Hitler

by Ian Kershaw

  Indeed, there was no basis of legality for what was taking place. Hitler explicitly refused to have a ‘euthanasia’ law, rejecting the prospect of a cumbersome bureaucracy and legal constraints. Even according to the legal theories of the time, Hitler’s mandate could not be regarded as a formal Führer decree and did not, therefore, possess the character of law. But an order from the Führer, whatever its legal status, was nonetheless seen as binding. That applied also to Reich Justice Minister Gürtner. Once he had seen with his own eyes that Hitler’s will stood behind the liquidation of the mentally sick, and that it was not the work of party underlings operating without authority, he gave up his attempts on legal grounds to block or regulate the killings. To a courageous district judge, Lothar Kreyssig, who had written frank protest letters to him about the crass illegality of the action, and on being shown Hitler’s authorization had exclaimed that even on the basis of positive legal theory wrong could not be turned into right, Gürtner gave a simple reply: ‘If you cannot recognize the will of the Führer as a source of law, as a basis of law, then you cannot remain a judge.’ Kreyssig’s notice of retirement followed soon afterwards.

  The exchange between Gürtner and Kreyssig shows how far the acceptance of ‘Führer power’ had undermined the essence of law. The genesis of the ‘euthanasia action’ that Hitler authorized in writing in October 1939 provides, beyond that, a classic example of the way ‘working towards the Führer’ converted an ideological goal into realizable policy.

  Hitler was indispensable to the process. His well-aired views from the 1920s on ‘euthanasia’ served after 1933 as an encouragement to those, most notably represented in the National Socialist Doctors’ League but by no means confined to fanatical Nazis, anxious to act on the ‘problem’ of what they described as the ‘ballast’ of society.

  The notion of the ‘destruction of life not worth living’ had already been the subject of much public debate. Doctors had, however, overwhelmingly rejected euthanasia during the Weimar era. Hitler’s takeover of power changed the climate – and opened up new possibilities to the medical profession. Some leading psychiatrists were more than ready to exploit them. Hitler’s presumed intentions provided guidelines for their endeavours, even if the time was still not deemed right to introduce the programme they wanted. Above all, Hitler’s role was decisive in 1938–9 in providing approval for every step that extended into the full ‘euthanasia’ programme from the autumn of 1939 onwards. Without that approval, it is plain, and without the ideological drive that he embodied, there would have been no ‘euthanasia action’.

  But the mentality which led to the killing of the mentally sick was no creation of Hitler. Building on foundations firmly laid, especially in the wake of the catastrophic public funding cuts during the Depression years, the erection of the dictatorship had provided licence to the medical and psychiatric professions after 1933 to think the unthinkable. Minority views, constrained even in a failing democracy, could now become mainstream. The process gathered pace. By 1939, doctors and nurses attached to the asylums were aware of what was required. So was the medical bureaucracy which oiled the wheels of the killing machinery. The climate of opinion among the general public was by this time also not unfavourable. Though there were strong feelings against euthanasia, particularly among those attached to the Churches, others were in favour – notably, it seems, in the case of mentally ill or disabled children – or at least passively prepared to accept it.

  Finally, but not least, the point at which, coinciding with the outbreak of war, a secret programme of mass murder could be implemented would have been unimaginable without the progressive erosion of legality and disintegration of formal structures of government that had taken place since 1933.

  Hitler had given a strong indication of his own thoughts on how to deal with the incurably ill in Mein Kampf, where he advocated their sterilization. When he spoke at the Nuremberg Party Rally in 1929 about how the weakest in society should be handled, the economic argument used by the eugenics lobby in the medical profession and others weighed less heavily than questions of ‘racial hygiene’ and the ‘future maintenance of our ethnic strength, indeed of our ethnic nationhood altogether’. ‘If Germany were to have a million children a year,’ he declared, ‘and do away with 700,000–800,000 of the weakest of them, the result would finally be perhaps even a rise in strength.’ This implied racial engineering through mass murder, justified through social-Darwinist ideology, not ‘euthanasia’ in the conventional sense as the voluntary release from terminal illness.

