Authors: Lynn H. Nicholas
Victor Brack’s declaration that it would be easy to hide the killings from the public had run into reality. The stream of gray buses going to the killing centers, which were heavily guarded by the SS, and the evilsmelling smoke emanating from their chimneys was the talk of the surrounding towns. Village children playing games threatened one another
with incarceration in the creepy castles. Rumors that the inmates were being used as guinea pigs for some secret lethal gas spread rapidly and were reported to Berlin. There was more solid evidence too. In March 1941 a nurse who worked in one of the killing centers sent an anonymous letter to the American consulate in Berlin in which she said:
Unfortunately I am obliged to be the bearer of sad information; our Government is murdering masses of the spiritually ill and other sick persons in experimental stations with poison gas.… I assure you that recently not hundreds but thousands have been murdered.
She included addresses of victims’ families for verification and ended her passionate appeal with “the expectation that you will do what lies in your power to bring the murderers to justice.”
25
A steady stream of complaints flowed into the Ministry of Justice. Shocked local officials revealed that a Nazi welfare organization was trying to claim public funds released by the demise of large numbers of mental patients.
26
A high-level bureaucrat who had a schizophrenic son wrote, again anonymously, to say that what was going on was “plain murder, just as in the concentration camps,” and defiantly continued, “This measure uniformly emanates from the SS in Berlin.… For seven years now this gang of murderers defiles the German name. If my son is murdered, woe! I shall take care that these crimes will be published in all foreign newspapers.… I shall demand prosecution by the public prosecutor.” Obviously believing that the Führer was unaware of the process, as many others did, he added in a postscript, “at the same time I write to Hitler.”
27
The Chief Prosecutor of Stuttgart reported that the city’s Guardianship and Probate Court had received some seventy “stereotyped” death notices issued by the killing centers and had become suspicious,
28
while a courageous judge in Brandenburg, Dr. Lothar Kreyssig, unimpressed by the informal note Hitler had written to authorize the euthanasia process, which was shown to him by the Minister of Justice, tried to institute murder proceedings against officials of the program.
29
All this led the Minister, Hans Gürtner, to suggest to the Reichschancellery that since Hitler had refused to publish a law legalizing the killings, despite the fact that one had been drafted by worried officials from a number of agencies, he should “discontinue immediately the secret extermination of insane persons. The recent procedure became publicized so rapidly and widely and not least by the attempted camouflage.… It is impossible for our authorities to pretend that the Reich Justice Administration knows nothing of the matter.”
30
Himmler too was getting letters about the goings-on at Graefeneck. One, from a highborn schloss dweller, Frau von Loewis, arrived with a flowery cover letter from a male Nazi friend describing her as a “Nordic goddess descended from heaven” and “an ardent follower of the movement.” After saying that his “unlimited trust in my Reichsführer SS” had assured him that Frau von Loewis would not suffer any “unpleasantness” because of her letter, the writer of the cover letter smarmily suggests that “there are certainly things which a man can stand but access to which should not be allowed to a woman.… Therefore if we must to-day undertake certain things because we want to fight for the eternal life of our people, things before which a woman would shudder, they must be handled in such a way as to keep them really concealed.” In her own letter Frau von Loewis not only expressed her dismay at the open-ended nature of the euthanasia process, but also confirmed that the most awful thing “is the public secret which creates a terrible feeling of unsafety.” The matter, she declared, “must be brought to the Führer’s ears before it is too late and there
must
be a way by which the voice of the German people can reach the ear of its Führer!”
31
We do not know if Hitler got these messages, but Himmler, noting that “the population recognizes the gray automobile of the SS and think they know what is going on at the constantly smoking crematory. What happens there is a secret and yet no longer one,” ordered his men to discontinue operations at Graefeneck.
32
The gassings and cremations at Graefeneck and Brandenburg stopped, but the killings did not; they were simply slowed down and transferred to other institutions less visible to the public. Nevertheless, resistance continued to build. By the summer of 1940 the churches, whose institutions were responsible for nearly half the disabled in Germany, had become fully aware of the deaths. Pastor Gerhard Braune of the Protestant welfare organization known as the Innere Mission, horrified at an order to transfer twenty-five “feebleminded” girls to one of the killing wards, began an investigation. He succeeded in finding the disguised offices of the Reich Committee and confronted officials there with his evidence. All was denied, causing Braune to send a detailed memo to Hitler, who replied that he could not cancel the program but would make sure that the process would be carried out “more carefully.”
33
A few days later Braune was arrested on vague charges by the Gestapo.
Shortly after this effort, another pastoral protest was issued by the Protestant Bishop Theophil Wurm of Württemberg, who wrote an eloquent letter to Minister of the Interior Wilhelm Frick, stating, “The decision as to the time when the life of a suffering human being should end
rests with the Almighty God.” He emphasized: “It is certainly a source of much grief to parents if one of their children is not mentally intact, but as long as God permits this child to live, they will let it feel all their love.” Wurm too blamed the rejection of Christianity on the SS and not on Hitler, who, he felt, had embraced “positive Christianity.” And, he continued, “If young people begin to realize that life is no longer sacred to the State, what conclusions will they draw therefrom for private life? Cannot every violation of the rights of another person be justified by saying that the elimination of that person was useful to the person committing the crime? On this sloping plane there is no stopping.”
34
On August 11, 1940, the Catholic bishops also protested, and in December the Vatican decreed that it was not “permissible on the basis of an order by the state authority directly to kill those who, although they have not committed a crime worthy of death, nevertheless cannot be of any further use to the nation and are rather a burden for the nation and a hindrance to its energy and strength.”
