Archive/File: places/germany/euthanasia/euthanasia.04
Last-Modified: 1994/08/25

Newsgroups: alt.revisionism,alt.usenet.kooks
From: sbradley@scic.intel.com (Seth J. Bradley)
Subject: Re: The consistency of the denier mind (was re: Bacque)
Message-ID: <1994Jun27.053932.5481@scic.intel.com>
Sender: news@scic.intel.com
Organization: Intel Corporation
References: <2ul53n$ggl@mary.iia.org> <1994Jun27.005754.2851@scic.intel.com> <2ulh48$1vu@mary.iia.org>
Date: Mon, 27 Jun 1994 05:39:32 GMT
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In article <2ulh48$1vu@mary.iia.org> bergf@mary.iia.org (Friedrich Berg) writes:
>American and British bombing of civilians?  The US Strategic Bombing
>Survey Medical Branch Report has a number of photos of Germans burned alive
>in some of the large communities in Germany--I dont suppose the colonel
>noticed anything like that.  Perhaps I should send you some.  As to 

I'm quite sure that it did indeed happen. Has anyone in this group
claimed that atrocities weren't committed against German civilians?
Has anyone claimed that no German POW's were mistreated? In what war
did a large-scale invasion take place without atrocities? You're
the one making denials here, not us.  I'd be happy to respond with
Nazi propaganda material which attempted to justify the slaughter of
her own citizens in the infamous T4 operation. "Life not deserving of
life" was the phrase used.  Many, many 1000's perished in that abomination.
Not even the very poor excuse that they were enemies could be given.
The only responses to T4 that I could conceive of are "its all lies"
or "it was justified".  Which is it, Mr. Berg?  In either event, here's
some info on it for you to peruse. Afterwards, you can continue to state
that the Nazis were innocent, and let the Internet judge for themselves:


---------
		    NAZI GASSINGS OF GERMANS IN GERMANY

In this article I will discuss the precursor to the gassing of the Jews
- namely the gassing of "incurable" persons in Germany which started in the
winter of 1939-40.  There are a number of reasons I think this topic is
important to understand:
  (a) this "small-scale" gassing (only about 100,000 in one and a half
years) led to the large-scale gassing of the Jews and there were many
lessons learned in the earlier program which made the latter program so
effective;
  (b) many of the Nazis involved in this "pilot" program later set up the
gassing in the concentration camps;
  (c) this "euthanasia" program can be tied directly to Hitler himself;
  (d) the medical profession in Germany was thoroughly corrupted by the
killings in the "euthanasia" program and thus were led to willingly
participate in the extermination of the Jews;
  (e) the killings became common knowledge both INSIDE Germany and OUTSIDE
by the end of 1941; and
  (f) there is a long paper trail for all of the above - and it leads all
the way up to Hitler himself.
To summarize:
      Prior to Auschwitz and the other death camps, the Nazis established a
    policy of direct medical killing:  that is killing arranged within medical
    channels, by means of medical decisions, and carried out by doctors and
    their assistants.  The Nazis called this program "euthanasia."  Since, for
    them, this term camouflaged mass murder, I have throughout this book
    enclosed it within quotation marks when referring to that program.
      The Nazis based their justification for direct medical killing on the
    simple concept of "life unworthy of life" (lebensunwertes Leben).  While
    the Nazis did not originate this concept, they carried it to its ultimate
    biological, racial, and "therapeutic" extreme.
      Of the five identifiable steps by which the Nazis carried out the
    principle of "life unworthy of life," coercive sterilization was the first.
    There followed the killing of "impaired" children in hospitals; and then
    the killing of "impaired" adults, mostly collected from mental hospitals,
    in centers especially equipped with carbon monoxide gas.  This project was
    extended (in the same killing centers) to "impaired" inmates of
    concentration and extermination camps and, finally, to mass killings,
    mostly of Jews, in the extermination camps themselves. 
                            (From:  The Nazi Doctors, by Robert Jay Lipton)

As always, since there is no fact that the net-Nazis cannot misinterpret
and no quote that they cannot take out of context, I have included
(reasonably) COMPLETE quotes, court transcripts, and letters rather than
just the appropriate sentences or paragraphs.

(For the net-Nazis who have gotten this far, Arthur Butz's response to all
the evidence presented here is: "Despite Brack's testimony, it is difficult
to believe that euthanasia was practiced in German hospitals by a method of
gassing 20 or 30 persons at a time with carbon monoxide."  I hope the
readers of this article will decide this question for themselves.)

