen in Nazi concentration camps, carried out to count the prisoners but also to inspect, humiliate, weaken and intimidate them. All prisoners were made to line up in rows and be counted very early in the morning and again at night. Even the bodies of those who had died since the previous roll call had to be brought to the Appellplatz to be counted. Roll calls were held year round no matter

178-1202: A Kripo officer who later played a prominent role in the Final Solution (extermination of Jews) as commandant of newly built death camps in occupied Poland. In addition to Brandenburg, the killing centres included Grafeneck Castle in Baden-Württemberg (10,824 dead), Schloss Hartheim near Linz in Austria (over 18,000 dead), Sonnenstein in Saxony (15,000 dead), Bernburg in Saxony-Anhalt and Hadamar in Hesse (14,494 dead). The same facilities were also used to kill mentally sound prisoners transferred from concentration camps in Germany, Austria and occupied parts of Poland. Condemned patients were transferred from their institutions to new centres in T4 Charitable Ambulance buses, called

267-421: A "mercy death" ( Gnadentod ). In October 1939, Adolf Hitler signed a "euthanasia note", backdated to 1 September 1939, which authorised his physician Karl Brandt and Reichsleiter Philipp Bouhler to begin the killing. The killings took place from September 1939 until the end of the war in 1945; from 275,000 to 300,000 people were killed in psychiatric hospitals in Germany and Austria, occupied Poland and

356-475: A "trial" case in late 1938. Hitler instructed Brandt to evaluate a petition sent by two parents for the "mercy killing" of their son who was blind and had physical and developmental disabilities. The child, born near Leipzig and eventually identified as Gerhard Kretschmar , was killed in July 1939. Hitler instructed Brandt to proceed in the same manner in all similar cases. On 18 August 1939, three weeks after

445-703: A Jewish invention". Bishop Heinrich Wienken of Berlin, a leading member of the Caritas Association , was selected by the Fulda episcopal synod to represent the views of the Catholic Church in meetings with T4 operatives. In 2008, Michael Burleigh wrote Wienken seems to have gone partially native in the sense that he gradually abandoned an absolute stance based on the Fifth Commandment in favour of winning limited concessions regarding

534-553: A brief medical examination on arrival. They were induced to enter what appeared to be a shower block, where they were gassed with carbon monoxide (the ruse was also used at extermination camps). Some of the victims knew their fate and tried to defend themselves. The SS functionaries and hospital staff associated with Aktion T4 in the German Reich were paid from the central office at Tiergartenstraße 4 in Berlin from

623-687: A child could be killed. The Ministry used deceit when dealing with parents or guardians, particularly in Catholic areas, where parents were generally uncooperative. Parents were told that their children were being sent to "Special Sections", where they would receive improved treatment. The children sent to these centres were kept for "assessment" for a few weeks and then killed by injection of toxic chemicals, typically phenol ; their deaths were recorded as " pneumonia ". Autopsies were usually performed and brain samples were taken to be used for "medical research". Post mortem examinations apparently helped to ease

712-466: A death camp. Forced labor from the camp was to man the shops and factories of an SS empire that would be centered in Lublin. This empire never materialized as SS chief Heinrich Himmler had fantasized, but some of its building blocks, including Majdanek, were put in place. The Germans established an elaborate hierarchy of power and order in the camp, which relied on violence from the camp commander down to

801-572: A list of conditions. The conditions included schizophrenia, epilepsy, Huntington's chorea , advanced syphilis , senile dementia , paralysis , encephalitis and "terminal neurological conditions generally". Many doctors and administrators assumed that the reports were to identify inmates who were capable of being drafted for "labour service" and tended to overstate the degree of incapacity of their patients, to protect them from labour conscription. When some institutions refused to co-operate, teams of T4 doctors (or Nazi medical students) visited and compiled

890-473: A mental health facility and people with simple physical disabilities. New insulin shock treatments were used by German psychiatrists to find out if patients with schizophrenia were curable. Karl Brandt , doctor to Hitler and Hans Lammers , the head of the Reich Chancellery, testified after the war that Hitler had told them as early as 1933—when the sterilisation law was passed—that he favoured

