issue, though confined to one part of Germany, had cast momentary light on the increasing fragility of backing for Party and regime as the inevitable radicalization and lack of coordinated, pragmatic policy intensified. Aggression turned outwards, as long as it was painless and successful, was largely unobjectionable, it seems. But as soon as aggression was directed inwards, at widely held traditional belief systems as opposed to unloved but harmless minorities, it was a different matter altogether. The ‘total claim’ made by Nazism, its intolerance towards any institutional framework the Movement did not control, and the inbuilt ‘cumulative radicalization’ of the system meant, therefore, an inexorable trend towards greater, not less, social conflict.175
This now emerged in an issue at the very heart of the regime’s ideology as, in midsummer 1941, serious disquiet over the ‘euthanasia action’ came out into the open. All too credible rumours about the killing of asylum patients had been circulating since summer 1940. Taking place in selected asylums within Germany, in close reach of major centres of population, it had been impossible to keep the ‘action’ as close a secret as had been intended. Those in the immediate vicinity saw the grey buses arrive, the patients unload and enter the asylum, the crematorium chimneys continually smoking.176 Occasionally, as at Absberg in Franconia in February 1941, there had been public demonstrations of sympathy for the victims as they were loaded on to the buses to take them to what everyone knew was a certain death.177 The secrecy, and absence of any public statement, let alone law, authorizing what was known to be happening, stoked the fires of alarm. Protest letters landed in the Reich Chancellery and the Reich Justice Ministry. Some were even from dyed-in-the-wool National Socialists.178 Others, on occasion not mincing words, were from prominent churchmen.179 But the churchmen up to this point had kept their protests confidential. On 7 July a pastoral letter from German bishops was read out in Catholic churches, declaring that it was wrong to kill except in war or for self-defence.180 But this veiled attempt to criticize the ‘euthanasia action’ left no obvious mark. The death-mills stayed working.
Then, on 3 August 1941, Bishop Clemens August Graf von Galen, the Catholic Bishop of Munster in Westphalia, referring to the pastoral letter, in a most courageous sermon in the St Lamberti Church in Munster, openly denounced in plain terms what was happening. Galen, deeply conservative, anti-liberal, and anti-socialist, had been thought in some Church circles in the 1930s even to be a Nazi sympathizer.181 In June 1941, like some other Catholic bishops, he had welcomed the attack on the Soviet Union and offered his prayers for the ‘successful defence against the Bolshevik threat to our people’.182 But by July, as Munster suffered under a hail of British bombs, he delivered a series of sermons denouncing in the most forthright terms the Gestapo’s suppression of religious orders in the city.183
On 14 July, a day after a sermon attacking the closure of the monasteries, Galen sent a telegram to the Reich Chancellery requesting Hitler to defend the people against the Gestapo. The following Sunday, 20 July, he read out the telegram in church. Two days later he wrote to Lammers with what could only be seen as a criticism of Hitler and his state. The Fuhrer’s involvement with foreign and military matters was such, Galen remarked, that he was not in a position to deal with all the petitions and complaints sent to him. ‘Adolf Hitler is not a divine being, raised above every natural limitation, who is able to keep an eye on and direct everything at the same time. However, when as a result of this overloading with work of the responsible leader… the Gestapo shatters unrestrained the home front… then I know (I am called upon)… to raise my voice loudly.’184
Popular unrest at the closing of the monasteries was also brought to Hitler’s attention by Lammers on 29 July while a protest by Bishop Franz Rudolf Bornewasser of Trier was being discussed. It seems likely that Galen’s telegram, and the contents of his letter to Lammers, were referred to Hitler at the same time. Bishop Bornewasser’s confidential protest had already linked the unrest over the closing of monasteries to the disquiet about the killing of ‘unworthy life’. Galen now did the same — but in public. His fury over the dissolution of the monasteries lit the fuse for his open assault on the Nazi ‘euthanasia programme’.185
