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Hey, assclown Hans - Peter Skaliks: Hitler authorizes the killing of 70,000 to 90,000 disabled people!
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NEMO
Mar 3, 2013, 7:56:41 PM3/3/13
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Hitler authorizes killing of disabled
Adolf Hitler wanted the severely disabled to be killed
In October 1939 Adolf Hitler did something extremely unusual. He
signed a document which linked him directly with a course of action
which could reflect badly on him – the so called ‘adult euthanasia’
policy of killing selected disabled patients. The document, which
allowed his physician, Dr Brandt, and one of his secretariat, Philipp
Bouhler, to pursue a policy of ‘mercy killing’ was backdated –
significantly – to 1 September 1939, the day the Nazis invaded Poland.
The reason Hitler signed the document was because it was proving hard
for his subordinates to push forward with something as radical as the
killing of the disabled without some form of authorization. For this
document did not mark the start of the campaign against the disabled –
the policy of ‘euthanasia’ was already in operation.
Indeed, the idea of ‘Vernichtung lebensunwerten Lebens’ (destruction
of life not worthy of life) had been around since the 1920s and had
taken additional force as an extension of the eugenics movement.
Eugenics, whose prime idea was that only genetically ‘suitable’ people
should be allowed to have children, had followers in many countries in
the first half of the Twentieth Century, notably in America where
several states – like Indiana – enacted legislation which made it
legal to sterilize certain mentally ill individuals.
Not surprisingly, given his core belief in the notion of the ‘survival
of the fittest’, Hitler embraced the ideas of ‘conventional’ eugenics,
but wanted to take them to an extreme level. In a propaganda film
like ‘Opfer der Vergangenheit’ (Victims of the Past), shown in 1937,
the Nazi vision was made clear. Patients in mental asylums were
revealed as suffering in their own minds, whilst the commentary made
clear the cost to the state of keeping these people in care. The
implication was obvious – if these people did not exist then the Nazi
state would be much better off.
The route by which this ideological notion – that it would be better
to remove the seriously disabled – became a practical reality reveals
a great deal about how policy could be made in the Nazi state.
Sometime early in 1939 the father of a severely disabled child wrote a
petition to Hitler asking that his son should be killed – a so called
‘mercy’ killing. The petition landed in the Fuehrer’s Chancellery,
controlled by an ambitious Nazi called Philipp Bouhler and staffed by
his no less ambitious underlings. The petition was chosen from
thousands of others to be seen personally by Hitler. When he saw it he
ordered Dr Brandt to consult with the child’s doctors and then,
subsequently, the child was killed. Hitler then authorized other
children to be dealt with the same way. Eventually, around 8,000
children were killed, mostly by poisonous injections.
In the summer of 1939, Hitler let it be known that he would approve of
adult patients who had severe mental illnesses being treated in the
same way. Significantly he said that medical resources could be put to
better use in any forthcoming war.i Bouhler and Viktor Brack, his
deputy, were keen to turn their Fuehrer’s wishes into practical policy
and soon a variety of organisations with reassuring names (like
‘Community Patients’ Transport’) were established, all based in a
house at Number 4 Tiergartenstrasse. Thus, the killing programme that
developed was known as T4.
It was in order to give formal legitimation to this operation that
Hitler signed the document he did in October 1939. Then, over the next
20 months, the T4 team organized the killing of 70,000 to 90,000
disabled people. In order to deal with this many people a new system
of murder was developed. In several asylums, like Sonnenstein in east
Germany, special fake ‘shower’ rooms were built. Once the patients
entered these rooms, any suspicions lulled because they thought they
were about to take a shower, carbon monoxide gas was pumped into the
room in order to kill them. This technique, pioneered in the killing
of the disabled, was later to appear in modified form as a method of
murdering the Jews.