979-546: A nurse and mother of a child with a disability, vehemently petitioned to Hermann Linden at the Reich Ministry of the Interior in Berlin to prevent her son, Alfred, from being transferred from Gugging, where he lived and which also became a euthanasia center. Wödl failed and Alfred was sent to Am Spiegelgrund , where he was killed on 22 February 1941. His brain was preserved in formaldehyde for "research" and stored in

SECTION 10

#1732775724318

1068-425: A soldier or bureaucrat or doctor after a visual inspection or perhaps a question or two. Children under 16 and later 14, the elderly, women visibly pregnant, mothers who would not leave their children, the disabled, or anyone visibly weak or ill, were ineligible for "selection" and were summarily murdered. In addition to the initial selection upon arrival, subsequent selections would occur at subsequent prisoner counts,

1157-524: A time. On each they marked a + (death), a - (life), or occasionally a ? meaning that they were unable to decide. Three "death" verdicts condemned the person and as with reviews of children, the process became less rigorous, the range of conditions considered "unsustainable" grew broader and zealous Nazis further down the chain of command increasingly made decisions on their own initiative. The first gassings in Germany proper took place in January 1940 at

1246-457: Is a stub . You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it . This article related to Nazi Germany is a stub . You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it . Selektion Selection ( German : Selektion ) was the process of designating inmates either for murder or forced labor at a Nazi concentration camp . The arrival selection was first a separation by gender, and then a separation into either fit or unfit for work, as determined by

1335-500: Is generally suppressed, then unless we will get new measures our race must rapidly deteriorate. Within the Nazi administration, the idea of including in the programme people with physical disabilities had to be expressed carefully, because the Reich Minister of Propaganda , Joseph Goebbels , had a deformed right leg. After 1937, the acute shortage of labour in Germany arising from rearmament, meant that anyone capable of work

1424-462: The Appellplatz , or in the blocks  [ de ] , the camp barracks. The selection officers were nominally looking for healthier, stronger laborers, but according to historian Jan Erik Schulte , camp guards and administrators were given maximum discretion in selections, which resulted in "ultimately only a superficially utilitarian-motivated selection process." The selection process

1513-735: The Danzig (now Gdańsk ) area, some 7,000 Polish patients of various institutions were shot and 10,000 were killed in the Gdynia area. Similar measures were taken in other areas of Poland destined for incorporation into Germany. The first experiments with the gassing of patients were conducted in October 1939 at Fort VII in Posen (occupied Poznań), where hundreds of prisoners were killed by means of carbon monoxide poisoning, in an improvised gas chamber developed by Albert Widmann , chief chemist of

1602-627: The Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia (now the Czech Republic). The number of victims was originally recorded as 70,273 but this number has been increased by the discovery of victims listed in the archives of the former East Germany . About half of those killed were taken from church-run asylums, often with the approval of the Protestant or Catholic authorities of the institutions. The Holy See announced on 2 December 1940 that

1691-476: The University of Paderborn , Joseph Mayer, on the likely reactions of the churches in the event of a state euthanasia programme being instituted. Mayer – a longstanding euthanasia advocate – reported that the churches would not oppose such a programme if it was seen to be in the national interest. Brack showed this paper to Hitler in July and it may have increased his confidence that

1780-611: The " Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring " prescribed compulsory sterilisation for people with conditions thought to be hereditary, such as schizophrenia, epilepsy , Huntington's chorea and "imbecility". Sterilisation was also legalised for chronic alcoholism and other forms of social deviance. The law was administered by the Interior Ministry under Wilhelm Frick through special Hereditary Health Courts ( Erbgesundheitsgerichte ), which examined

1869-412: The "euthanasia" decree, in a 1939 conference with Leonardo Conti , Reich Health Leader and State Secretary for Health in the Interior Ministry, and Hans Lammers, Chief of the Reich Chancellery, Hitler gave as examples the mentally ill who he said could only be "bedded on sawdust or sand" because they "perpetually dirtied themselves" and "put their own excrement into their mouths". This issue, according to

SECTION 20

#1732775724318

1958-566: The "euthanasia" programme would be acceptable to German public opinion. Notably, when Sereny interviewed Mayer shortly before his death in 1967, he denied that he formally condoned the killing of people with disabilities but no copies of this paper are known to survive. Some bureaucrats opposed the T4 programme; Lothar Kreyssig , a district judge and member of the Confessing Church , wrote to Justice Minister Franz Gürtner protesting that

