Hitler's Forgotten Victims

The Holocaust and the Disabled

Suzanne E Evans

• Publisher: The History Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780752454023
• eBook ISBN: 9780750979788
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World War II
• Index: History

The appalling story of Hitler's murderous policies aimed at the disabled including tens of thousands of children killed by their doctors. Between 1939 and 1945 the Nazi regime systematically murdered thousands of adults and children with physical and mental disabilities as part of its 'euthanasia' policy. These programmes were designed to eliminate all people with disabilities who, according to Nazi ideology, threatened the health and purity of the German race. Hitler's Forgotten Victims explores the development and workings of this nightmarish process, a relatively neglected aspect of the Holocaust. Suzanne Evans's account draws on the rich historical record, as well as scores of exclusive interviews with disabled Holocaust survivors. It begins with a description of the Children's Killing Programme, in which tens of thousands of children with physical and mental disabilities were murdered by their doctors, usually by starvation or lethal injection. The book goes on to recount the AktionT4 programme, in which adults with disabilities were disposed of in six official centres, and the development of the Sterilisation Law, which allowed the forced sterilisation of at least half a million young adults with disabilities.

1

THE CHILDREN’S KILLING PROGRAMME

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.

Adolf Hitler (1923)

Sometime in the fall of 1938, a baby was born to the Knauer family near Leipzig, Germany, a tiny village about two hundred kilometres south-west of Berlin. But what should have been a joyous occasion for the family proved to be a source of sadness and despair: the infant had been born blind and deformed. After a brief examination, Leipzig physicians diagnosed the infant as an idiot.¹

Several days later, the baby’s father met with Dr Werner Catel, director of the Leipzig University Children’s Clinic, who agreed to admit the infant to the clinic. Catel later claimed that the father had requested that the clinic’s physicians kill the infant, but that he had refused to do so because ‘killing children was against the law.’ The father then reportedly appealed directly to Adolf Hitler, requesting that he bring about the child’s death. After reading the appeal, Hitler ordered Karl Brandt, his personal physician, to meet with the Leipzig physicians to determine whether the information presented in the petition was accurate. ‘If the facts given by the father were correct,’ Brandt later testified, ‘I was to inform the physicians in [Hitler’s] name that they could carry out euthanasia.’ Brandt was also authorised to inform the physicians that any legal proceedings that might be brought against them for killing the child would be quashed by Hitler himself. After meeting with the physicians and briefly examining the child, Brandt confirmed the original diagnosis. Shortly thereafter, one of the Leipzig physicians ‘euthanised’ the child, thus setting the stage for what ultimately became the Nazi regime’s children’s killing programme, in which thousands of infants and children with disabilities were brutally and systematically killed.²

At the Nuremberg trials, Karl Brandt described what happened to the Knauer baby:

BRANDT: The father of a deformed child approached the Führer and asked that this child or creature should be killed. Hitler turned this matter over to me and told me to go to Leipzig immediately … to confirm the fact on the spot. It was a child, who had been born blind, and an idiot – at least it seemed to be an idiot – and it lacked one leg and part of an arm.

QUESTION: Witness, you were speaking about the Leipzig affair, about this deformed child. What did Hitler order you to do?

BRANDT: He ordered me to talk to the physicians who were looking after the child to find out whether the statements of the father were true. If they were correct, then I was to inform the physicians in his name that they could carry out the euthanasia. The important thing was that the parents should not feel themselves incriminated at some later date as a result of this euthanasia that the parents should not have the impression that they themselves were responsible for the death of the child. I was further ordered to state that if these physicians should become involved in some legal proceedings because of this measure, these proceedings would be quashed by order of Hitler.

QUESTION: What did the doctors who were involved say?

BRANDT: The doctors were of the opinion that there was no justification for keeping such a child alive.³

Werner Catel later testified that he had discussed the Knauer case with the child’s father but that he (Catel) left for a holiday soon after the infant was admitted to the clinic. When he returned, Catel was reportedly informed that one of his subordinates, a Dr Kohl, had given the child a lethal injection while the nurses were taking a coffee break. Although both Brandt and Catel tried to evade responsibility for the child’s death, both men stressed the importance of the Knauer case to the beginning of the children’s killing programme.⁴

While some historians argue that the Nazi regime’s euthanasia programmes developed on an informal, ad hoc basis, this view conflicts with existing testimony and evidence. For example, Karl Brandt testified at Nuremberg that in 1935 Hitler told Gerhard Wagner, a prominent German physician, that ‘if war should break out, he would take up the euthanasia question and implement it … because the Führer was of the opinion that such a problem would be easier and smoother to carry out in wartime’, and because ‘the public resistance which one would expect from the churches would not play such a prominent role amidst the events of wartime as it otherwise would.’ Brandt also recalled a meeting with Hitler at Obersalzberg shortly after the conclusion of the Polish campaign at which Hitler stated that he ‘wanted to bring about a definite solution in the euthanasia question.’ Hitler, Brandt recalled, ‘gave me general directives on how he imagined it, and the fundamentals were that insane persons who were in such a condition that they could no longer take any conscious part in life were to be given relief through death. General instructions followed.’⁵

