Hitler. 1936-1945: Nemesis полностью

Doctors had, however, overwhelmingly rejected euthanasia during the Weimar era. Psychiatrists began by doing the same, despite arguments already being aired that money spent upon ‘idiots’ could be put to better use. As professional conditions in psychiatry deteriorated, as pychiatrists’ public standing declined — they were often regarded as second-class doctors — and as conditions in the asylums drastically worsened in the wake of severe cuts in public spending by the early 1930s, radical suggestions for reducing the cost of institutionalized support of the mentally ill gained ground. But it was recognized that the public climate for such changes was still not propitious.

Hitler’s takeover of power changed that 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 pyschiatric 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.¹³⁴ 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.¹³⁵

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. His remarks were made in the context of a diatribe on the need to eradicate sexually transmitted diseases from society. He wanted no half-measures. ‘It is a half-measure,’ he wrote, ‘to let incurably sick people steadily contaminate the remaining healthy ones… The demand that defective people be prevented from propagating equally defective offspring is a demand of the clearest reason… 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.’¹³⁶

For Hitler, typically, 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 (Volkskraft), indeed of our ethnic nationhood (unseres Volkstums) altogether’.¹³⁷ ‘If Germany were to have a million children a year,’ he declared, ‘and do away with (beseitigen) 700,000–800,000 of the weakest of them, the result would finally be perhaps even a rise in strength.’¹³⁸ 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.¹³⁹ Lammers, too, later recalled Hitler musing on the killing of mental patients in 1933 during discussions on the ‘Sterilization Law’.¹⁴⁰ But in 1933, German public opinion was nowhere near prepared for such a drastic step. The Nazi regime could not contemplate introducing as controversial a measure as compulsory ‘euthanasia’ for the incurably sick, certain at the very least at that time to provoke the condemnation of the Catholic Church.