  According to the comments of his doctor, Karl Brandt, in his post-war trial, Hitler was known to favour involuntary euthanasia at the latest from 1933 onwards. His position was indicated in his reply in 1935 to the Reich Doctors’ Leader Gerhard Wagner. Evidently, Wagner was pressing for radical measures to bring about the ‘destruction of life not worth living’. Hitler reportedly told him that he would ‘take up and carry out the questions of euthanasia’ in the event of a war. He was ‘of the opinion that such a problem could be more smoothly and easily carried out in war’, and that resistance, as was to be expected from the Churches, would then have less of an impact than in peacetime. He intended, therefore, ‘in the event of a war radically to solve the problem of the mental asylums’.

  For the next three years, Hitler had little involvement with the ‘euthanasia’ issue. Others were more active. Evidently encouraged by Hitler’s remarks that he did intend, once the opportunity presented itself through the war for which the regime was preparing, to introduce a ‘euthanasia programme’, Reich Doctors’ Leader Wagner pushed forward discussions on how the population should be prepared for such action. Calculations were published on the cost of upkeep of the mentally sick and hereditarily ill, instilling the impression of what could be done for the good of the people with vast resouces now being ‘wasted’ on ‘useless’ lives. Cameras were sent into the asylums to produce scenes to horrify the German public and convince them of the need to eliminate those portrayed as the dregs of society for the good of the whole population. The National Socialist Racial and Political Office produced five silent films of this kind between 1935 and 1937.

  Meanwhile, the ‘Chancellery of the Führer of the NSDAP’, the agency which would come to run the ‘euthanasia action’ from 1939 onwards, was doing all it could to expand its own power-base in the political jungle of the Third Reich. Despite its impressive name, the Führer Chancellery had little actual power. Hitler had set it up at the end of 1934 to deal with correspondence from party members directed to himself as head of the NSDAP. It was officially meant to serve as the agency to keep the Führer in direct touch with the concerns of his people. Much of the correspondence was a matter of trivial complaints, petty grievances, and minor personal squabbles of party members. But a vast number of letters to Hitler did pour in after 1933 – around quarter of a million a year in the later 1930s. And, to preserve the fiction of the Führer listening to the cares of his people, many of them needed attention.

  Hitler put the Führer Chancellery under the control of Philipp Bouhler – a member of the Party’s Reichsleitung (Reich Leadership) since 1933, a quiet, bureaucratic type but intensely loyal and deferential, and ideologically fanatical. Exploiting his direct connections with Hitler, the vagueness of his remit, and the randomness of the business that came the way of the organization he headed, he was now able to expand his own little empire. Of the various departments, the most important was Department (Amt) II (from 1939 Main Department – Hauptamt) headed by Bouhler’s deputy, Viktor Brack. This Department itself covered a wide range of heterogeneous business but, in its section ‘IIb’, under Hans Hefelmann, was responsible for handling petitions relating to the Reich Ministry of the Interior, including sensitive issues touching on the competence of the health department of the Ministry. Brack, five years younger than Bouhler, was, if anything, even more ambitious than his boss, and was ideologically attuned to what was wanted. He was ready to grasp an opportunity when
he saw one.

  This came some time in the first months of 1939. Around that time the father of a severely handicapped child – born blind, with no left forearm and a deformed leg – in Pomßen, near Leipzig, sent in a petition to Hitler, asking for the child to be released through mercy-killing. The petition arrived in Hefelmann’s office in the Führer Chancellery. Hefelmann did not consider involving either the Reich Ministry of the Interior or the Reich Ministry of Justice. He thought it should be taken to Hitler himself, to see how the Führer thought it should be handled. This was probably in May or June 1939. Hitler sent his doctor, Karl Brandt, to the University of Leipzig Children’s Clinic, to consult the child’s doctors with the mandate, if the position was as the father had described it, to authorize the doctors in his name to carry out euthanasia. This was done towards the end of July 1939. Soon after Brandt’s return, he was verbally empowered by Hitler, as was Bouhler, to take similar action should other cases arise. (The case of the child from Pomßen was evidently not an isolated instance around this time.) Whether Hitler took this step unprompted, or whether it followed a suggestion from Brandt or the ambitious Bouhler is not known. But between February and May 1939 Hefelmann, on Brandt’s instructions, carried out discussions with doctors known to be sympathetic and eventually set up a camouflaged organization that was given the title ‘Reich Committee for the Scientific Registration of Serious Hereditary and Congenital Suffering’. Between 5,000 and 8,000 children are estimated to have been put to death, mostly with injections of the barbiturate luminal, under its aegis.