This so-called ‘adult euthanasia’ scheme was extended in 1941 to
concentration camps in a programme known as 14f 13. Prisoners, who had
been selected as too sick to work, were transported to the euthanasia
killing centres. In fact, the first Auschwitz prisoners to be gassed
in the summer of 1941 were not selected because they were Jews, but
because – following 14f 13 – they were sick, and they were not gassed
in the camp (no such facility yet existed) but transported to
Sonnenstein to be murdered.ii
Perhaps not surprisingly given Nazi ideology, German Jews in mental
asylums were, from the spring of 1940, killed under the adult
euthanasia scheme without selection by doctors, and in occupied Poland
a similar widening of the killing criteria was made so that all the
inmates in mental asylums could be killed. In Poland another new
method of killing was devised, the gas van. Mental patients were put
in the back of a lorry and taken for a drive. Once under way the
driver would turn a switch and the carbon monoxide gas from the engine
exhaust would be pumped back into the sealed area where the patients
were crammed. At the end of the journey, they were dead. By May 1940
around 10,000 Polish mental patients had been killed in this way in
the Germanized areas of West Prussia and the Warthegau.
Within Germany, after opposition from church leaders (notably Bishop
Galen), Hitler called a halt to the euthanasia action in August 1941,
but many of the T4 staff simply moved on to use their killing
expertise in the murder of the Jews. Most notable was Christian Wirth,
a committed Nazi and policeman in Stuggart, who had been one of the
earliest members of T4 and had helped organize a gassing demonstration
in a mental asylum in Brandenburg in January 1940.iii He would now go
on to help build Belzec, the first killing centre for Jews which used
fixed gas chambers. Then in August 1942 he was appointed to the job of
Inspector of three death camps (Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka).
The Nazi euthanasia scheme developed because enthusiastic, committed
underlings attempted to make real the ‘vision’ of their leader, Adolf
Hitler. Something similar would happen with the development of the
Nazis’ ‘Final Solution’ – the extermination of the Jews – only this
time, of course, Hitler would be careful not to leave any paper trail
behind.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
i Ian Kershaw, Hitler, 1936-1945: Nemesis, Allen Lane, 2000, p. 259
ii Laurence Rees, Auschwitz: The Nazis and the ‘Final Solution’, BBC
Books, 2005, pp. 75-77
iii Christopher Browning, The Origins of the Final Solution: The
Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy September 1939 – March 1945, William
Heinemann, 2004, p. 191
Adolf Hitler wanted the severely disabled to be killed
In October 1939 Adolf Hitler did something extremely unusual. He
signed a document which linked him directly with a course of action
which could reflect badly on him – the so called ‘adult euthanasia’
policy of killing selected disabled patients. The document, which
allowed his physician, Dr Brandt, and one of his secretariat, Philipp
Bouhler, to pursue a policy of ‘mercy killing’ was backdated –
significantly – to 1 September 1939, the day the Nazis invaded Poland.
The reason Hitler signed the document was because it was proving hard
for his subordinates to push forward with something as radical as the
killing of the disabled without some form of authorization. For this
document did not mark the start of the campaign against the disabled –
the policy of ‘euthanasia’ was already in operation.
Indeed, the idea of ‘Vernichtung lebensunwerten Lebens’ (destruction
of life not worthy of life) had been around since the 1920s and had
taken additional force as an extension of the eugenics movement.
Eugenics, whose prime idea was that only genetically ‘suitable’ people
should be allowed to have children, had followers in many countries in
the first half of the Twentieth Century, notably in America where
several states – like Indiana – enacted legislation which made it
legal to sterilize certain mentally ill individuals.
Not surprisingly, given his core belief in the notion of the ‘survival
of the fittest’, Hitler embraced the ideas of ‘conventional’ eugenics,
but wanted to take them to an extreme level. In a propaganda film
like ‘Opfer der Vergangenheit’ (Victims of the Past), shown in 1937,
the Nazi vision was made clear. Patients in mental asylums were
revealed as suffering in their own minds, whilst the commentary made
clear the cost to the state of keeping these people in care. The
implication was obvious – if these people did not exist then the Nazi
state would be much better off.
The route by which this ideological notion – that it would be better
to remove the seriously disabled – became a practical reality reveals
a great deal about how policy could be made in the Nazi state.