2047-520: The Brandenburg Euthanasia Centre. The operation was headed by Brack, who said "the needle belongs in the hand of the doctor". Bottled pure carbon monoxide gas was used. At trials, Brandt described the process as a "major advance in medical history". Once the efficacy of the method was confirmed, it became standard and was instituted at a number of centres in Germany under the supervision of Widmann, Becker and Christian Wirth –

2136-565: The Community Patients Transports Service. They were run by teams of SS men wearing white coats, to give it an air of medical care. To prevent the families and doctors of the patients from tracing them, the patients were often first sent to transit centres in major hospitals, where they were supposedly assessed. They were moved again to special treatment ( Sonderbehandlung ) centres. Families were sent letters explaining that owing to wartime regulations, it

2225-598: The Gaubschat GmbH in Berlin and before February 1942, killed 3,830 Polish Jews and around 4,000 Romani , under the guise of "resettlement". After the Wannsee conference , implementation of gassing technology was accelerated by Heydrich. Beginning in the spring of 1942, three killing factories were built secretly in east-central Poland. The SS officers responsible for the earlier Aktion T4 , including Wirth, Stangl and Irmfried Eberl , had important roles in

2314-562: The German Criminal Police (Kripo). In December 1939, Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler witnessed one of these gassings, ensuring that this invention would later be put to much wider uses. The idea of killing adult mental patients soon spread from occupied Poland to adjoining areas of Germany, probably because Nazi Party and SS officers in these areas were most familiar with what was happening in Poland. These were also

2403-507: The Gestapo. It is a terrible, unjust and catastrophic thing when man opposes his will to the will of God ... We are talking about men and women, our compatriots, our brothers and sisters. Poor unproductive people if you wish, but does this mean that they have lost their right to live? Galen's sermons were not reported in the German press but were circulated illegally in leaflets. The text

2492-543: The Holocaust. As a related aspect of the "medical" and scientific basis of this programme, the Nazi doctors took thousands of brains from 'euthanasia' victims for research. From August 1939, the Interior Ministry registered children with disabilities, requiring doctors and midwives to report all cases of newborns with severe disabilities; the 'guardian' consent element soon disappeared. Those to be killed were identified as "all children under three years of age in whom any of

2581-576: The Nazi appropriation of Church property in Münster to accommodate people made homeless by an air raid, in July and August 1941, the bishop of Münster , Clemens August Graf von Galen , gave four sermons criticising the Nazis for arresting Jesuits , confiscating church property and for the euthanasia program. Galen sent the text to Hitler by telegram, calling on ... the Führer to defend the people against

2670-637: The Nazi regime with enthusiasm. Many were appointed to positions in the Health Ministry and German research institutes. Their ideas were gradually adopted by the majority of the German medical profession, from which Jewish and communist doctors were soon purged. During the 1930s, the Nazi Party had carried out a campaign of propaganda in favour of euthanasia. The National Socialist Racial and Political Office (NSRPA) produced leaflets, posters and short films to be shown in cinemas, pointing out to Germans

2759-478: The Nazi regime, assumed a new urgency in wartime. After the invasion of Poland , Hermann Pfannmüller (Head of the State Hospital near Munich ) said It is unbearable to me that the flower of our youth must lose their lives at the front, so that that feeble-minded and asocial element can have a secure existence in the asylum. Pfannmüller advocated killing by a gradual decrease of food, which he believed

Appellplatz - Misplaced Pages Continue

2848-522: The SS men of Einsatzkommando 16, Selbstschutz and EK-Einmann under the command of SS- Sturmbannführer Rudolf Tröger, overseen by Reinhard Heydrich , during Operation Tannenberg . All hospitals and mental asylums of the Wartheland were emptied. The region was incorporated into Germany and earmarked for resettlement by Volksdeutsche following the German conquest of Poland. In

2937-453: The T4 programme. Hitler wrote a confidential letter in October 1939 to overcome opposition within the German state bureaucracy. Hitler told Bouhler that, "the Führer's Chancellery must under no circumstances be seen to be active in this matter". Gürtner had to be shown Hitler's letter in August 1940 to gain his co-operation. In the towns where the killing centres were located, some people saw