This "euthanasia" project was under the PERSONAL direction of Philipp
Bouhler, chief of Hitler's Chancellery (i.e., his personal office), and of
Dr. Karl Brandt, Hitler's personal physician.  And the order for the
killing came directly in a handwritten note from Hitler himself:
                               Berlin, 1 September 1939
    Reichsleiter Bouhler and Dr. Brandt, M. D., are charged with the
  responsibility of enlarging the authority of certain physicians to be
  designated by name in such a manner that persons who, according to human
  judgment, are incurable can, upon a most careful diagnosis of their
  condition of sickness, be accorded a mercy death.
                               [signed] A. Hitler
By the way, the above date is incorrect.  The actual date was sometime
in October but was backdated to the date of the invasion of Poland.
      He must have assumed that the excitements and perils of war would muffle
    possible criticism, distract attention, and make incurably handicapped
    lives less sacrosanct in Germany and beyond.
                  (From: "Why Did the Heavens Not Darken" by Arno J. Mayer)

First of all, what does "incurable" mean?  Questionaires were distributed
to psychiatric institutions as well as hospitals and homes for chronic
patients and were to be filled out for the following groups of patients:
                                 INSTRUCTION SHEET
                  To be followed in filling out the questionaires
    All patients are to be reported who
    1.  suffer from the diseases enumerated below and who within the
        institution can be occupied not at all or only at the most
        mechanical work (picking, etc.):
        Schizophrenia,
        Epilepsy (indicate if exogenous, war-related or other causes),
        Senile disorders,
        therapy-resistant paralysis and other Lues [syphilitic] diseases,
        Retardation from whatever cause,
        Encephalitis,
        Huntington's chorea and other terminal neurological conditions;
        or
    2.  have been continuously in institutions for at least 5 years,
        or
    3.  are in custody as criminally insane;
        or
    4.  do not possess German citizenship or are not of German or related
        blood, giving/designating race [b] and nationality.
      [b] German or related blood (German-blooded), Jew, Jewish Mischling
          1st or 2nd class, Negro Mischling, Gypsy, Gypsy Mischling, etc.

Why was gassing used rather than injection or some other means of "mercy
killing"?
      Hitler himself is said to have decided upon the use of carbon monoxide
    gas as the killing method, on the so-called medical advice of Dr. Heyde.
    The decision followed upon an experiment conducted in early 1940 at
    Brandenburg, then being converted from a prison into a killing center.
    Killing by injection (using various combinations of morphine, scopolomine,
    curate, and prussic acid [cyanide]) was directly compared with killing by
    means of carbon monoxide gas.  Karl Brandt, "a very conscientious man [who]
    took his responsibility very seriously," requested the experiment; and he
    and Conti [the Reich Minister for Health!] administered the injections
    themselves "as a symbolic action in which the most responsible
    physicians in the Reich subjected themselves to the practical carrying
    through of the Fuehrer's order." 
      The four or six injected patients ("six at the most") "died only slowly,"
    and some had to be injected again.  In contrast, the gas worked perfectly.
    The first Nazi gas chamber has been constructed under the supervision of
    Christian Wirth, of the SS Criminal Police, lent to the T4 staff.  [The
    code name for this "mercy killing" program was "T4" since its main office
    was at 4 Tiergartenstrasse, the address of the Chancellery.]  The
    arrangement included a fake shower room with benches, the gas being
    inserted from the outside into water pipes with small holes through which
    the carbox monoxide could escape.  Present were two SS chemists with
    doctoral degrees, one of whom operated the gas.  The other, August Becker,
    told how eighteen to twenty people were led naked into the "shower room":
    through a peephole he observed that very quickly "people toppled over, or
    lay on the benches" - all without "scenes or commotion."  The room was
    ventilated within five minutes; SS men then used special stretchers which
    mechanically shoved the corpses into crematory ovens with contact.  The
    technical demonstration was performed before a select audience of the inner
    circle of physicians and administrators of the medical killing project.
    Having been shown the technique, Dr. Irmfried Eberl, newly appointed head
    of the Brandenburg institution, took over "by himself and on his own
    responsibility."  Both Brack and Brandt [the first assistant of Bouhler]
    expressed their satisfaction with the experiment, the latter stressing
    that "only doctors should carry out the gassings."
      I have referred to those initial gassings as both experiments and
    demonstrations, since later testimony - for instance, Brandt's remarkable
    statements at the Nuremberg Medical Trial - make clear that they were both.
    Brandt said that the original plan was to kill people by injecting
    narcotics, until it was realized that these would cause loss of
    consciousness but that death would not occur for some time.  An alternative
    suggestion was made by a psychiatrist (presumably Heyde) to use carbon
    monoxide gas (which, in turn, led to the demonstration just described).
    Brandt recalled not liking the idea because he felt that "this whole
    question can only be looked at from a medical point of view," and that "in
    my medical imagination carbon monoxide had never played a part."  Killing
    by gas, that is, made it much more difficult to maintain a medical aura.
    Brandt was able to change his mind when he recalled a personal experience
    of carbon monoxide poisoning in which he lost consciousness "without
    feeling anything," and realized that carbon monoxide "would be the most
    humane form of death."  Yet he remained troubled because that method
    required "a whole change in medical conception," and gave the matter
    extensive thought "in order to put my own conscience right."  He brought up
    to Hitler the difference of opinion about the two methods, and later
    remembered the Fuehrer asking, "Which is the more humane way?"  "My answer
    was clear," Brandt testified - and other leading physicians in the program
    agreed. 
                             (From:  The Nazi Doctors, by Robert Jay Lipton)

