Cruel World (8 page)

“Belonging” to the Jewish religion did not simply mean membership in a synagogue, but was based on whether the person had ever regarded himself as a Jew. The
Mischlinge
, though given considerable protection, were still subject to serious restrictions. Needless to say, even this clarified version of the definition of a Jew did not cover every case, and all sorts of petitions and lawsuits to escape final classification continued to go through the courts with varying degrees of success.

For those categorized as Jews, an inexorable series of decrees continued to be promulgated. Taking lessons from the segregation laws of the United States and the colonial powers and harking back to the myriad regulations used over the ages to isolate and exclude Jews, the laws limited employment, transportation, and shopping. They restricted housing, forbade the use of telephones, denied entrance to public toilets and baths, and even prohibited the keeping of pets. There was a new rule almost every day, which put the newly defined victims in ever more miserable situations. The aim was to separate them totally from the pure Aryans. It was hard to cheat. Every Jew had to carry an identification card indicating his status, and all other documents, from ration cards to passports, would eventually include racial classification. The ultimate identifying mark, the yellow star, of which Hitler originally disapproved, would not be used in Germany itself until 1941. But this badge was, by then, hardly necessary, as the Nazi security police had had full control of the central Jewish communal organizations since 1939 and, through them, knew exactly where most Jews were to be found come the day when any still in Germany would have to be removed involuntarily.

In the cold of mid-February 1941, a scene that might have been taken from the darkest Brueghel painting but for the modern machinery involved, unfolded in the main square of Absberg, a small farming town in Bavaria. As most of the population watched, over 100 “feebleminded” inmates of the Ottilienheim Convent, located right on the square, were loaded into two huge, dark gray buses. The patients, many of whom worked in the local agricultural industries, did not go willingly but were dragged out of the convent one by one. Some of the gathered townspeople wept openly while others made “irresponsible” remarks about their government. The Nazi official reporting this “unrest” noted with disgust that “even some Party members” were among those who cried. He blamed the chaplain of the convent for “arranging” the negative mood in the very Catholic town by having those who were about to be transported take Communion before leaving. The official assured his superiors that the incident would be carefully investigated, but suggested rather curtly that “somehow more tact should be used in the removal of such people, who are to be done away with in the course of the Reich defense.”
¹
The fact that those who departed on the gray buses would not return was by now common knowledge in this town and many others. The plea for more “tact” would soon be satisfied. But the removal process, begun in 1939, would continue until the end of the war.

By the middle of 1938, great progress had been made in the cleansing of the Reich. Racial examination and classification was well advanced and organized. The Gypsies had been herded into reservations and criminals and political dissidents filled the concentration camps. Thousands of Jews had emigrated, and thousands more from all these groups had been sterilized. But this was not nearly enough. The handicapped, sterilized or not, especially if maintained in state institutions, were a burden on the economy and would be more so in the event of war, which only a few in the Nazi leadership knew was coming very soon. The process of purification would therefore have to be speeded up. The most efficient method for ridding the state of the useless handicapped was, of coince, death, or more acceptably, “euthanasia.”

A propaganda illustration showing the cost to healthy citizens of maintaining those with a “hereditary illness.”
(photo credit 2.1)

Consideration of this option was not a bolt from the blue for the Nazis. Prior to World War I, the concept had been studied in many places, but discussion was usually limited to the need to relieve the sufferings of the terminally ill. In Germany, however, the forced triage imposed on mental institutions by the starvation conditions of World War I had led some thinkers to extend the parameters of euthanasia beyond those who were terminally ill to those considered “unworthy” of life.

There was little question of who the victims would be. Thirty percent of the most severely mentally ill patients held in state institutions in World War I had died as a result of drastic reductions of their rations in favor of those who were more useful to society. In 1920, two scientists, Drs. Karl Binding and Alfred Hoche, published a work entitled
Permission for the Destruction of Life Unworthy of Life, w
hich proposed giving the government
the right to kill the comatose and beings “of manifest negative value,” a category that was not very clearly defined. The authors argued that mistakes that might be made in these killings should not be considered too serious, as “humanity loses so many of its members on account of error that one more or less hardly counts in the balance.”
²
The “balance” was not humanitarian but economic. The learned doctors had carefully analyzed the cost to the nation of each mental patient, and could see no reason to maintain the lives of those who were merely “ballast” in the ship of state.

The idea of legalized euthanasia met with strong opposition in the 1920s. Numbers of German physicians and psychiatrists pointed out the dangers of such a policy, which many felt would open the way to indiscriminate condemnations. They correctly predicted that, if such measures were implemented, anyone sent to an asylum would go in terror, and that the nurses in a place where euthanasia was commonplace would soon become brutalized. The intellectual debate would continue into the 1930s, with the balance tilting ever more toward death as the Depression took hold, but even Hitler did not dare implement large-scale extermination of these useless and “degenerate” citizens until he had the cover of war.
³
It is clear, however, that the issue was on his mind: at the 1929 Nazi Party rally in Nuremberg, Hitler mused out loud that “if a million children a year are born in Germany and 700–800,000 of the weakest people are eliminated the end result might be an increase in strength.”
⁴

In the postwar trials of those who would eventually run the euthanasia programs, testimony is repeatedly given that shows Hitler’s interest in the subject. Hans Heinrich Lammers, chief of the Reichschancellery, who was in daily contact with Hitler, testified in 1961 that Hitler had discussed the euthanization of mental patients in 1933 during planning conferences on the heredity laws.
⁵

