Under Hitler, the German medical community was accustomed to receiving questionnaires to be completed for racial hygiene bureaucrats; so it was not unusual when the “Committee for the Scientific Treatment of Severe Genetically Determined Illness” wrote to doctors and midwives in 1939 to compile
Details of any children under three years of age exhibiting Down’s syndrome, spina bifida, missing or malformed limbs, spasticism and a range of similar conditions. The registration forms were sent to Berlin, where a panel of doctors sifted through them writing either a plus or minus sign on each. In October, those children whose files had been marked with a plus were collected from their parents and taken to special paediatric clinics. There they were put to death.38
The methods used to kill those with so-called “genetic illnesses” (many of which were not genetic) at first varied, and later much more effective methods were developed:
Some clinics used cyanide gas, others administered an overdose of morphine. In one clinic where, presumably, the doctors were anxious about the legality of what they were being asked to do, the children were simply left to starve to death. The physicians need not have been so concerned about themselves: the Fuhrer signed a secret order exempting participating medical staff from prosecution and backdated it to September so that even the pioneers of child-murder would be covered.39
The next step was to send a set of forms asking about children in the next age bracket, a process that was “repeated until the state had identified, abducted and murdered all handicapped children up to the age of seventeen.”40 Last, the adult “handicapped” and mentally deficient were targeted, resulting in killing many thousands of persons, many of which were not afflicted with a genetic disease, and some that had very minor “handicaps” such as hare lip. The whole process was carried out by, or under the supervision of, medical doctors. In January 1940, Dr. Karl Brandt visited a Brandenburg psychiatric hospital to witness new and more effective killing methods:
A prototype gas chamber had been constructed, disguised as a communal shower room. Approximately twenty inmates of the asylum were led naked into the room. After the door was closed, a doctor then turned on a supply of carbon-monoxide gas, which dispersed into the room through small holes in what otherwise looked like water pipes. Six minutes later, the room was cleared of gas and a team of SS men took the bodies to the hospital crematorium. Karl Brandt expressed his satisfaction and ordered that, as in this case, qualified doctors must carry out all future exterminations.41
The claim that these professionals were forced to participate in these crimes is, in the case of doctors and academics, false. Dr. Hans Hefelman, a high-level euthanasia programme bureaucrat, testified, “No doctor was ever ordered to participate in the euthanasia programme; they came of their own volition.”42 Himmler, in a written statement to a high-level judge, noted that operations undertaken in psychiatric hospitals were ordered and administered solely by medical doctors.43 Proctor wrote that “Doctors were never ordered to murder psychiatric patients and handicapped children,” rather they
Were empowered to do so, and fulfilled their task without protest, often on their own initiative. Hitler’s original memo of October 1939 was not an order (Befehl), but an empowerment (VoUmacht), granting physicians permission to act.44
As German zoologist and geneticist Dr. Ludwig Plate wrote, “progress in evolution goes forward over millions of dead bodies” of “inferior” humans, and the “key elements of the worldview had been constructed and repeatedly reaffirmed by linguists, racial anthropoloGists, evolutionary scientists and geneticists.”45
World History
