Newsgroups: alt.revisionism From: Ken McVaySubject: Holocaust Almanac: T4 - Endloesung Followup-To: alt.revisionism Organization: The Nizkor Project, Canada Keywords: T4 Archive/File: places/germany/euthanasia program.08 Last-Modified: 1994/06/02 T4 - The camouflage organization created for the medical killing of adults was known as the Reich Work Group of Sanatoriums and Nursing Homes (Reichsarbeitsgemeinschaft Heil- und Pflegeanstalten, or RAG). It operated from the Berlin Chancellery, at Tiergarten 4, hence the "T4" code name. In "The Nazi Doctors," Lifton demonstrates the relationship between the Nazi medical killing program, which led to the gassing technology later employed with such brutal efficiency at the death camps, and the existence of the death camps themselves. He shows how the T4 program inexorably led to the extermination of the Jews et al, and clearly demonstrates that this was done as a matter of policy, ordered by Hitler himself. Contrary to assertions held true by the Holocaust denial set, the German government of the day clearly developed and implemented planned extermination. Whether or not the end result was planned in 1933 or 1942 matters not - planned it was. "Under T4, Jewish inmates of institutions in Germany did not have to meet the ordinary criteria for medical killing (mental deficiency or schizophrenia, length of hospitalization, capacity to work, etc.). For them, `no special consultations or discussions ... were necessary.': `The total extermination of this group of asylum inmates was the logical consequence of the `radical solution' of the Jewish problem being embarked upon. <75> Only at this point does direct medical killing provide an _exact _ prefiguring of the Final Solution: Jews were to be killed -- to the last man, woman, and child -- simply because they were Jews. For the Nazis, Jewish mental patients were unique among all Nazi victims in that they could embody both `dangerous genes' in an individual medical sense, and `racial poison' in a collective ethnic sense. Sytematic T4 treatment of German Jews began in April 1940, with a proclamation from the Reich Interior Ministry that, within three weeks, all Jewish patients were to be inventoried. In June, the first gassings of Jews took place, as two hundred men, women and children died in the Brandenburg facility, having been transported there in six `Gekrat' buses from the Berlin-Buch mental institution. There were more killings in July. On 30 August, another directive from the Interior Ministry ordered that Jews were to be transferred to various centers, depending on their georaphic location. It was explained that employees and relatives of Aryan patients had complained about being treated and housed with Jews.<76> The Bavarian collection center was Eglfing-Haar, where Dr. Pfannmueller had once declared proudly: `No Jews are allowed in my institution!'<77> Now the Jews transferred in were placed in two special houses (where they were separated by sex rather than degree of illness) and thrust into propaganda-film roles depicting them as `typical Jews' and `the scum of humanity.' This segregation reflected the general policy that, in Schmidt's ironic words, ``Aryan' mental patients could not be expected to die together with Jewish patients, much less live together.'<78> In the fall of 1940, Jewish patients began to be transported to Nazi-occupied Poland as part of the policy of removing all Jews from Germany. In December, it was announced that henceforth Jewish patientws would be transferred to a facility for mentally impaired children in Bendorf near Neuwied in the Rhineland. This was a privately owned Jewish institution going back to 1869. Beginning in the spring of 1942, Bendorf patients were sent to Poland, in trains with sixty to seventy patients sealed in each freight car, trains that carried ordinary Jewish citizens as well. The Bendorf hospital was supposed to be used for soldiers, but never was. The director, a `privileged Jew' (married to an Aryan), stayed on to act as caretaker in the empty facility.<79> Once the Jewish patients were herded into trains, the pretense of medicalized treatment ended. The trains arrived in Lublin, an area where Polish Jews were being concentrated and where Jewish confiscated goods were processed with slave labor. The precise fate of these patients is unknown and probably varied, except for the final outcome -- their extermination in such camps as Sobibor and Belzec.<80> The T4 office set up a Jewish camouflage operation: on `Cholm Insane Asylum' letterheads, statements of condolence and death certificates were sent out. Couriers took the mail to Chelm (the Polish spelling), near Lublin, where they were mailed with the proper postmark. As far as can be determined, the `Cholm Insane Asylum' was a fiction.<81>" (Lifton, 71-72) <75> Heyde Trial commentary, p.451 <76> Klee, "Euthanasia" [3], pp.258-60 <77> Hermann Pfannmueller, quoted in Schmidt, Selektion [37], p.68 <78> Ibid. p.67 <79> Klee, "Euthanasia" [3], pp. 261-63 <80> On Lublin, see Hilberg, "Destruction" [74] pp. 136-38, 292 Work Cited Lifton, Robert Jay. The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide. London: Papermac, 1986 (Reprinted 1990)
Home ·
Site Map ·
What's New? ·
Search
Nizkor
© The Nizkor Project, 1991-2012
This site is intended for educational purposes to teach about the Holocaust and
to combat hatred.
Any statements or excerpts found on this site are for educational purposes only.
As part of these educational purposes, Nizkor may
include on this website materials, such as excerpts from the writings of racists and antisemites. Far from approving these writings, Nizkor condemns them and
provides them so that its readers can learn the nature and extent of hate and antisemitic discourse. Nizkor urges the readers of these pages to condemn racist
and hate speech in all of its forms and manifestations.