  In July Hitler told Lammers, Bormann, and Dr Leonardo Conti (recently appointed Reich Health Leader and State Secretary for Health in the Reich Ministry of the Interior) that he favoured mercy-killing for seriously ill mental patients. Better use of hospitals, doctors, and nursing staff could be made in war, he stated. Conti was commissioned to investigate the feasibility of such a programme. By then, war was looming. Hitler’s own comments showed that he continued to see a ‘euthanasia programme’ in the context of war. By that time, too, Hitler had probably received the evaluation commissioned around the start of the year by Brack from Dr Joseph Mayer, Professor of Moral Theology at the University of Paderborn. Hitler had been uneasy about the likely reaction of the Churches in the event of the introduction of a ‘euthanasia programme’. He imagined both the Catholic and Protestant Churches would outrightly oppose it. Mayer, who in 1927 had published a tract in favour of the legal sterilization of the mentally sick, was now asked to assess the attitude of the Catholic Church. He sided with the right of the state to take the lives of the mentally ill. Though this was against orthodox Catholic teaching, Mayer left the impression that unequivocal opposition from the Churches was not to be expected. This was the conclusion which Hitler apparently drew, following further discreet inquiry. The biggest internal obstacle to such a programme appeared to be surmountable. The programme could go ahead.

  The organization, set up to deal with the ‘euthanasia’ of children, was to hand. Brack had heard indirectly of Hitler’s instructions to Conti at the July meeting. Spotting his chance, but needing to act without delay, if control were not to be lost to Conti and the Reich Ministry of the Interior, he had Hefelmann draw up a short statistical memorandum on the asylums and took it to Bouhler. The head of the Führer Chancellery had little difficulty in persuading Hitler to extend the authorization he had earlier granted to himself and Brandt to deal with the children’s ‘euthanasia’. It was in August 1939 that Hitler told Bouhler that he wanted the strictest secrecy maintained, and ‘a completely unbureaucratic solution of this problem’. The Reich Ministry of the Interior should be kept out of it as far as possible.

  Shortly after this, a sizeable number of doctors were summoned to a meeting in the Reich Chancellery to seek their views on such a programme. They were overwhelmingly in favour and ready to cooperate. They suggested that around 60,000 patients might be ‘eligible’. The number involved meant there was a serious problem about maintaining secrecy. Once more, camouflaged organizations were needed. Three were set up to distribute questionnaires to the asylums (the Reich Association of Asylums), handle personnel and finance matters (Community Foundation for the Care of Asylums), and organize transport (Community Patients’ Transport). They were based, under Brack’s direction, in an unpretentious villa in Berlin-Charlottenburg, Tiergartenstraße 4, from which the entire ‘euthanasia action’ drew its code-name ‘T4’. Apart from Bouhler, Brandt, and Brack the organization comprised 114 persons.

  Plainly, the construction of such an organization and the implementation of its gruesome task needed more than simply the verbal authorization that had sufficed for the children’s ‘euthanasia’ up to then. This is what prompted Hitler’s almost casual written authorization some weeks later, backdated (as we noted) to 1 September. This formless empowering, and the way the Führer Chancellery had been able, without the ministries of state even being informed, to expropriate control over a programme calculated to bring the deaths of tens of thousands in an action lacking any basis in law, is the clearest indication of how far internal structures of government had been deformed and superseded by executive agencies devoted to implementing what they saw as the will of the Führer. The cloak-and-dagger secrecy – some leading figures, including Brack, even worked with false names – highlighted the illegality of what was taking place. The regime had taken the step into outright criminality.

  The medical staff of the asylums selected their own patients for inclusion in the ‘euthanasia action’. They, too, were ‘working towards the Führer’, whether or not this was their overt motivation. Patients included had their names marked with a red cross. Those to be spared had a blue ‘minus’ sign against their names. The killing, mostly by carbon monoxide gas administered by doctors under no compulsion to participate, was carried out in selected asylums, the most notorious of which were Grafeneck, Hadamar, Bernburg, Brandenburg, Hartheim, and Sonnenstein.

