Hitler. 1936-1945: Nemesis

In the interim, the ‘Chancellery of the Fuhrer of the NSDAP’, the agency which would come to run the ‘euthanasia action’ from 1939 onwards, was doing all it could to expand its own power-base in the political jungle of the Third Reich. Despite its impressive name, the Fuhrer Chancellery had little actual power. Hitler had set it up at the end of 1934 to deal with correspondence from Party members directed to himself as head of the NSDAP. It was officially meant to serve as the agency to keep the Fuhrer in direct touch with the concerns of his people.¹⁵² Much of the correspondence, as Hitler himself made clear, was a matter of trivial complaints, petty grievances, and minor personal squabbles of Party members. But a vast number of letters to Hitler did pour in after 1933 — around a quarter of a million a year in the later 1930s.¹⁵³ And, to preserve the fiction of the Fuhrer listening to the cares of his people, many of them needed attention.

Hitler put the Fuhrer Chancellery under the control of Philipp Bouhler — a member of the Party’s Reichsleitung (Reich Leadership) since 1933, a quiet, bureaucratic type but intensely loyal and deferential. Tenacious and efficient, Bouhler had been in no small measure responsible for setting up the Party’s administrative organization after its refoundation in 1925.¹⁵⁴ At the time of his appointment he was thirty-five years old, somewhat owlish-looking with round, black horn-rimmed spectacles and swept-back hair. His soft-voiced and polite manner was unusual in the Nazi leadership. He was a quiet man behind the scenes who, at another time in another place, might have become a company secretary. But Bouhler, still bearing a walking disability — and perhaps psychological scars — from the serious injuries to his legs sustained towards the end of the war which had prevented him from pursuing an officer’s career in the army as his father had done, was ambitious.¹⁵⁵ He was also, whatever his introverted mannerisms, ideologically fanatical. And exploiting his direct connections with Hitler, the vagueness of his remit, and the randomness of the business that came the way of the organization he headed, he was now able to expand his own little empire — treading on numerous toes along the way. By the time the Fuhrer Chancellery moved in 1936 into new accommodation close to the Reich Chancellery, it consisted of six departments, and the original twenty-six employees had almost doubled, increasing five-fold by 1942.¹⁵⁶ Of the various departments, the most important was Department (Amt) II (from 1939 Main Department — Hauptamt) headed by Bouhler’s deputy, Viktor Brack. This Department itself covered a wide range of heterogeneous business but, in its section ‘IIb’, under Hans Hefelmann, was responsible for handling petitions relating to the Reich Ministry of the Interior, including sensitive issues touching on the competence of the health department of the Ministry.¹⁵⁷ Brack, five years younger than Bouhler, was, if anything, even more ambitious than his boss. He had a classical Nazi background: volkisch upbringing, Freikorps, participation in the Beerhall Putsch, study of agricultural economics at the Technische Hochschule in Munich, student activism, entry into the Party and SS at the age of twenty-five in 1929. His father was Frau Himmler’s doctor. He himself acted for a time as Himmler’s chauffeur.¹⁵⁸ Brack was ideologically attuned to what was wanted. And he was ready to grasp an opportunity when he saw one.

This came some time in the first months of 1939. Around that time the father of a severely handicapped child — born blind, with no left forearm and a deformed leg — in Pom?en, near Leipzig, sent in a petition to Hitler, asking for the child to be released through mercy-killing. The petition arrived in Hefelmann’s office in the Fuhrer Chancellery.¹⁵⁹ Hefelmann did not consider involving either the Reich Ministry of the interior or the Reich Ministry of Justice. He thought it should be taken to Hitler himself, to see how the Fuhrer thought it should be handled.¹⁶⁰ This was probably in May or June 1939. Hitler sent his doctor, Karl Brandt, to the University of Leipzig Children’s Clinic, to consult the child’s doctors with the mandate, and, if the position was as the father had described it, to authorize the doctors in his name to carry out euthanasia.¹⁶¹ This was done towards the end of July 1939. Soon after Brandt’s return, he was verbally empowered by Hitler, as was Bouhler, to take similar action should other cases arise. (The case of the child from Pom?en was evidently not an isolated instance around this time.)¹⁶² Whether Hitler took this step unprompted, or whether it followed a suggestion from Brandt or the ambitious Bouhler is not known. But between February and May 1939 Hefelmann, on Brandt’s instructions, carried out discussions with doctors known to be sympathetic and eventually set up a camouflaged organization that was given the title ‘Reich Committee for the Scientific Registration of Serious Hereditary and Congenital Suffering’ [Reich sausschufi?zur wissenschaftlichen Erfassung erb — und anlagebed-ingter schwerer Leiden’). Between 5,000 and 8,000 children are estimated to have been put to death, mostly with injections of the barbiturate luminal, under its aegis.¹⁶³

