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

their fate until the very last minute. They were first subjected to a

kind of reception examination before being taken to the gas chamber that was

disguised as a shower room. Death usually followed within a few minutes. After

gold teeth had been removed and some corpses selected for autopsy, the mortal

remains of the dead were cremated within the perimeter of the institutions.

In the first six months of 1940 the ‘euthanasia’ killings that formed part of the

T4 programme were gradually extended to each of the individual German states

and Prussian provinces until almost the whole area of the Reich was covered.

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The Persecution of the Jews, 1939–1941

If one attempts to reconstruct in detail the chronological and geographical

progress of the mass murder of institutional patients, 46 what emerges is an image of T4 as a completely non-standardized process dependent on a whole

range of disparate factors. The number of people killed in the T4 programme rose

steadily month by month from January 1940 and in August reached its initial high

point with many more than 5,000 victims per month. In the regions affected first

(Baden, Württemberg, Berlin, Brandenburg, and Austria) sometimes a much

higher proportion of patients was murdered than had originally been intended.

This evidently led the organizers of T4 to raise their targets. There is an important

document in existence that suggests that by October 1941 the intention was to

murder between 130,000 and 150,000 people in total. 47

On the other hand, the numbers of those actually murdered each month went

down after September 1940, clearly because regions were being targeted that did

not have their own killing centres. The transportation of patients over large

distances proved to be problematic, not least because the population were

gradually becoming aware of what was happening. Eventually the numbers of

victims reached its nadir between the point when the two killing centres at

Brandenburg and Grafeneck were closed in August and the end of the year.

There exists a further indication from this period that the ‘euthanasia’ organizers

were reducing their target numbers to 100,000.48 The construction of gas chambers in Bernburg (Anhalt) and Hadamar (Hessen) early in 1941 made it possible

to extend the programme to neighbouring regions that had not hitherto been

included, or had been only partially included, especially Hessen and the Prussian

province of Saxony. At this point the monthly figures began to increase again

sharply and by May were once more well over 5,000 and rising. Now the

attention of the ‘euthanasia’ planners was directed at the richly populated regions

of northern and western Germany, which did not have their own killing centres

and had so far largely been spared. But before these areas could be fully

incorporated into the programme of murders the T4 campaign was stopped, in

August 1941, at precisely the moment when the original target of 70,000 victims

had been reached. I shall go into the reasons why this came to a halt in more

detail later.

Within the context of the T4 programme, therefore, the Chancellery of the

Führer of the NSDAP had developed a process through which a large number of

people had been murdered in procedures that had been centrally directed, were

ostensibly under scientific control, and were bureaucratically managed in the

minutest detail. This programme of murder—which was kept secret—had been

disguised sufficiently well that, from the outside, the true fates of the patients

being ‘transferred’ only became known very gradually, such that protests and

resistance only became effective at a point where the programme had already

largely been completed.

Persecution of Jews in the Reich, 1939–40

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With the ‘euthanasia’ programmes the National Socialist regime had crossed

the threshold to a systematic, racially motivated policy of annihilation a little

under two years before the mass murder of the Jews began. Important elements of

this policy of annihilation that were to play a central role in the murder of the Jews

can be identified as early as 1939 and 1940 as part of the planning and execution of

the ‘euthanasia’ campaign. Alongside mass executions and the use of fixed as well

as mobile gas chambers, it is particularly important to note that ‘euthanasia’

involved the development of a complex, work-intensive process that deceived

the victims until the last moment and to a large extent also apparently protected

the perpetrators from personal responsibility, in that they received the impression

of fulfilling only a subordinate role in a scientifically controlled process that

obeyed the dictates of reason.

Closer analysis of the T4 programme has shown, however, that carrying out

the murders involved considerable variations at different points and in different

places, and that these can be attributed to a whole series of factors. The T4

Central Office was decisively reliant on the cooperation of individual psychiatric

institutions and that of regional authorities; both were prerequisites for continu-

ity in the deportation of patients to killing centres. Geographical factors, such as

the location of the killing centres and the question of which administrative

authority (state or province) had responsibility for each individual institution,

also played a major role; similarly the conditions operating in individual killing

centres affected the extent and speed of the programme of murder to a consid-

erable degree. It is also apparent, however, that the planners were prepared to

correct the targets of planned victims upwards or downwards. What looks at first

sight like a systematically organized and implemented programme for the

murder of 70,000 people is revealed on closer analysis to be a complex network

of central planning aims and revisions on the one hand and a many-faceted

mode of delivery on the other, which was dependent on several regional and

chronological variants. T4 can be seen as a model for the ‘Final Solution’ in this

respect as well.

There is a further parallel between the two: the T4 programme already

displays a degree of ambivalence between the attempts on the part of the regime

to maintain strict secrecy (but which was impossible, given the sheer extent of

the operation)49 and targeted references on the part of official agencies to the necessity of such radical measures, which must have fed the rumours that were

already circulating. 50 This ambivalence can be seen as a phenomenon of the

‘open secret’: what was happening was already known in outline amongst broad

sections of the population, but was not commented on in public in any way

at all.

Finally, the fate of the Jewish inmates of the psychiatric institutions within the

T4 programme is