But the idea did not disappear from view. In 1933 a published lengthy memorandum on National Socialist penal law, whose author was the Prussian Minister of Justice, Hanns Kerrl, did not classify voluntary euthanasia, certified by two doctors, as a criminal offence. Kerrl also stated that it would not be an offence, were the state ‘legally to order the elimination from life of incurably mentally sick by official organs’.141 The hierarchy of the Catholic Church responded in predictably hostile manner (though in an unpublished memorandum).142 In 1935, Gürtner’s published report on the work of the commission set up to review the penal code, in direct contrast to Kerrl’s line of interpretation, then appeared to rule out explicitly the prospect of any legalization of the killing of the mentally sick.143 However, Hitler’s own position was indicated in his reply in 1935 to the Reich Doctors’ Leader Gerhard Wagner (who was instrumental in the drive to introduce an anti-Jewish ‘Blood Law’). 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’.144
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 resources 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.145 The National Socialist Racial and Political Office(
From 1936 onwards, the Churches were forced to transfer the patients in the sanatoria they ran into asylums controlled by the state.148 These had already had their budgets slashed as the overcrowding grew, and the quality of the staff deteriorated.149 Rumours circulated that the Reich Ministry of the Interior was pondering the drastic reduction of food-rations for asylum patients in the event of war.150 In the SS organ
In the interim, 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.152 Much of the correspondence, as Hitler himself made clear, 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 a quarter of a million a year in the later 1930s.153 And, to preserve the fiction of the Führer listening to the cares of his people, many of them needed attention.