3026-443: The action was illegal since no law or formal decree from Hitler had authorised it. Gürtner replied, "If you cannot recognise the will of the Führer as a source of law, then you cannot remain a judge" and had Kreyssig dismissed. Hitler had a policy of not issuing written instructions for matters which could later be condemned by the international community but made an exception when he provided Bouhler and Brack with written authority for

3115-541: The areas where Germans wounded from the Polish campaign were expected to be accommodated, which created a demand for hospital space. The Gauleiter of Pomerania , Franz Schwede-Coburg , sent 1,400 patients from five Pomeranian hospitals to undisclosed locations in occupied Poland, where they were shot. The Gauleiter of East Prussia , Erich Koch , had 1,600 patients killed out of sight. More than 8,000 Germans were killed in this initial wave of killings carried out on

3204-414: The barracks elders for its functioning." The Aktion Reinhard extermination camps , such as Belzec , Chełmno , Sobibor and Treblinka , had essentially no selection, as all transported prisoners were murdered within hours of arriving. Selection began with Aktion 14f13 , the murder of prisoners who were too sick or weak for forced labor, and were considered a burden to the state. Action 14f13

3293-500: The beginning of the Third Reich", according to Richard J. Evans . Several reasons have been suggested for the killings, including eugenics , racial hygiene , and saving money. Physicians in German and Austrian asylums continued many of the practices of Aktion T4 until the defeat of Germany in 1945, in spite of its official cessation in August 1941. The informal continuation of the policy led to 93,521 "beds emptied" by

3382-580: The best young men died in war, causing a loss to the Volk of the best genes. The genes of those who did not fight (the worst genes) then proliferated freely, accelerating biological and cultural degeneration". The advocacy of eugenics in Germany gained ground after 1930, when the Depression was used to excuse cuts in funding to state mental hospitals, creating squalor and overcrowding. Many German eugenicists were nationalists and antisemites , who embraced

3471-483: The camps likely did not use the term Selektion , but instead would have referred to Aussortierung ( transl.  sorting or separating ) and Ausmusterung ( transl.  retirement or decommissioning ). Aktion T4 Aktion T4 (German, pronounced [akˈtsi̯oːn teː fiːɐ] ) was a campaign of mass murder by involuntary euthanasia in Nazi Germany . The term

3560-531: The centres continued to be used to kill concentration camp inmates: eventually some 20,000 people in this category were killed. In 1971, Gitta Sereny conducted interviews with Stangl, who was in prison in Düsseldorf , having been convicted of co-responsibility for killing 900,000 people, while commandant of the Sobibor and Treblinka extermination camps in Poland. Stangl gave Sereny a detailed account of

3649-704: The child-killing programme, such as Unger, Heinze and Hermann Pfannmüller. The recruits were mostly psychiatrists, notably Professor Carl Schneider of Heidelberg, Professor Max de Crinis of Berlin and Professor Paul Nitsche from the Sonnenstein state institution. Heyde became the operational leader of the programme, succeeded later by Nitsche. In early October, all hospitals, nursing homes, old-age homes and sanatoria were required to report all patients who had been institutionalised for five years or more, who had been committed as "criminally insane", who were of "non- Aryan race" or who had been diagnosed with any on

Appellplatz - Misplaced Pages Continue

3738-558: The clinic for sixty years. The Lutheran theologian Friedrich von Bodelschwingh (director of the Bethel Institution for Epilepsy at Bielefeld ) and Pastor Paul-Gerhard Braune (director of the Hoffnungstal Institution near Berlin) protested. Bodelschwingh negotiated directly with Brandt and indirectly with Hermann Göring , whose cousin was a prominent psychiatrist. Braune had meetings with Gürtner, who

3827-409: The consciences of many of those involved, giving them the feeling that there was a genuine medical purpose to the killings. The most notorious of these institutions in Austria was Am Spiegelgrund, where from 1940 to 1945, 789 children were killed by lethal injection, gas poisoning and physical abuse. Children's brains were preserved in jars of formaldehyde and stored in the basement of the clinic and in

3916-485: The cost of maintaining asylums for the incurably ill and insane. These films included The Inheritance ( Das Erbe , 1935), The Victim of the Past ( Opfer der Vergangenheit , 1937), which was given a major première in Berlin and was shown in all German cinemas, and I Accuse ( Ich klage an , 1941) which was based on a novel by Hellmuth Unger, a consultant for "child euthanasia". In mid-1939, Hitler authorised