  Alongside the T4 ‘action’, the Gauleiter of Pomerania, Franz Schwede-Coburg, rapidly alerted to the new possibilities, worked closely with the SS in October 1939 to ‘clear’ the asylums near the coastal towns of Stralsund, Swinemünde, and Stettin to make space for ethnic Germans from the Baltic region (and for an SS barracks at Stralsund). Patients were removed from the asylums, transported to Neustadt, not far from Danzig, and shot by squads of SS men. Gauleiter Erich Koch was quick to follow suit, arranging to pay for the costs of ‘evacuating’ 1,558 patients from asylums in his Gau of East Prussia, liquidated by an SS squad provided by Wilhelm Koppe, newly-appointed Police Chief in Reichsgau Posen. This was the ‘Sonderkommando Lange’, which was soon put to use deploying prototype mobile gas-vans to kill the mentally sick in this part of annexed Poland. By mid-1940, these regional ‘actions’ had claimed the lives of an estimated 10,000 victims.

  By the time ‘Aktion-T4’ was halted – as secretly as it had begun – in August 1941, the target-figure laid down by the doctors in the late summer had been surpassed. In the T4 ‘action’ alone by this date, between 70,000 and 90,000 patients are reckoned to have fallen victim to Hitler’s ‘euthanasia programme’. Since the killings were neither confined to the T4 ‘action’, nor ended with the halt to that ‘action’ in 1941, the total number of victims of Nazism’s drive to liquidate the mentally ill may have been close on double that number.

  IV

  Was there the will to halt the already advanced rupture of civilization and descent into modern barbarism that had so swiftly broken new ground since the start of the war? And even if there were the will, could anything be done?

  Given Hitler’s outright dominance and unassailable position within the regime, significant change could by this time, autumn 1939, be brought about only through his deposition or assassination. This basic truth had been finally grasped the previous summer, during the Sudeten crisis, by those individuals in high-ranking places in the military, Foreign Ministry, and elsewhere close to the levers of power who had tentatively fe
lt their way towards radical opposition to the regime. For long, even some of these individuals had tended to exempt Hitler from the criticism they levelled at others, especially Himmler, Heydrich, and the Gestapo. But by now they were aware that without change at the very top, there would be no change at all. This realization started to forge tighter links between the disparate individuals and groups concerned. Colonel Hans Oster, Chief of Staff at the Abwehr, backed by his boss, the enigmatic Admiral Canaris, was the driving-force in making the Abwehr the centre of an oppositional network, building on the contacts made and relationships forged the previous summer. Oster placed his most trusted associate, implacably opposed to Hitler, Lieutenant-Colonel Helmuth Groscurth, as liaison with Chief of Staff Halder at the headquarters of the Army High Command in Zossen, just south of Berlin. He encouraged Weizsäcker to appoint, as the Foreign Office’s liaison at army headquarters, another opponent of the regime, Rittmeister (Cavalry Major) Hasso von Etzdorf. This was probably done on the initiative of Erich Kordt, head of the Ministerial Bureau who continued, under Weizsäcker’s protection, to make the Foreign Office a further centre of oppositional contacts, placing sympathizers (including his brother, Theo) in embassies abroad. Oster also appointed to his own staff an individual who would play an energetic role in extending and deepening oppositional contacts while officially gathering foreign intelligence: the able and well-connected lawyer Hans Dohnanyi, for some years a close associate of Reich Justice Minister Gürtner, and who had helped clear former Commander-in-Chief of the Army Fritsch of the trumped-up charges of homosexual relations that had been laid against him. Dohnanyi would regularly drive Oster during autumn 1939 – dismal weeks for those opposed to Hitler – to see the man whom practically all who hoped to see an early end to the Nazi regime regarded as the patron of the oppositional groups, former Chief of the General Staff, Ludwig Beck. Gradually, something beginning to resemble a fundamental, conspiratorial resistance movement among, necessarily, existing or former ‘servants’ of the regime was in the process of emerging. The dilemma for those individuals, mostly national-conservative in inclination, patriots all, in contemplating the unseating of the head of state was great, and even more acute now that Germany was at war.