And, since the population of greater Germany at the time was about
85,000,000, that meant that a lot of people had to be put to death.  And so
6 gas chambers were built in different parts of Germany to carry out these
"mercy killings":
       Six institutions in different parts of Germany began to "process"
  mental patients, each with its own geographic radius of activity: Grafeneck
  in Wurttenberg; Hadamar in Hessen; Brandenburg and Bernburg in central
  Prussia; Sonnenstein in Silesia; and Hartheim near Linz.  The staff of
  Grafeneck eventually was sent to Hadamar, and that of Brandenburg was
  transferred to Bernburg.  Between January 1940 and August 1941 the
  operatives of these institutions put to death about 70,000 patients by
  individual gassing, and they are estimated to have ended another 20,000
  lives by lethal injections and overdoses of drugs.  The corpses were
  cremated.  The closest kin or guardians were sent notices of the passing
  away of their infirm relatives or wards, with invented and perfunctory
  explanations as to the cause of death.
                  (From: "Why Did the Heavens Not Darken" by Arno J. Mayer)

And even though these "mercy killing" were supposed to remain secret it
soon became common knowledge because of the numbers involved.  Clergy even
railed against this in their sermons:
     Have you, have I the right to live only as long as we are productive,
     as long as [some official or commission] certifies us to be
     productive?  Once you establish and apply this principle that
     "unproductive" human beings may be killed, then woe to all of us when
     we grow old and infirm!  If you allow individuals to be killed because
     they are unproductive, then woe to all invalids who exerted,
     sacrificed, and wasted their energy and healthy bones in the
     production process!  Once you permit fellow creatures who are
     unproductive to be eliminated by brute force, then woe to those of our
     brave soldiers who will return home heavily wounded, crippled, or
     disabled.  At bottom, to grant common mortals the right to kill
     "unproductive" fellow humans -- even if for the moment only the
     unfortunate and defenseless mentally ill are targeted -- is to license
     the murder of all unproductive individuals: the incurably sick; the
     invalids of work and war; and all of us who in our infirm old age will
     be unproductive.
                                 Archbishop Clemens August Count von Galen
                                 excerpt from sermon of August 3, 1941
                                 Lamberti Church, Munster