4005-691: The creation of the Reich Committee for the Scientific Registering of Serious Hereditary and Congenital Illnesses ( Reichsausschuss zur wissenschaftlichen Erfassung erb- und anlagebedingter schwerer Leiden ) led by his physician, Karl Brandt, administered by Herbert Linden of the Interior Ministry, leader of German Red Cross Reichsarzt SS und Polizei Ernst-Robert Grawitz and SS - Oberführer Viktor Brack . Brandt and Bouhler were authorised to approve applications to kill children in relevant circumstances, though Bouhler left

4094-427: The details to subordinates such as Brack and SA- Oberführer Werner Blankenburg . Extermination centres were established at six existing psychiatric hospitals: Bernburg , Brandenburg , Grafeneck , Hadamar , Hartheim , and Sonnenstein . One thousand children under the age of 17 were killed at the institutions Am Spiegelgrund and Gugging in Austria. They played a crucial role in developments leading to

4183-514: The end of 1941. Technology developed under Aktion T4 , particularly the use of lethal gas on large numbers of people, was taken over by the medical division of the Reich Interior Ministry, along with the personnel of Aktion T4 , who participated in mass murder of Jewish people . The programme was authorised by Hitler but the killings have since come to be viewed as murders in Germany. The number of people killed

4272-433: The end of the year, partly because the areas they served had been cleared and partly because of public opposition. In 1941, however, the centres at Bernburg and Sonnenstein increased their operations, while Hartheim (where Wirth and Franz Stangl were successively commandants) continued as before. Another 35,000 people were killed before August 1941, when the T4 programme was officially shut down by Hitler. Even after that date

4361-411: The families could afford it, transferred them to private clinics beyond the reach of T4. Other doctors "re-diagnosed" patients so that they no longer met the T4 criteria, which risked exposure when Nazi zealots from Berlin conducted inspections. In Kiel , Professor Hans Gerhard Creutzfeldt managed to save nearly all of his patients. Lifton listed a handful of psychiatrists and administrators who opposed

4450-418: The following 'serious hereditary diseases' were 'suspected': idiocy and Down syndrome (especially when associated with blindness and deafness); microcephaly ; hydrocephaly ; malformations of all kinds, especially of limbs, head, and spinal column; and paralysis, including spastic conditions". The reports were assessed by a panel of medical experts, of whom three were required to give their approval before

4539-505: The front and was supervised by Bouhler and Brandt. The officials in charge included Herbert Linden, who had been involved in the child killing programme; Ernst-Robert Grawitz, chief physician of the SS and August Becker , an SS chemist. The officials selected the doctors who were to carry out the operational part of the programme; based on political reliability as long-term Nazis, professional reputation and sympathy for radical eugenics. The list included physicians who had proved their worth in

SECTION 50

#1732775724318

4628-579: The implementation of the "Final Solution" for the next two years. The first killing centre, equipped with stationary gas chambers, modelled on technology developed under Aktion T4 , was established at Bełżec in the General Government territory of occupied Poland; the decision preceded the Wannsee Conference of January 1942 by three months. In January 1939, Brack commissioned a paper from Professor of Moral Theology at

4717-654: The incident at Absberg noted that "the removal of residents from the Ottilien Home has caused a great deal of unpleasantness" and described large crowds of Catholic townspeople, among them Party members, protesting against the action. Similar petitions and protests occurred throughout Austria as rumours spread of mass killings at the Hartheim Euthanasia Centre and of mysterious deaths at the children's clinic, Am Spiegelgrund in Vienna. Anna Wödl,

4806-528: The inmates arrive in buses, saw smoke from the crematoria chimneys and noticed that the buses were returning empty. In Hadamar, ashes containing human hair rained down on the town and despite the strictest orders, some of the staff at the killing centres talked about what was going on. In some cases families could tell that the causes of death in certificates were false, e.g. when a patient was claimed to have died of appendicitis , even though his appendix had been removed some years earlier. In other cases, families in

4895-410: The inmates of nursing homes, asylums, prisons, aged-care homes and special schools, to select those to be sterilised. It is estimated that 360,000 people were sterilised under this law between 1933 and 1939. The policy and research agenda of racial hygiene and eugenics were promoted by Emil Kraepelin . The eugenic sterilisation of persons diagnosed with (and viewed as predisposed to) schizophrenia