In July Hitler told Lammers, Bormann, and Dr Leonardo Conti (recently appointed Reich Health Leader and State Secretary for Health in the Reich Ministry of the Interior) that he favoured mercy-killing for seriously ill mental patients. Better use of hospitals, doctors, and nursing staff could be made in war, he stated. Conti was commissioned to investigate the feasibility of such a programme.¹⁶⁴ By then, war was looming. Hitler’s own comments showed that he continued to see a ‘euthanasia programme’ in the context of war. By that time, too, Hitler had probably received the evaluation commissioned around the start of the year by Brack from Dr Joseph Mayer, Professor of Moral Theology at the University of Paderborn. Hitler had been uneasy about likely reaction of the Churches in the event of the introduction of a ‘euthanasia programme’. He imagined both the Catholic and Protestant Churches would outrightly oppose it. Mayer, who in 1927 had published a tract in favour of the legal sterilization of the mentally sick, was now asked to assess the attitude of the Catholic Church. He sided with the right of the state to take the lives of the mentally ill. Though this was against orthodox Catholic teaching, Mayer left the impression that unequivocal opposition from the Churches was not to be expected. This was the conclusion which Hitler apparently drew, following further discreet inquiry.¹⁶⁵ The biggest internal obstacle to such a programme appeared to be surmountable. The programme could go ahead.

The organization, set up to deal with the ‘euthanasia’ of children, was to hand. Brack had heard indirectly of Hitler’s instructions to Conti at the July meeting.¹⁶⁶ Spotting his chance, but needing to act without delay, if control were not to be lost to Conti and the Reich Ministry of the Interior, he had Hefelmann draw up a short statistical memorandum on the asylums and took it to Bouhler. The head of the Fuhrer Chancellery had little difficulty in persuading Hitler to extend the authorization he had earlier granted to himself and Brandt to deal with the children’s ‘euthanasia’. It was in August 1939 that Hitler told Bouhler that he wanted the strictest secrecy maintained, and ‘a completely unbureaucratic solution of this problem’. The Reich Ministry of the Interior should be kept out of it as far as possible.¹⁶⁷

Shortly after this, a sizeable number of doctors were summoned to a meeting in the Reich Chancellery to seek their views on such a programme. They were overwhelmingly in favour and ready to cooperate. They suggested that around 60,000 patients might be ‘eligible’.¹⁶⁸ The number involved meant there was a serious problem about maintaining secrecy. Once more, camouflaged organizations were needed. Three were set up to distribute questionnaires to the asylums (the Reich Association of Asylums), handle personnel and finance matters (Community Foundation for the Care of Asylums), and organize transport (Community Patients’ Transport). They were based, under Brack’s direction, in an unpretentious villa in Berlin-Charlottenburg, Tiergartenstra?e 4, from which the entire ‘euthanasia action’ drew its code-name ‘T₄’. Apart from Bouhler, Brandt, and Brack the organization comprised 114 persons.¹⁶⁹

Plainly, the construction of such an organization and the implementation of its gruesome task needed more than simply the verbal authorization that had sufficed for the children’s ‘euthanasia’ up to then. This is what prompted Hitler’s almost casual written authorization some weeks later, backdated (as we noted) to I September. This formless empowering, and the way the Fuhrer Chancellery had been able, without the ministries of state even being informed, to expropriate control over a programme calculated to bring the deaths of tens of thousands in an action lacking any basis in law, is the clearest indication of how far internal structures of government had been deformed and superseded by executive agencies devoted to implementing what they saw as the will of the Fuhrer. The cloak-and-dagger secrecy — some leading figures, including Brack, even worked with false names — highlighted the illegality of what was taking place.¹⁷⁰ The regime had taken the step into outright criminality.

The medical staff of the asylums selected their own patients for inclusion in the ‘euthanasia action’. They, too, were ‘working towards the Fuhrer’, whether or not this was their overt motivation. Patients included had their names marked with a red cross. Those to be spared had a blue ‘minus’ sign against their names.¹⁷¹ The killing, mostly by carbon monoxide gas administered by doctors under no compulsion to participate, was carried out in selected asylums, the most notorious of which were Grafeneck, Hadamar, Bernburg, Brandenburg, Hartheim, and Sonnenstein.¹⁷²

Alongside the T₄ ‘action’, the Gauleiter of Pomerania, Franz Schwede-Coburg, rapidly alerted