And some even sent letters to Berlin protesting these "mercy killings":
  The Bishop of Limburg
                                   Limburg/Lahm, 13 August 1941
  To the Reich Minister of Justice
  Berlin
    Regarding the report submitted on July 16 by the Chairman of the Fulda
  Bishops' Conference, Cardinal Dr. Bertram, I consider it my duty to present
  the following as a concrete illustration of destruction of so-called
  "useless life".
    About 8 kilometers from Limburg in the little town of Hadamar, on a hill
  overlooking the town, there is an institution which had formerly served
  various purposes and of late had been used as a nursing home.  This
  institution was renovated and furnished as a place in which, by concensus
  of opinion, the above-mentioned euthanasis has been systematically
  practiced for months - approximately since February 1941.  This fact is, of
  course, known beyond the administrative district of Wiesbaden because death
  certificates from the Hadamar-Moenchberg Registry are sent to the home
  communities. 
    Several times a week busses arrive in Hadamar with a considerable number
  of such victims.  School children of the vicinity know this vehicle and
  say:  " There comes the murder-box again."  After the arrival of the
  vehicle, the citizens of Hadamar watch the smoke rise out of the chimney
  and are tortured with the ever-present thought of depending on the
  direction of the wind.
    The effect of the principles at work here are that children call each
  other names and say, "You're crazy; you'll be sent to the baking oven in
  Hadamar."  Those who do not want to marry, or find no opportunity, say,
  "Marry, never!  Bring children into the world so they can be put into the
  bottling machine!"  You hear old folks say, "Don't send me to a state
  hospital!  When the feeble-minded have been finished off, the next useless
  eaters whose turn will come are the old people."
    All God-fearing men consider this destruction of helpless beings a crass
  injustice.  And if anybody says that Germany cannot win the war, if there
  is yet a just God, these expressions are not the result of a lack of love
  for the Fatherland but of a deep concern for our people.  The population
  cannot grasp the fact that systematic actions are carried out which in
  accordance with paragraph 211 of the German Penal Code are punishable with
  death.  High authority as a moral concept has suffered a severe shock as a
  result of these happenings.  The official notice that N. N. died of a
  contagious disease and, therefore, his body had to be burned, no longer
  finds credence, and official notices of this kind which are no longer
  believed have further undermined the ethical value of the concept of
  authority.
    Officials of the Secret State Police, it is said, are trying to suppress
  discussion of the Hadamar occurrences by means of severe threats.  In the
  interest of public peace, this may be well intended.  But the knowledge,
  and the conviction, and the indignation of the population, cannot be
  changed by it; the conviction will be increased with the bitter realization
  that discussion is prohibited by threats, but that the actions themselves
  are not prosecuted under penal law.
    I beg you most humbly, Herr Reich Minister, in the sense of the report of
  the Episcopate of 16 July of this year, to prevent further transgressions
  of the Fifth Commandment of God.
                                     [signed] Dr. Hilfrich
    I am submitting copies of this letter to the Reich Minister of the
  Interior and to the Reich Minister for Church Affairs.
                                     [Initialed by the above]

And views such as this actually had an effect (although not to stop the
killing - but to only drive it underground).  What follows is a letter From
Heinrich Himmler (the head of the SS) to SS Colonel Victor Brack (the first
assistant of Bouhler):
                                    Top Secret
                                                    19 December 1940
    SS Standartenfuehrer Victor Brack
    Staff Leader at Reichsleiter Bouhler's Office
    Berlin W 8
    Dear Brack,
      I hear there is great excitement on the Alb because of the Grafeneck
    Institution. 
      The population recognizes the gray automoblie of the SS and think they
    know what is going on at the constantly smoking crematory.  What happens
    there is a secret and yet is no longer one.  Thus the worst feeling has
    arisen there, and in my opinion there remains only one thing, to
    discontinue the use of the institution in this place and in any event
    disseminate information in a clever and sensible manner by showing motion
    pictures on the subject of inherited and mental diseases in just that
    locality. 
      May I ask for a report as to how the difficult problem is solved?
                                         Heil Hitler!
                                         [initialed] H.H.

Britain was even using these "mercy killings" for propaganda purposes (the
RAF dropped copies of Archbishop von Galen's sermon among German troops).
And the gassings were even mentioned in the New York Times (Dec. 7, 1941):
                          MANN BIDS REICH BREAK NAZI YOKE
               Author Warns German People to Act Before Ever-Growing
                            World 'Hatred Engulfs You'
      In an appeal to the people of Germany to break away from their Nazi
    leaders, Thomas Mann, German author, broadcast a warning yesterday over the
    British radio in a German-language transmission admonising them to make the
    break while there is still time before the "ever-growing gigantic hatred
    engulfs you."
    .....
      How are things with you?  Don't you think we abroad know just as well as
    you do?  Degeneration and misery are spreading.  Your young men, including
    boys of 16, are unscrupulously sacrificed to the Moloch of war, hundreds of
    thousands of them - millions - there is no home in Germany which is not
    mourning for a husband, a brother or a son.  Collapse is near.  Your troops
    in Russia lack doctors, nurses, medical supplies.  In German hosiptals the
    severely wounded, the old and feeble are killed with poison gas - in one
    single institution two or three thousand, a German doctor said.
    ..........