4984-617: The jurisdiction of the national medical division of the Reich Interior Ministry. Further gassing experiments with the use of mobile gas chambers ( Einsatzwagen ) were conducted at Soldau concentration camp by Herbert Lange following Operation Barbarossa . Lange was appointed commander of the Chełmno extermination camp in December 1941. He was given three gas vans by the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA), converted by

5073-526: The killing of the boy, the Reich Committee for the Scientific Registering of Hereditary and Congenital Illnesses was established to register sick children or newborns identified as defective. The secret killing of infants began in 1939 and increased after the war started; by 1941, more than 5,000 children had been killed. Hitler was in favour of killing those whom he judged to be lebensunwertes Leben (' Life unworthy of life '). A few months before

5162-468: The killing of the incurably ill but recognised that public opinion would not accept this. In 1935, Hitler told the Leader of Reich Doctors, Gerhard Wagner , that the question could not be taken up in peacetime; "Such a problem could be more smoothly and easily carried out in war". He wrote that he intended to "radically solve" the problem of the mental asylums in such an event. Aktion T4 began with

5251-621: The killing of those designated as juvenile delinquents. Jewish children could be placed in the net primarily because they were Jewish; and at one of the institutions, a special department was set up for 'minor Jewish-Aryan half-breeds'. More pressure was placed on parents to agree to their children being sent away. Many parents suspected what was happening and refused consent, especially when it became apparent that institutions for children with disabilities were being systematically cleared of their charges. The parents were warned that they could lose custody of all their children and if that did not suffice,

5340-731: The killing programme must be implemented with stealth "...to avoid a probable backlash of public opinion during the war". On 4 December 1940, Reinhold Sautter, the Supreme Church Councillor of the Württemberg State Church, complained to the Nazi Ministerial Councillor Eugen Stähle against the murders in Grafeneck Castle. Stähle said "The fifth commandment Thou shalt not kill, is no commandment of God but

5429-570: The killings; many doctors collaborated, either through ignorance, agreement with Nazi eugenicist policies or fear of the regime. Protest letters were sent to the Reich Chancellery and the Ministry of Justice, some from Nazi Party members. The first open protest against the removal of people from asylums took place at Absberg in Franconia in February 1941 and others followed. The SD report on

SECTION 60

#1732775724318

5518-483: The lists, sometimes in a haphazard and ideologically motivated way. During 1940, all Jewish patients were removed from institutions and killed. As with child inmates, adults were assessed by a panel of experts, working at the Tiergartenstraße offices. The experts were required to make their judgements on the reports, not medical histories or examinations. Sometimes they dealt with hundreds of reports at

5607-519: The operations of the T4 programme based on his time as commandant of the killing facility at the Hartheim institute. He described how the inmates of various asylums were removed and transported by bus to Hartheim. Some were in no mental state to know what was happening to them but many were perfectly sane and for them various forms of deception were used. They were told they were at a special clinic where they would receive improved treatment and were given

5696-502: The orders of local officials, although Himmler certainly knew and approved of them. The legal basis for the programme was a 1939 letter from Hitler, not a formal "Führer's decree" with the force of law. Hitler bypassed Conti, the Health Minister and his department, who might have raised questions about the legality of the programme and entrusted it to Bouhler and Brandt. Reich Leader Bouhler and Dr. Brandt are entrusted with

5785-521: The parents could be threatened with call-up for 'labour duty'. By 1941, more than 5,000 children had been killed. The last child to be killed under Aktion T4 was Richard Jenne on 29 May 1945, in the children's ward of the Kaufbeuren - Irsee state hospital in Bavaria , Germany, more than three weeks after US Army troops had occupied the town. Brandt and Bouhler developed plans to expand

5874-435: The policy was contrary to divine law and that "the direct killing of an innocent person because of mental or physical defects is not allowed" but the declaration was not upheld by all Catholic authorities in Germany. In the summer of 1941, protests were led in Germany by the bishop of Münster, Clemens von Galen , whose intervention led to "the strongest, most explicit and most widespread protest movement against any policy since

