Hitler. 1936-1945: Nemesis

into realizable policy.

Hitler was indispensable to the process. His well-aired views from the 1920s on ‘euthanasia’ served after 1933 as an encouragement to those, most notably represented in the National Socialist Doctors’ League but by no means confined to fanatical Nazis, anxious to act on the ‘problem’ of what they described as the ‘ballast’ of society (Ballastexistenzen),¹³²

The notion of the ‘destruction of life not worth living’ (‘Vernichtung lebensunwerten Lebens’) had already been the subject of much public debate following the publication in 1920 of a tract by the lawyer Professor Karl Binding and the psychiatrist Dr Alfred Hoche — neither of them a National Socialist — demanding the killing of the incurably sick and insane on request of relatives or the decision of a commission comprising two doctors and two lawyers who had thoroughly investigated the circumstances of a particular case. Among the reasons given for such a policy — later to be voiced by the Nazis — was the need to avoid having to spend money otherwise available for ‘productive’ purposes on the care of those deemed to be no more than a social burden.¹³³

Doctors had, however, overwhelmingly rejected euthanasia during the Weimar era. Psychiatrists began by doing the same, despite arguments already being aired that money spent upon ‘idiots’ could be put to better use. As professional conditions in psychiatry deteriorated, as pychiatrists’ public standing declined — they were often regarded as second-class doctors — and as conditions in the asylums drastically worsened in the wake of severe cuts in public spending by the early 1930s, radical suggestions for reducing the cost of institutionalized support of the mentally ill gained ground. But it was recognized that the public climate for such changes was still not propitious.

Hitler’s takeover of power changed that climate — and opened up new possibilities to the medical profession. Some leading psychiatrists were more than ready to exploit them. Hitler’s presumed intentions provided guidelines for their endeavours, even if the time was still not deemed right to introduce the programme they wanted. Above all, Hitler’s role was decisive in 1938–9 in providing approval for every step that extended into the full ‘euthanasia’ programme from the autumn of 1939 onwards. Without that approval, it is plain, and without the ideological drive that he embodied, there would have been no ‘euthanasia action’.

But the mentality which led to the killing of the mentally sick was no creation of Hitler. Building on foundations firmly laid, especially in the wake of the catastrophic public funding cuts during the Depression years, the erection of the dictatorship had provided licence to the medical and pyschiatric professions after 1933 to think the unthinkable. Minority views, constrained even in a failing democracy, could now become mainstream. The process gathered pace. By 1939, doctors and nurses attached to the asylums were aware of what was required. So was the medical bureaucracy which oiled the wheels of the killing machinery.¹³⁴ The climate of opinion among the general public was by this time also not unfavourable. Though there were strong feelings against euthanasia, particularly among those attached to the Churches, others were in favour — notably, it seems, in the case of mentally ill or disabled children — or at least passively prepared to accept it.¹³⁵

Finally, but not least, the point at which, coinciding with the outbreak of war, a secret programme of mass murder could be implemented would have been unimaginable without the progressive erosion of legality and disintegration of formal structures of government that had taken place since 1933.

Hitler had given a strong indication of his own thoughts on how to deal with the incurably ill in Mein Kampf, where he advocated their sterilization. His remarks were made in the context of a diatribe on the need to eradicate sexually transmitted diseases from society. He wanted no half- measures. ‘It is a half-measure,’ he wrote, ‘to let incurably sick people steadily contaminate the remaining healthy ones… The demand that defective people be prevented from propagating equally defective offspring is a demand of the clearest reason… If necessary, the incurably sick will be pitilessly segregated — a barbaric measure for the unfortunate who is struck by it, but a blessing for his fellow men and posterity.’¹³⁶

For Hitler, typically, when he spoke at the Nuremberg Party Rally in 1929 about how the weakest in society should be handled, the economic argument used by the eugenics lobby in the medical profession and others weighed less heavily than questions of ‘racial hygiene’ and the ‘future maintenance of our ethnic strength (Volkskraft), indeed of our ethnic nationhood (unseres Volkstums) altogether’.¹³⁷ ‘If Germany were to have a million children a year,’ he declared, ‘and do away with (beseitigen) 700,000–800,000 of the weakest of them, the result would finally be perhaps even a rise in strength.’¹³⁸ This implied racial engineering through mass murder, justified through social-Darwinist ideology, not ‘euthanasia’ in the conventional sense as the voluntary release from terminal illness.

