Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews Peter Longerich (grave mercy .TXT) 📖

the decision to put this radical idea into practice was intimately linked to the

regime’s wider orientation towards war. From the perspective of the ‘national

biological’ (volksbiologisch) considerations of radical National Socialists, it was not

merely legitimate but necessary to compensate for the potential loss of ‘healthy’

national biological substance (Volkssubstanz) due to the war by ‘eradicating’ the

least ‘desirable’ elements of the population at the same time. Such a drastic

intervention could only be contemplated within an atmosphere in which human

life was more generally brutalized and devalued, in other words when faced by the

vast scale of killing and death that a war represented. Only in the exceptional

situation that the war represented was it possible to conceal mass murder behind

the façade of supposedly ‘war-related’ measures, such as the ‘freeing up’ of the

psychiatric institutions for purposes connected with the war, saving the costs of

care, and so forth. Justifications with this kind of functionalist rationale were

supplied from various branches of the administration, each from its own particu-

lar perspective, and were to play a significant role when the ‘euthanasia pro-

grammes’ were eventually carried out. However, historical analysis runs the risk

of regarding these apparently ‘rational’ motives as cumulatively constituting a

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The Persecution of the Jews, 1939–1941

multi-dimensional context of justification for ‘euthanasia’ and thus losing sight of

the true starting point for the murders—the fact that the National Socialists used

the war as a welcome opportunity to put their ideologically founded ‘biological

revolution’ project into practice more radically than had hitherto been possible.

The planning and preparation phase for the ‘euthanasia programmes’ can only

be partially reconstructed, mostly on the basis of statements by those involved

made after the end of the war. The mass murder of the disabled and the sick began

with a distinct programme of children’s ‘euthanasia’. 29 It has long been clear that an individual case played an important role in triggering this programme of

murders: on the basis of a petition from one set of parents Hitler gave his personal

physician, Karl Brandt, the authority to have a severely handicapped child killed.

According to more recent research the killing of this child, who had been born in

the Leipzig area on 20 February 1939, took place on 25 July 1939.30 Most probably contemporaneously with this individual case Hitler had charged his personal

physician, Karl Brandt, and Philipp Bouhler, the Head of the Chancellery of the

Führer of the NSDAP, with devising a process for proceeding in the same manner

with similar cases in the future. The Chancellery convened a small group of

experts, who established the procedures for the ‘euthanasia’ of small children.

To facilitate their implementation a front organization was formed under the

name of the Reich Committee for the Scientific Registration of Severe Illnesses

with Hereditary or Predisposed Causes (Reichsausschuss zur wissenschaftlichen

Erfassung von erb- und anlagebedingten schweren Leiden).

The deliberations of this group must have taken place in July at the latest, since

on 18 August 1939 the Reich Minister of the Interior used an unpublished circular

decree to introduce a Requirement to Report Newborn Children with any form of

Handicap (Meldepflicht über misgestaltete usw. Neugeborene). This constrained

medical personnel to report all children who displayed ‘severe hereditary illnesses’

before the end of their third year to the Health Authorities, who would pass the

information forward to the Reich Committee. The Committee submitted the

report forms to three experts, who each gave their assessment in turn. If their

conclusions were negative, as soon as the parents had given their consent to

hospitalization, the children were transferred to one of the approximately thirty

so-called ‘specialist children’s clinics’ where they were killed by means of tablets,

injections, or by starvation. It is thought that children’s ‘euthanasia’ claimed some

5,000 victims in all.

The fact that the first ‘euthanasia’ murder took place at the end of July 1939 (and

not early in 1939 as has previously been assumed) makes necessary a partial

revision of the prehistory of the whole ‘euthanasia’ programme. Hitler’s instruc-

tion to carry out adult ‘euthanasia’ is evidently to be seen in closer chronological

connection to the beginning of children’s ‘euthanasia’ than it has been hitherto,

and an interpretation of the whole ‘euthanasia’ complex in the context of direct

preparations for the war is therefore much more plausible. From the new dating

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for the killing of the child in Leipzig it emerges that the decisive discussions during

which Hitler, in the presence of Bormann, Lammers, and Leonardo Conti (State

Secretary for Health in the Ministry of the Interior and Director of the NSDAP’s

Main Office for the People’s Health), gave instructions for the systematic murder

of adult psychiatric institution inmates took place before Hitler personally

authorized the first individual ‘euthanasia’ case and not, as has hitherto been

supposed, several months afterwards. It now seems highly probable that Hitler’s

instructions for the ‘euthanasia’ of children and adults were chronologically in

very close proximity, and that they were issued in June or early July 1939. In any

case Bouhler and Brandt, who had rapidly conceived a programme for the murder

of children on the basis of the Leipzig precedent, succeeded relatively quickly in

taking over the task of adult ‘euthanasia’ from Conti.

It was probably at the end of July that Bouhler arranged a meeting with some

fifteen to twenty doctors at which the plans for ‘euthanasia’ were established on

the basis of the supposed necessity of freeing up psychiatric institutions and carers

for war-related purposes. With the help of the Technological Institute of the Reich

Criminal Investigation Department (Reichskriminalpolizeiamt), which had

already developed appropriate poisons for children’s ‘euthanasia’, an apparently

suitable method of killing was found: asphyxiation by carbon monoxide. 31 It was significant that during the preparations for ‘euthanasia’ an instruction for

enforced sterilization that had been issued on 31 August (thus immediately before

the start of the war) was officially suspended except F-cases, which were seen as

particularly serious. 32

At a meeting of leading ‘euthanasia’ doctors held on 9 October it was agreed to

kill approximately every fifth psychiatric in-patient, or some 65,000–70,000 indi-

viduals. 33 Also in October 1939, it seems that Hitler issued a document on his personal notepaper in which he instructed Bouhler and Brandt ‘to extend the remit

of certain named doctors to grant those who are as far as anyone can humanly

judge incurably sick a merciful death (Gnadentod) after critical investigation of

their state of health’. With