5963-534: The private collection of Heinrich Gross , one of the institution's directors, until 2001. When the Second World War began in September 1939, less rigorous standards of assessment and a quicker approval process were adopted. Older children and adolescents were included and the conditions covered came to include ... various borderline or limited impairments in children of different ages, culminating in

6052-451: The programme of euthanasia to adults. In July 1939 they held a meeting attended by Conti and Professor Werner Heyde , head of the SS medical department. This meeting agreed to arrange a national register of all institutionalised people with mental illnesses or physical disabilities. The first adults with disabilities to be killed en masse by the Nazi regime were Poles. After the invasion on 1 September 1939, adults with disabilities were shot by

6141-447: The prospect of either having to imprison prominent, highly admired clergymen and other protesters – a course with consequences in terms of adverse public reaction they greatly feared – or else end the programme". Evans considered it "at least possible, even indeed probable" that the T4 programme would have continued beyond Hitler's initial quota of 70,000 deaths but for the public reaction to Galen's sermon. Burleigh called assumptions that

6230-456: The responsibility of extending the authority of physicians, to be designated by name, so that patients who, after a most critical diagnosis, on the basis of human judgment [ menschlichem Ermessen ], are considered incurable, can be granted mercy death [ Gnadentod ]. The killings were administered by Viktor Brack and his staff from Tiergartenstraße 4, disguised as the "Charitable Foundation for Cure and Institutional Care" offices which served as

6319-524: The restriction of killing to 'complete idiots', access to the sacraments and the exclusion of ill Roman Catholic priests from these policies. Despite a decree issued by the Vatican on 2 December 1940 stating that the T4 policy was "against natural and positive Divine law" and that "The direct killing of an innocent person because of mental or physical defects is not allowed", the Catholic Church hierarchy in Germany decided to take no further action. Incensed by

6408-669: The same town would receive death certificates on the same day. In May 1941, the Frankfurt County Court wrote to Gürtner describing scenes in Hadamar, where children shouted in the streets that people were being taken away in buses to be gassed. During 1940, rumours of what was taking place spread and many Germans withdrew their relatives from asylums and sanatoria to care for them at home, often with great expense and difficulty. In some places doctors and psychiatrists co-operated with families to have patients discharged or if

6497-406: The spring of 1940. The SS and police from SS-Sonderkommando Lange responsible for murdering the majority of patients in the annexed territories of Poland since October 1939, took their salaries from the normal police fund, supervised by the administration of the newly formed Wartheland district; the programme in Germany and occupied Poland was overseen by Heinrich Himmler. Before 2013, it

6586-404: The twins to be gathered. I looked around the camp. Everything appeared dark, gray, lifeless. Near the train, as the victims were being separated into two distinct groups, there stood one SS officer dressed in a neatly pressed uniform. He looked very sharp in his beautiful gleaming boots. It appeared to me that he was in charge. The officer doing the selection was Dr. Joseph Mengele. The SS guards at

6675-449: The victims were cremated en masse ). The preparation of thousands of falsified death certificates took up most of the working day of the doctors who operated the centres. During 1940, the centres at Brandenburg, Grafeneck and Hartheim killed nearly 10,000 people each, while another 6,000 were killed at Sonnenstein. In all, about 35,000 people were killed in T4 operations that year. Operations at Brandenburg and Grafeneck were wound up at

6764-629: The weather, be it driving snow, pouring rain or extreme temperatures. Prisoners were made to stand at attention the entire time it took to count thousands of prisoners, which had to be done more than once if a mistake were made. Some prisoners died during or shortly after the roll calls. Harsh disciplinary measures, including beatings and death, were taken against anyone who was late to or who did not remain perfectly still during roll calls. Selektions were sometimes made during roll calls; prisoners would be looked over, and those deemed unhealthy or too weak to work were killed. This German history article

6853-548: Was a respectable field of medicine. Canada , Denmark , Switzerland and the US had passed laws enabling coerced sterilisation . Studies conducted in the 1920s ranked Germany as a country that was unusually reluctant to introduce sterilisation legislation. In his book Mein Kampf (1924), Hitler wrote that one day racial hygiene "will appear as a deed greater than the most victorious wars of our present bourgeois era". In July 1933,

6942-434: Was about 200,000 in Germany and Austria, with about 100,000 victims in other European countries. Following the war, a number of the perpetrators were tried and convicted for murder and crimes against humanity. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the sterilisation of people carrying what were considered to be hereditary defects and in some cases those exhibiting what was thought to be hereditary "antisocial" behaviour,