Sometime early in 1939 the father of a severely disabled child wrote a
petition to Hitler asking that his son should be killed – a so called
‘mercy’ killing. The petition landed in the Fuehrer’s Chancellery,
controlled by an ambitious Nazi called Philipp Bouhler and staffed by
his no less ambitious underlings. The petition was chosen from
thousands of others to be seen personally by Hitler. When he saw it he
ordered Dr Brandt to consult with the child’s doctors and then,
subsequently, the child was killed. Hitler then authorized other
children to be dealt with the same way. Eventually, around 8,000
children were killed, mostly by poisonous injections.
In the summer of 1939, Hitler let it be known that he would approve of
adult patients who had severe mental illnesses being treated in the
same way. Significantly he said that medical resources could be put to
better use in any forthcoming war.i Bouhler and Viktor Brack, his
deputy, were keen to turn their Fuehrer’s wishes into practical policy
and soon a variety of organisations with reassuring names (like
‘Community Patients’ Transport’) were established, all based in a
house at Number 4 Tiergartenstrasse. Thus, the killing programme that
developed was known as T4.
It was in order to give formal legitimation to this operation that
Hitler signed the document he did in October 1939. Then, over the next
20 months, the T4 team organized the killing of 70,000 to 90,000
disabled people. In order to deal with this many people a new system
of murder was developed. In several asylums, like Sonnenstein in east
Germany, special fake ‘shower’ rooms were built. Once the patients
entered these rooms, any suspicions lulled because they thought they
were about to take a shower, carbon monoxide gas was pumped into the
room in order to kill them. This technique, pioneered in the killing
of the disabled, was later to appear in modified form as a method of
murdering the Jews.
This so-called ‘adult euthanasia’ scheme was extended in 1941 to
concentration camps in a programme known as 14f 13. Prisoners, who had
been selected as too sick to work, were transported to the euthanasia
killing centres. In fact, the first Auschwitz prisoners to be gassed
in the summer of 1941 were not selected because they were Jews, but
because – following 14f 13 – they were sick, and they were not gassed
in the camp (no such facility yet existed) but transported to
Sonnenstein to be murdered.ii
Perhaps not surprisingly given Nazi ideology, German Jews in mental
asylums were, from the spring of 1940, killed under the adult
euthanasia scheme without selection by doctors, and in occupied Poland
a similar widening of the killing criteria was made so that all the
inmates in mental asylums could be killed. In Poland another new
method of killing was devised, the gas van. Mental patients were put
in the back of a lorry and taken for a drive. Once under way the
driver would turn a switch and the carbon monoxide gas from the engine
exhaust would be pumped back into the sealed area where the patients
were crammed. At the end of the journey, they were dead. By May 1940
around 10,000 Polish mental patients had been killed in this way in
the Germanized areas of West Prussia and the Warthegau.
Within Germany, after opposition from church leaders (notably Bishop
Galen), Hitler called a halt to the euthanasia action in August 1941,
but many of the T4 staff simply moved on to use their killing
expertise in the murder of the Jews. Most notable was Christian Wirth,
a committed Nazi and policeman in Stuggart, who had been one of the
earliest members of T4 and had helped organize a gassing demonstration
in a mental asylum in Brandenburg in January 1940.iii He would now go
on to help build Belzec, the first killing centre for Jews which used
fixed gas chambers. Then in August 1942 he was appointed to the job of
Inspector of three death camps (Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka).
The Nazi euthanasia scheme developed because enthusiastic, committed
underlings attempted to make real the ‘vision’ of their leader, Adolf
Hitler. Something similar would happen with the development of the
Nazis’ ‘Final Solution’ – the extermination of the Jews – only this
time, of course, Hitler would be careful not to leave any paper trail
behind.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
i Ian Kershaw, Hitler, 1936-1945: Nemesis, Allen Lane, 2000, p. 259
ii Laurence Rees, Auschwitz: The Nazis and the ‘Final Solution’, BBC
Books, 2005, pp. 75-77
iii Christopher Browning, The Origins of the Final Solution: The
Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy September 1939 – March 1945, William
Heinemann, 2004, p. 191
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