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. Tenacious and efficient, Bouhler had been in no small measure responsible for setting up the Party’s administrative organization after its refoundation in 1925.154 At the time of his appointment he was thirty-five years old, somewhat owlish-looking with round, black horn-rimmed spectacles and swept-back hair. His soft-voiced and polite manner was unusual in the Nazi leadership. He was a quiet man behind the scenes who, at another time in another place, might have become a company secretary. But Bouhler, still bearing a walking disability — and perhaps psychological scars — from the serious injuries to his legs sustained towards the end of the war which had prevented him from pursuing an officer’s career in the army as his father had done, was ambitious.155 He was also, whatever his introverted mannerisms, ideologically fanatical. And 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 — treading on numerous toes along the way. By the time the Führer Chancellery moved in 1936 into new accommodation close to the Reich Chancellery, it consisted of six departments, and the original twenty-six employees had almost doubled, increasing five-fold by 1942.156 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.157 Brack, five years younger than Bouhler, was, if anything, even more ambitious than his boss. He had a classical Nazi background: völkisch upbringing, Freikorps, participation in the Beerhall Putsch, study of agricultural economics at the Technische Hochschule in Munich, student activism, entry into the Party and SS at the age of twenty-five in 1929. His father was Frau Himmler’s doctor. He himself acted for a time as Himmler’s chauffeur.158 Brack was ideologically attuned to what was wanted. And 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.159 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.160 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, and, if the position was as the father had described it, to authorize the doctors in his name to carry out euthanasia.161 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.)162 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’ [Reich sausschufißzur wissenschaftlichen Erfassung erb — und anlagebed-ingter schwerer Leiden’). 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.163