According to the comments of his doctor, Karl Brandt, in his post-war trial, Hitler was known to favour involuntary euthanasia at the latest from 1933 onwards.¹³⁹ Lammers, too, later recalled Hitler musing on the killing of mental patients in 1933 during discussions on the ‘Sterilization Law’.¹⁴⁰ But in 1933, German public opinion was nowhere near prepared for such a drastic step. The Nazi regime could not contemplate introducing as controversial a measure as compulsory ‘euthanasia’ for the incurably sick, certain at the very least at that time to provoke the condemnation of the Catholic Church.

But the idea did not disappear from view. In 1933 a published lengthy memorandum on National Socialist penal law, whose author was the Prussian Minister of Justice, Hanns Kerrl, did not classify voluntary euthanasia, certified by two doctors, as a criminal offence. Kerrl also stated that it would not be an offence, were the state ‘legally to order the elimination from life of incurably mentally sick by official organs’.¹⁴¹ The hierarchy of the Catholic Church responded in predictably hostile manner (though in an unpublished memorandum).¹⁴² In 1935, Gurtner’s published report on the work of the commission set up to review the penal code, in direct contrast to Kerrl’s line of interpretation, then appeared to rule out explicitly the prospect of any legalization of the killing of the mentally sick.¹⁴³ However, Hitler’s own position was indicated in his reply in 1935 to the Reich Doctors’ Leader Gerhard Wagner (who was instrumental in the drive to introduce an anti-Jewish ‘Blood Law’). Evidently, Wagner was pressing for radical measures to bring about the ‘destruction of life not worth living’. Hitler reportedly told him that he would ‘take up and carry out the questions of euthanasia’ in the event of a war. He was ‘of the opinion that such a problem could be more smoothly and easily carried out in war’, and that resistance, as was to be expected from the Churches, would then have less of an impact than in peacetime. He intended, therefore, ‘in the event of a war radically to solve the problem of the mental asylums’.¹⁴⁴

For the next three years, Hitler had little involvement with the ‘euthanasia’ issue. Others were more active. Evidently encouraged by Hitler’s remarks that he did intend, once the opportunity presented itself through the war for which the regime was preparing, to introduce a ‘euthanasia programme’, Reich Doctors’ Leader Wagner pushed forward discussions on how the population should be prepared for such action. Calculations were published on the cost of upkeep of the mentally sick and hereditarily ill, instilling the impression of what could be done for the good of the people with vast resources now being ‘wasted’ on ‘useless’ lives. Cameras were sent into the asylums to produce scenes to horrify the German public and convince them of the need to eliminate those portrayed as the dregs of society for the good of the whole population.¹⁴⁵ The National Socialist Racial and Political Office(NS-Rasse und Politisches Amt) produced five silent films of this kind between 1935 and 1937·¹⁴⁶ Hitler himself liked one of them, Erbkrank (Hereditarily Ill), made in 1936, so much that he commissioned a sequel with sound, Opfer der Vergangenheit (Victims of the Past) and had the film shown in all German cinemas in 1937.¹⁴⁷

From 1936 onwards, the Churches were forced to transfer the patients in the sanatoria they ran into asylums controlled by the state.¹⁴⁸ These had already had their budgets slashed as the overcrowding grew, and the quality of the staff deteriorated.¹⁴⁹ Rumours circulated that the Reich Ministry of the Interior was pondering the drastic reduction of food-rations for asylum patients in the event of war.¹⁵⁰ In the SS organ Das Schwarze Korps a reader’s letter in 1937 demanding a law to permit the killing of mentally retarded children, if their parents gave consent, was accompanied by a commentary advocating a law ‘that helps nature to its right’. The view that there was no right to kill, the paper declared, could be countered by stating that there was a hundred times less right to defy nature by keeping alive ‘what was not born to life’.¹⁵¹ It was to take away nothing from a seriously brain-damaged child to ‘extinguish its light of life’. The ‘child-euthanasia’ programme was presaged in such sentiments. Murder in the asylums was in the air. It was a matter of time and occasion until it was implemented.