35
The only trouble was that most of these protests were not made public, but were politely contained within high government and church circles by officials afraid to rock the boat. Public protest would not take place for eight more months, until the Catholic bishop of Münster, August Count von Galen, angered at the lack of response to the protests lodged via the bureaucracy and by reports of the imminent removal of a large number of “unproductive national comrades” from his own diocese to the killing centers, spoke out in a thunderous sermon on August 3, 1941. After exposing the methodology of the killings, he revealed that he had formally accused the agencies involved of murder.
36
The sermon was read in all the churches of the diocese and soon reached the Allies, who printed thousands of copies that were dropped over Germany by the RAF. Three weeks later Hitler, aware that all cover was blown, ordered that the adult euthanasia program be ended. The publicity was embarrassing, but in fact the program had already eliminated well over the targeted number of 70,000 “lives unworthy of life” at an estimated cost savings of 885 million reichsmarks. The T4 office that ran the program continued to exist under different designations. Its well-trained personnel and state-of-the-art facilities, as we shall see, would soon be expanded and used to “disinfect” a new category of “unproductive” victims, both within the Reich and in the greater privacy of the newly conquered lands to the east. And adult euthanasia, in conditions that can only be described as medieval, would soon begin again, using the more subtle measures of starvation and drugs already employed for the children.
For the young there was no amnesty: the Reich Committee, on specific orders from Hitler, not only continued its operations, but raised its age limit to include teenagers.
37
By March 1943 its parameters would be expanded to take in the perfectly healthy offspring of foreign forced laborers and half-Jewish children from reform schools. The handling of these children was no more gentle than it had been for those who had gone before. Four siblings, Klara, Alfred, Edeltraud, and Amanda Gotthelf, who were sent to the Hadamar Institution, all died within three weeks of “enteritis.” The official who had been asked to send them could not believe it:
These strange casualties disconcerted me so that my scruples could not be put aside even by the official statement of the Hadamar Institution. On the other hand I had to consider the fact that the official statements … could not be discussed as unworthy of belief. I would never have succeeded in obtaining a rectification or clarification of the procedures. Nothing else remained to me than to avoid a repetition of such events … therefore I personally instructed the heads of our institutions … by word of mouth to send no more children to Hadamar under any circumstances.
38
We do not know if he succeeded in this effort.
It is known that nearly 100,000 children were registered with the Reich Committee, of whom an estimated 5,200 were killed outright. Many more were retained in the institutions for other reasons and died in a less direct manner. Incentives to continue the children’s program were high for the professionals involved. The nurses and other technicians received bonuses for each death. Not all the motives were financial. The operatives were sworn to secrecy on pain of death. After the war many would testify that they had felt terrible about what they were required to do, though they clearly agreed that many of the pathetic children in their care were better off dead, but that they had been powerless and feared the doctors who were in charge. The detached sadism of Nurse Wörle, who killed Richard Jenne after the defeat of her Nazi superiors, casts doubt on these often repeated excuses.
For many in the medical profession, the institutionalized children, like Dr. Mengele’s twins, were an all too tempting pool of experimental objects useful for research. Proposals were submitted for research on polio, Down’s syndrome, and spina bifida. In 1942 one of the doctors on the Reich Committee proudly pointed out that “the Reich Committee children are serving science in two other areas: they make it possible to test
the scarlet fever vaccine … and are available for the extraordinarily important area of immunization against TB.”
39
In a Heidelburg research institute thirty retarded children aged three to thirteen were used in endocrinological experiments for a doctoral dissertation, aptly entitled “Metabolic Endurance Tests in Feebleminded Children,” which would be published in 1946. The experiments involved the precise measurement of fluid intake and excretion, necessitating force-feeding of the fluids, which the doctoral candidate, Monika Schneider, admitted, “made the experiment more difficult.” Other measurements were procured by drawing blood at frequent intervals, after the injection of large doses of adrenaline and insulin. Alas, the experiments were inconclusive, as the author felt she would need several hundred more “idiots” to be absolutely sure of her results, and noted that one could tell only so much from the living child. All was not lost, however: when the children were shipped off to their assigned killing centers, Dr. Schneider, clearly aware of their fate, followed up with a request that “the entire glandular system” of patient Ditmar K. be returned to her “along with the brain.”
40
Documents show that all of the killing centers were linked to research institutes of some kind, thus nothing went to waste. Brains were especially in demand. Indeed, researchers could order brains from whichever type of handicapped child they wanted. Dr. Carl Schneider, father-in-law of the studious Monika and director of the Racial Political Office of Baden, would peruse the children’s dossiers and then have suitable organs sent to him by courier.
41
Görden, the original child euthanasia institution, was closely linked to the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Brain Research in Berlin-Buch. Here Dr. Julius Hallervorden would accumulate a collection of some 600 brains. “If you are going to kill all these people,” he is said to have remarked to an American investigator after the war, “at least take the brains out so that the material can be utilized.”
42
And they were in fact utilized until 1990 at the Max Planck Institute in Frankfurt. At least thirty-three of the brains were from children aged seven to seventeen from Görden who all died on the same day in October 1940. A witness at a postwar trial testified that these children, plus about sixty-five more, had been sent there “for the express purpose of killing them.”
43
The autopsies were done immediately following the executions, which seem to have taken place, en masse, in the adult gas chambers at Brandenburg, just down the road.
44
Any parent who has taken a child to a routine physical with its usual blood tests knows how frightened even a child held in its mother’s arms
can be during the ordeal. At least one of the Nazi doctors withdrew from the programs when his own child was born with a birth defect, perhaps having found that one could love an imperfect being. But this sort of humanity seems to have been rare in the eugenically inclined, and acceptance of the concept of the promotion of a pure and superior Aryan race was not much questioned, even when the methodology was felt to be extreme. Hitler, orphaned at the age of nineteen, who admitted his unfitness for marriage and remained childless, did not have to deal with the reality of the emotions of parental love and loss.