Newsgroups: alt.revisionism
Subject: Holocaust Almanac - The Nazi Euthanasia programs
Summary: David Irving claims euthanasia program was simply the result
         of the Nazi need for more hospital beds...
Followup-To: alt.revisionism
From: Ken McVay 
Organization: The Nizkor Project, Vancouver Island, CANADA
Keywords: euthanasia,Irving

NOTE: This file has not been documented. I would like to know if it did
indeed appear in Irving's 'Hitler's War,' and, if so, whether or not it
_still_ appears in later editions of the book. knm.

Archive/File: places/germany/euthanasia/euthanasia.01
Last-modified: 1993/04/25

David Irving - title unknown (Hitler's War?)

             THE EUTHANASIA PROGRAM, OR 'MERCY KILLINGS'
         Nazi method for dealing with the retarded and insane
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
>From pages 20-23:

"...Here at Zoppot Hitler began weighing a course of action as hideous as any
that Reinhard Heydrich was tackling in Poland: 'mercy killings', or
euthanasia. The ostensible occasion for this formal decision was related
to war needs. About a quarter of a million hospital beds were required
for Germany's mental institutions...they occupied bed space and the
attention of skilled medical personnel which Hitler now urgently needed
for the treatment of the casualties of his coming campaigns. Above all
they were a glaring genetic impurity marring the blood of the German race.
According to Dr. Karl Brandt, his personal surgeon, Hitler wanted between
40 and 60 percent of the permanently hospitalized insane to be quietly
put away...

There was some discussion of the actual mechanics of the program. Dr. Conti
proposed the use of narcotics to induce in the patients a sleep from which
they would not awaken; but in separate discussions with Dr. Brandt Hitler
learned that barbiturates would be too slow to be 'humane' and that most
physicians considered Carbon Monoxide gas the fastest and most peaceful
lethal dose, if somewhat unmedical in character...

When Hitler received such an appeal from the parents of a malformed, blind
and imbecile boy born in Leipzig, he sent Dr. Brandt early in 1939 to
examine the child, and on hearing the doctor's horrifying description
of the pathetic case, he authorized the doctors to put him to sleep; at
the same time he orally authorized Bouhler and Brandt to act accordingly
in any similar case in the future....perhaps as many as five thousand
children were eventually disposed of this way.

The 'mercy killing' of a few was followed by the programmed elimination
of the burdensome tens of thousands of insane; and all this was but a
platform for far wider campaigns of extermination on which the Reich was
to embark now that it was at war."

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