Karl Brandt, a physician on Hitler’s staff, also testified that Hitler had planned as early as 1935 to implement euthanasia measures as soon as war broke out, “since the public resistance which one could expect from the churches would not play such a prominent role amidst the events of wartime.” He noted that Hitler had said soon after the invasion of Poland that he wanted to bring about “a definite solution to the euthanasia question” and “gave me general directives on how he imagined it.”
⁶

There were other, more macabre indicators of preparations. In July 1934, U.S. consulates reported that a law had been passed in May of that year to reduce the red tape involved in cremation and make it “the equal of burial,” noting that the legislation had been promoted by an Aryan religious group and that it would “upset the orthodox churches.”
⁷
To prepare
public opinion, Nazi speakers were sent forth to lecture professional groups about “the heavy burden upon the nation of those with hereditary diseases,” while the SS magazine
Das Schwarze Korps
ran articles reassuring its readers, “A child that is born an idiot has no personality. It would hardly last a year if it were not kept alive artificially. It is even less conscious of its existence than an animal. One does not remove anything from it if one snuffs it out.”
⁸

By 1938 tours of insane asylums, during which patients were displayed in a sort of freak show, were being given to military personnel and high school students. The students of one school were required to write up their observations for racial hygiene class. They had been well prepared. Few of them omitted to mention the financial burdens to the state caused by the care of the inmates, or their animal-like aspect. Those students who said the patients were not nearly as disgusting or repellent as they had been led to believe, or who wondered if relatively healthy people might not be made worse by being locked up, or who objected to the display of the sick as “exhibition objects,” had their papers corrected in red ink and were instructed to reread their racial hygiene texts.
⁹

The “general directives” for the “solution to the euthanasia question” that Hitler had mentioned were formulated in yet another secret expert committee, much like the one that had dealt with the Rhineland Bastards. This one would eventually settle on the typically excessive title of Reich Committee for the Scientific Registering of Serious Hereditary and Congenital Illnesses, or Reich Committee for short. Hitler’s personal doctor, Theo Morell, was also set to work to study the history of euthanasia back to the nineteenth century. His research included a long-suppressed 1920 report by a Dr. Ewald Meltzer, director of a home for feebleminded children, who had sent a questionnaire to the parents of his patients asking them how, in theory, they would feel about “the painless shortening” of their child’s life. To his surprise, a majority of those responding implied that they would not object to such a death for their child, as long as they did not have to make the decision themselves or be told the exact circumstances, because, as one respondent put it, “it is difficult to confirm a death sentence for one’s own flesh and blood.”
¹⁰
Morell’s report advised killing the handicapped because their lives were not really lives but terrible animal existences that inspired disgust in others and were expensive for the state. Advocating a more businesslike approach, he noted that “5000 idiots costing only 2000 RM [reichsmarks] each per annum equals 100 million a year. With interest at 5%, that corresponds to a capital reserve of 200 million.”
¹¹

Hitler and his staff were also encouraged to begin a child euthanasia program by petitions from parents requesting permission for euthanasia for critically ill or handicapped newborns. Dr. Brandt testified that just such a letter, received in early 1939, had been the catalyst for the activation of the program. He was sent by Hitler to examine the child, who apparently was blind, lacked parts of limbs, and “seemed to be an idiot.” After seeing the child Brandt assured its doctors, who agreed that it would be merciful to end its life, that they would not be prosecuted if they did so. The child was then given a lethal injection.

For Hitler this incident was an indication that the medical community would not be greatly opposed to his long-cherished plan. This would not be true of the churches or the judiciary, for whom euthanasia was still murder. The killing operations in Germany must, therefore, circumvent the judicial system. This time the secret agency involved, which would keep the name Reich Committee, would be concealed within Hitler’s personal chancellery, the Kanzlei des Führers, or KdF, and would be run by Karl Brandt and the head of the KdF, Philipp Bouhler. But the information upon which they would proceed and the personnel who performed the acts of euthanasia would be provided by mainstream social agencies.

On August 18, 1939, Interior Ministry health professionals were ordered to register all newborns and children under age three who had specified handicaps. To encourage thoroughness the grassroots reporters were paid 2RM per report. The registration forms were gathered by local officials, who mailed them not to a government agency, but to an anonymous post office box in Berlin, thereby giving the impression that the information was for some private scientific or statistical research project. Once the reports were in Berlin, nonmedical bureaucrats made a first selection. The forms were then sent on to three pro-euthanasia experts, who without seeing the children marked the forms “+” (kill) or “—” (let live). The follow-up on the registrations was very thorough.

One institution, in early 1942, received a letter asking if twelve-year-old Hans K., “who has been in your institution since 25 April, 1941, for hereditary feeblemindedness,” could “ever become a useful member of the Volk.” The negative reply was a death sentence.
¹²
Once a child was chosen, the parents would have to be convinced by their local health organizations to release it from home or institution. Special children’s wards were set up to receive the condemned children, usually within existing institutions and usually far from cities, which made it difficult for parents to visit. The little ones were not transported in the gray buses. They generally went by train.
Eventually there would be some thirty children’s euthanasia wards scattered all over the country. The first one opened in 1939 at Görden, a large hospital complex just outside Brandenburg that became the training ground for doctors sent to handle the euthanasia cases in other centers.