7031-445: Was advocated by Eugen Bleuler , who presumed racial deterioration because of "mental and physical cripples" in his Textbook of Psychiatry , The more severely burdened should not propagate themselves... If we do nothing but make mental and physical cripples capable of propagating themselves, and the healthy stocks have to limit the number of their children because so much has to be done for the maintenance of others, if natural selection

7120-683: Was always dubious about the legality of the programme. Gürtner later wrote a strongly worded letter to Hitler protesting against it; Hitler did not read it but was told about it by Lammers. Bishop Theophil Wurm , presiding over the Evangelical-Lutheran Church in Württemberg , wrote to Interior Minister Frick in March 1940 and that month a confidential report from the Sicherheitsdienst (SD) in Austria, warned that

7209-633: Was believed that 70,000 persons were murdered in the euthanasia programme, but the German Federal Archives reported that research in the archives of former East Germany indicated that the number of victims in Germany and Austria from 1939 to 1945 was about 200,000 persons and that another 100,000 persons were victims in other European countries. In the German T4 centres there was at least the semblance of legality in keeping records and writing letters. In Polish psychiatric hospitals no one

7298-425: Was deemed to be "useful", exempted from the law and the rate of sterilisation declined. The term Aktion T4 is a post-war coining; contemporary German terms included Euthanasie ( euthanasia ) and Gnadentod (merciful death). The T4 programme stemmed from the Nazi Party policy of "racial hygiene", a belief that the German people needed to be cleansed of racial enemies, which included anyone confined to

7387-590: Was dropped by the Royal Air Force over German troops. In 2009, Richard J. Evans wrote that "This was the strongest, most explicit and most widespread protest movement against any policy since the beginning of the Third Reich". Local Nazis asked for Galen to be arrested but Goebbels told Hitler that such action would provoke a revolt in Westphalia and Hitler decided to wait until after the war to take revenge. In 1986, Lifton wrote, "Nazi leaders faced

7476-543: Was first used in post- war trials against doctors who had been involved in the killings. The name T4 is an abbreviation of Tiergartenstraße  4, a street address of the Chancellery department set up in early 1940, in the Berlin borough of Tiergarten , which recruited and paid personnel associated with Aktion T4. Certain German physicians were authorised to select patients "deemed incurably sick, after most critical medical examination" and then administer to them

7565-402: Was heavily dependent on the labor-force needs of the camp at that time. Approximately 1 in 5 of all transported prisoners survived selection and were thus enslaved. Selection was specific to the camps, such as Auschwitz or Majdanek , that served some kind of industrial function for the regime. As one article put it, "Like Auschwitz-Birkenau, Majdanek was the rare concentration camp that was also

7654-455: Was itself an outgrowth of Aktion T4 , the mass-murder of the persons the Nazis deemed " life unworthy of life ", such as the disabled and mentally ill. Dr. Mengele used selection to find twins for his experiments at Auschwitz, as recalled by Eva Mozes Kor . Miriam and I joined a group of about 10 or 12 sets of twins. We waited for a long time at the edge of the railroad ramp. They seemed to be waiting for everybody to be detrained and all

7743-408: Was left behind. Killings were inflicted using gas-vans, sealed army bunkers and machine guns; families were not informed about the murdered relatives and the empty wards were handed over to the SS. After the official end of the euthanasia programme in 1941, most of the personnel and high-ranking officials, as well as gassing technology and the techniques used to deceive victims, were transferred under

7832-447: Was more merciful than poison injections. The German eugenics movement had an extreme wing even before the Nazis came to power. As early as 1920, Alfred Hoche and Karl Binding advocated killing people whose lives were "unworthy of life" ( lebensunwertes Leben ). Darwinism was interpreted by them as justification of the demand for "beneficial" genes and eradication of the "harmful" ones. Robert Lifton wrote, "The argument went that

7921-444: Was not possible for them to visit relatives in these centres. Most of these patients were killed within 24 hours of arriving at the centres and their bodies cremated. Some bodies were dissected for medical research whilst others had their gold teeth extracted. For every person killed, a death certificate was prepared, giving a false but plausible cause of death. This was sent to the family along with an urn of ashes (random ashes, since

#317682