Archive/File: places/germany/euthanasia/frick.001 people/b/bouhler.philip/frick.001 people/b/brandt.karl/frick.001 people/c/conti.leonardo/frick.001 people/f/frick.wilhelm/frick-nuremberg people/l/lammers.hans/frick.001 people/w/wirth.christian/frick.001 Last-Modified: 1994/03/05 "'One category of Frick's contribution ... deserves special notice,' Robert Kempner asserted to the court. 'This is the systematic killing of persons regarded as useless to the German war machine, such as the insane, the crippled, the aged, and foreign laborers who were no longer able to work.' The euthanasia action had had its wellspring in a passage of Mein Kampf: 'The right of personal freedom recedes before the duty to preserve the race. There must be no half measures. It is a half measure to let incurably sick people steadily contaminate the remaining healthy ones. This is in keeping with the humanitarianism which, to avoid hurting one individual, lets a hundred others perish. If necessary, the incurably sick will be pitilessly segregated -- a barbaric measure for the unfortunate who is struck by it, but a blessing for his fellow men and posterity.' Implementation of this philosophy had begun on July 14, 1933, the same day that the Fu"hrer Principle had been promulgated, when the cabinet enacted 'The Law for the Prevention of Offspring with Hereditary Diseases,' providing that 'Anyone who is suffering from a hereditary disease can be sterilized by a surgical operation.' Though the law established a 'eugenics court' to which a sterilization order could be appealed, the procedure was a fiction. As in so many of the other Nazi measures the appearance of legality served merely to cloak the dehumanized application of Hitler's aberrant concepts. In the summer of 1937, a year after Hitler remilitarized the Rhineland, he had ordered the secret roundup and sterilization of all the 'Rhineland bastards' -- children fathered by the French and Belgian occupation troops. Neither their parents nor guardians were informed, and no public acknowledgement of the action was ever permitted. As was the case throughout the Nazi regime in all the various professions, Hitler had no difficulty finding doctors, nurses, and hospitals to execute his designs. During the same period that Hitler decreed the Rhineland sterilizations, a German medical economist pointed out, in an article entitled 'The Fight Against Degeneration,' that the care of a deaf-mute or cripple cost 6 marks a day, that of a reform school inmate 4.85 marks, and that of a mentally ill or deficient person 4.50 marks. The average earnings of a laborer, on the other hand, were only 2.50 marks, and those of a civil servant 4 marks daily. (The exchange rate at the time was about forty cents -- 2.50 marks to the dollar.) The economist lamented: 'The state spends far more for the existence of these actually worthless compatriots than for the salary of a healthy man, who must bring up a healthy family,' and hinted that it was too bad that a more radical program than sterilization could not be employed. The economist's dissertation took on added meaning upon the outbreak of the war, when the Nazis earlier elimination of Jewish physicians generated a medical crises. (Approximately ten percent of doctors in Germany and half in Austria had been Jewish.) Because of Hitler's neglect of the civilian economy, jampacked, rundown institutions for the aged, the insance, and physically and mentally handicapped were turning into veritable snakepits. 'In connection with the limited space, this question of euthanasia came up,' Dr. Hermann Pfannmu"ller, chief psychiatrist at the Egglfing-Haar Asylum near Munich, related to Major John J. Monigan, a ... New Jersey lawyer who had responsibility for investigating euthanasia and medical experiments. For three thousand patients there had been only fifteen doctors, and some of these had been diverted to care for war casualties. Writing a report on what was required to maintain the patients, Pfannmu"ller's superior, the director of Egglfing-Haar, expressed the opinion: 'These days when our worthy men must make the hard sacrifice of blood and life teach us impressively that it is not possible on economic grounds to continue operating the installations of living corpses. The conception is unbearable for me that, while the best young men lose their lives at the front, the tainted asocial and unquestionably antisocial in the institutiions have a guaranteed existence.' Such and opinion fitted in completely with that of Hitler and his personal physician, Dr. Karl Brandt, the Reich Commissioner for Health and Sanitation. Early during the campaign in Poland, Brandt suggested to the Fu"hrer the necessity of weeding incurables out of the institutions. When the Reich Public Health Director, Dr. Leonardo Conti, and Hans Lammers, the state secretary and chief of the Reich (government) Chancellery, proved too bureaucratic and legalistic to work out practical implementation of such a program, the Fu"her put it in the hands of Brandt and the director of his personal chancellery, Philip Bouhler. 'Reichsleiter Bouhler and Dr. Brandt,' Hitler wrote, 'are charged with the responsibility of expanding the authority of certain officially appointed doctors, so that after a critical diagnosis incurable persons may be granted a mercy death.' Hitler vested operational authority for the exterminations in Himmler, who was immediately to close down the institutions in the annexed portion of Poland and liquidate the inmates. In Germany itself, the first category of unfortunates to be victimized were the so-called _Ausschusskinderer_, translatable either as 'committee children' or 'garbage children,' who had previously been institutionalized or sterilized. On October 12, the SS expropriated the Grafeneck crippled children's institution.... Under the supervision of Christian Wirth, criminal police commissioner of Wu"rttemberg, the children of Grafeneck were killed with overdoses of drugs secreted in their food. If they would not eat, they were dispatched with suppositories or injections. Setting up a front organization, the Public Corporation for Nursing Homes, Bouhler and Brandt sent questionnaires, to be filled out for every patient, to all child-care institutions in Germany. On the basis of the completed questionnaires, children who were considered 'incurable' or had hereditary diseases were picked for 'Besonderes Heilverfahren' (special healing procedure) and transported to Grafeneck and a half-dozen similar installations subsequently set up throughout Germany.... Then, early in 1940, with the liquidation of the children well under way, the exterminations were expanded to adults. Every institution caring for the mentally or physically afflicted was required to fill out patient questionnaires. One the basis of these, commissions of doctors and medical students made the selections for transportation -- soon, in fact, the selection became pro forma, and the asylums were cleared en masse." (Conot, 204-207) Work Cited Conot, Robert E. Justice at Nuremberg. New York: Harper & Row, 1983
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