In his sermon on 3 August, Bishop Galen again pilloried the Gestapo for its attacks on Catholic religious orders. Then he came to the ‘euthanasia action’. ‘There is a general suspicion verging on certainty,’ the Bishop stated, ‘that these numerous deaths of mentally ill people do not occur of themselves but are deliberately brought about, that the doctrine is being followed, according to which one may destroy so-called “worthless life”, that is kill innocent people if one considers that their lives are of no further value for the nation and the state.’ In emotional terms, Galen pointed out the implications. People who had become invalids through labour and war, and the soldier risking his life at the front, would all be at risk. ‘Some commission can put us on the list of the “unproductive”, who in their opinion have become worthless life. And no police force will protect us and no court will investigate our murder and give the murderer the punishment he deserves. Who will be able to trust his doctor any more? He may report his patient as “unproductive” and receive instructions to kill him. It is impossible to imagine the degree of moral depravity, of general mistrust that would then spread even through families if this dreadful doctrine is tolerated, accepted, and followed.’186
Even before Galen delivered his sermon, Hitler had been sufficiently concerned about morale and popular unrest at such a critical juncture of the war that he had issued orders to Gauleiter to cease until further notice all seizures of Church and monastic property. Under no circumstances were independent actions by Gauleiter permissible. Similar instructions went to the Gestapo.187 According to Papen, Hitler attributed all the blame to the hotheads in the Party. He had told Bormann that the ‘nonsense’ had to stop, and that he would tolerate no conflict, given the internal situation.188 It was simply a tactical move. Hitler sympathized with the radicals, but acted pragmatically.189 As his comments a few months later made plain, he fully approved of the closure of the monasteries.190 Only the need for peace in relations with the Churches to avoid deteriorating morale on the home front determined his stance. Events in the Warthegau (where by 1941 94 per cent of churches and chapels in the Posen-Gnesen diocese were closed, 11 per cent of the clergy murdered, and most of the remainder thrust into prisons and concentration camps) showed the face of the future.191 A victorious end to the war would unquestionably have brought a renewed, even more savage onslaught on the Churches. But in the context of such widespread unrest, Hitler had to take seriously the impact of Galen’s sermon on the killing of asylum patients, a copy of which had been brought to him by Lammers.192 Moreover, with that sermon, reproduced in thousands of clandestine copies and circulated from hand to hand, the secrecy surrounding the ‘euthanasia action’ had been broken.193
The Nazi leadership realized that it was helpless in the circumstances to take strong action against Galen. It was suggested to Bormann that Galen should be hanged. Bormann answered that, while the death penalty was certainly warranted, ‘considering the war circumstances the Fuhrer would scarcely decree this measure’. Goebbels acknowledged that if anything were undertaken against the Bishop, support from the population of Munster and Westphalia could be written off during the war.194 He hoped that a favourable turn in the eastern campaign would provide the opportunity to deal with him.195 Not surprisingly, since he was aware of Hitler’s concern about the decline in morale in the wake of the Church conflict, Goebbels spoke against arousing public discussion over ‘euthanasia’ at precisely that time. ‘Such a debate,’ noted Goebbels, ‘would only inflame feelings anew. In a critical period of the war, that is extraordinarily inexpedient. All inflammatory matters should be kept away from the people at present. People are so occupied with the problems of the war that other problems only arouse and irritate them.’196 Goebbels’s comments on popular opinion during his visit to Fuhrer Headquarters on 18 August must have reinforced Hitler’s view that the time had come to calm the unrest at home. On 24 August, Hitler stopped the T4 ‘euthanasia action’ as secretly as he had started it two years earlier.197
On the very same day, Hitler, through an internal Party circular, ordered replacement buildings for damaged hospitals in areas threatened by bombing raids to be constructed. The barrack-like prefabricated constructions were to be attached to asylums and nursing homes, which were to have their existing patients relocated in order to make room for air-raid victims. The costs of the removal of the patients were to be borne by the ‘Community Patients Transport Service’ — precisely the same organization, run by the Chancellery of the Fuhrer, whose buses had carried the asylum inmates to their deaths in the ‘euthanasia’ centres. Specifically acknowledging the disquiet which this would cause, the order — signed by none other than Hitler’s doctor, Karl Brandt, who along with Bouhler had been authorized in autumn 1939 to carry out the ‘euthanasia action’ — stated that relatives would be informed in advance about the destination of the patients, and would be able to visit them there. The press would undertake a propaganda campaign to explain what was happening and prevent rumours spreading.198
In his sermon of 3 August, Bishop Galen had cleverly brought the ‘euthanasia action’ into connection with the bombing-raids on Munster, which he hinted were a ‘punishment of God’ for the offences against the Commandment