Other sources also argue against the ad hoc development of the euthanasia programmes. In the summer of 1939, Hitler’s physician, Theo Morel, reviewed everything that had been written since the nineteenth century on the subject of euthanasia. Morel then used those materials to write a lengthy memorandum about the need for a law authorising the ‘Destruction of Life Unworthy of Life.’ Among other measures, Morel proposed killing people who suffered from congenital mental or physical ‘malformations’ because such ‘creatures’ required costly long-term care, aroused ‘horror’ in other people, and represented the ‘the lowest animal level.’ Morel also stressed the economic savings that would result from such a law:

5,000 idiots costing 2,000 RMs [reichsmarks] each per annum = 100 million a year. With interest at 5% that corresponds to a capital reserve of 200 million. That should even mean something to those whose concept of figures has gone awry since the period of inflation. In addition one must separately take into account the release of domestic foodstuffs and the lessening of demand for certain imports.⁶

As Morel was preparing his memorandum, a Ministry of Justice Commission on the Reform of the Criminal Code drafted a similar law sanctioning the ‘mercy killing’ of people suffering from incurable diseases. The law read, in part:

Clause 1. Whoever is suffering from an incurable or terminal illness which is a major burden to him or others, can request mercy killing by a doctor, provided that it is his express wish and has the approval of a specially empowered doctor.

Clause 2. The life of a person who because of incurable mental illness requires permanent institutionalisation and is not able to sustain an independent existence, may be prematurely terminated by medical measures in a painless and covert manner.⁷

Inspired by these ideas, the Reich Committee for the Scientific Registration of Severe Hereditary Ailments issued a decree on 18 August 1939, that called for the compulsory registration of all ‘malformed’ newborn children. In return for a small payment, German doctors and midwives were obliged to report all children under their care who had been born with Down’s syndrome, microcephaly, hydroencephaly, paralysis, congenital deafness, blindness, and other physical and neurological disorders. These reports were to be returned to the Reich Committee central offices in Berlin where they would be reviewed by a panel of three ‘medical experts.’ Without seeing or examining the children whose lives were at stake, these so-called experts reviewed the registration forms, marking them with a plus sign if they believed the child should be killed, a minus sign if they believed the child should live, and a question mark in those rare borderline cases that needed further consideration. Based on these recommendations, the Reich Committee instructed local public health officials to arrange for the transfer of the children to nearby institutions that were serving as pediatric killing wards.⁸ The first such wards were established in 1940 in Brandenburg-Görden, Leipzig, Niedermarsberg, Steinhof, and Eglfing-Haar. By 1943, twenty-three additional wards were located in Berlin, Hadamar, Eichberg, Hamburg, Kalmenhof, Kaufbeuren, Loben, Meseritz-Obrawalde, Stuttgart, Uchtspringe, Vienna, and other cities. Between 1939 and 1945, at least 5,000, and perhaps as many 25,000, children with disabilities were killed throughout Germany, Austria, Poland, and other occupied territories.⁹

Children’s killing wards¹⁰

Institution	Physician in charge
Ansbach	Dr Irene Asam-Bruckmüller
Berlin	Dr Ernst Wentzel
Brandenburg-Görden	Dr Hans Heinze
Eglfing-Haar (Munich)	Dr Hermann Pfannmüller
Eichberg	Dr Friedrich Mennecke Dr Walter Eugen Schmidt
Hamburg-Langenhorn	Dr Friedrich Knigge
Hamburg-Rothenburgsort	Dr Wilhelm Bayer
Kalmenhof	Dr Wilhelm Grossmann Dr Mathilde Weber Dr Hermann Wesse
Kaufbeuren (Bavaria)	Dr Valentin Faltlhauser
Leipzig, University Children’s Clinic	Dr Werner Catel
Leipzig-Dösen	Dr Mittag
Lüneburg	Dr Baumert
Meseritz-Obrawalde (Pomerania)	Dr Hilde Wernicke
Niedermarsberg	Dr Theo Steinmeyer
Sachsenberg	Dr Alfred Leu
Stadtroda	Dr Gerhard Kloos
Stuttgart Municipal Children’...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 The Children’s Killing Programme
• 2 The T4 Adult Euthanasia Programme
• 3 Racial Hygiene, Nazi Doctors, and the Sterilisation Law
• 4 Perpetrators and Accomplices
• 5 After the Atrocities
• 6 The Need to Remember
• Notes
• List of Illustrations
• Picture Section