Thus the "euthanasia" program had to be "officially" called off:
      Von Galen's sermon was widely disseminated by word of mouth, by handbill,
    and by fliers scattered by England's Royal Air Force.  It encouraged
    prominent Catholic bishops of other cities to come out against euthanasia.
    Several prominent Protestant pastors and laymen spoke up as well.  The
    secret was out.
      On August 24, 1941, Hitler called off the wholesale euthanasia.  He
    could not afford to have the morale of the Wehrmacht undermined by doubts
    about the fate of wounded war heroes.  Nor did he want to provide grist for
    the enemy's propaganda mill.  Besides, there was no way of silencing von
    Galen and other clerics without creating popular martyrs.
      But to stop the sweeping killing operation inside the Reich was not to
    put an end to T4 althgether.  Within Germany the euthanasia program
    continued on a reduced scale.  Operation 14 f 13, its most characteristic
    extension, shifted its focus from asylums for the mentally ill and homes
    for the physically handicapped to concentration camps.  Himmler prevailed
    on Bouhler to detach some of the euthanasia doctors to sort out all camp
    inmates who were physically and psychologically disabled.
      This selection started some time around mid-1941.  Bouhler's physicians
    traveled to the different camps to administer medical examinations that
    were even more cursory than those administered heretofore.  Before long,
    these doctors were charged with weeding out inmates who were unfit to
    work.  The euthanasia doctors signed thousands of death warrants, though
    exactly how many is unclear.  Between mid-1941 and mid-1943 close to 4,500
    inmates were taken from Mauthausen, Gusen and Dachau to Hartheim for
    gassing.  About 830 inmates from Buchenwald suffered the same fate at
    Sonnenstein.  Before the war was over the doctors of 14 f 13 selected
    many more inmates in these and other camps, most of them to be killed
    at Hartheim.
                     (From: "Why Did the Heavens Not Darken" by Arno J. Mayer)

And this was about the time that the gas chambers were beginning to kill
Jews in Poland!  In a very prophetic statement Himmler had said in December
1940 that "If operation T4 had been entrusted to the SS, things would have
happened differently," because "when the Fuehrer entrusts us with a job, we
know how to deal with it correctly, without causing useless uproar among
the people."

And that is exactly what happened!  
      In October 1941, Brack and Eichmann decided to use these [gassing] vans
    for Jews in general who were "incapable of working."  Three were installed
    at the first pure extermination camp at Chelmno/Kulmhof (using personnel
    from Soldau), where they killed mainly Jews, but also Gypsies, typhus
    victims, Soviet POWS, and the insane.  In a replica of the T4 procedure,
    victims were told they would shower while their clothing was being
    disinfected.  SS officers wore white coats and carried stethoscopes.
    Prisoners had their valuables registered, then followed a "To the Bath"
    sign, up a ramp and into the van.  When no more noise was audible from the
    van, it was driven to the woods nearby where the Jewish Kommandos unloaded
    the corpses into mass graves.  (Because of noxious gases, a crematorium was
    later installed.)  Chelmno/Kulmhof, in reclaimed German teritory, was the
    first of the extermination camps in the General Government, followed by
    Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka, all of which still more closely resembled
    "euthanasia" killing centers in the use of stationary gas chambers and T4
    personnel. 
                             (From:  The Nazi Doctors, by Robert Jay Lipton)

As mentioned previously, this "euthanasia" program was not the first the
Nazis carried out.  As will be discussed later in the testimony of Karl
Brandt, the first "mercy killings" were done in early 1939 through the
Reich Committee for the Scientific Registration of Serious Hereditary and
Congenital Diseases.  Midwives were required to report at birth, and
doctors were required to report up to age three, children who were
suspected of having serious hereditary diseases, idiocy and mongolism,
microcephaly, hydrocephaly, malformations of all kinds, or paralysis
(including spastic conditions).  Three outside medical experts then made
their life-or-death judgments based only on these reports (and not on
personal examinations or even the medical reports of the children).
    Before being killed, children were generally kept for a few weeks in the
    institution in order to convey the impression that they were being given
    some form of medical therapy.  The killings were usually arranged by the
    director of the institution or by another doctor working under him,
    frequently by innuendo rather than specific order.  It was generally done
    by means of luminal tablets dissolved in liquid, such as tea, given to the
    child to drink.  This sedative was given repeatedly - often in the morning
    and at night - over two or three days, until the child lapsed into
    continuous sleep.  The luminal dose could be increased until the child went
    into coma and died.  For childred who had difficulty drinking, luminal
    was sometimes injected.  If the luminal did not kill the child quickly
    enough - as happened with excitable childrenw ho developed considerable
    tolerance for the drug because of having been given so much of it - a fatal
    morphine-scopolamine injection was given.  The cause of death was listed as
    a more or less ordinary disease such as pneumonia, which could even have
    the kind of kernel of truth we have noted.
                              (From:  The Nazi Doctors, by Robert Jay Lipton)

It is estimated that around 5000 children were put to death in this way.

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