On the very same day, Hitler, through an internal Party circular, ordered replacement buildings for damaged hospitals in areas threatened by bombing raids to be constructed. The barrack-like prefabricated constructions were to be attached to asylums and nursing homes, which were to have their existing patients relocated in order to make room for air-raid victims. The costs of the removal of the patients were to be borne by the ‘Community Patients Transport Service’ — precisely the same organization, run by the Chancellery of the Führer, whose buses had carried the asylum inmates to their deaths in the ‘euthanasia’ centres. Specifically acknowledging the disquiet which this would cause, the order — signed by none other than Hitler’s doctor, Karl Brandt, who along with Bouhler had been authorized in autumn 1939 to carry out the ‘euthanasia action’ — stated that relatives would be informed in advance about the destination of the patients, and would be able to visit them there. The press would undertake a propaganda campaign to explain what was happening and prevent rumours spreading.198
In his sermon of 3 August, Bishop Galen had cleverly brought the ‘euthanasia action’ into connection with the bombing-raids on Münster, which he hinted were a ‘punishment of God’ for the offences against the Commandment ‘Thou shalt not kill.’ Galen’s sermon had linked the three areas — attacks on the Church, ‘euthanasia’, and bombing-raids on German cities — in which alienation of the population from the regime, and the consequent threat to morale, was greatest. The population of the industrial belt of Westphalia were bearing the brunt of the raids. As SD reports pointed out, morale in the area was suffering accordingly. At the same time the attacks on the monasteries and religious orders in the area had reached their high point. And this was at precisely the juncture when the patients from the Westphalian asylums were being deported to the ‘euthanasia’ killing-centres. Any attempt to provide emergency hospitals for the victims of the air-raids, to combat the effect on morale, had to make use of the spare capacity of the asylums. But this could only be attained by removing the patients. And this would immediately give rise to further unrest. It was in the grip of this strait-jacket that Hitler bowed to the pressure created by Galen’s protest. His pragmatic solution, it seems, was to halt the T4 ‘Action’ in order to be able to offer the hospital care for air-raid victims, and the accompanying assurances necessary to calm the unrest in Westphalia and restore morale.199
By the time of Hitler’s ‘halt order’, the T4 ‘euthanasia action’ had already killed more than the 70,000 victims foreseen at the outset of the ‘programme’.200 Bouhler had in fact boasted to Goebbels as early as January 1941 that 40,000 mentally sick patients had already been liquidated, and that there were another 60,000 still to be dealt with.201 By the end of 1941, the number gassed, starved to death, or poisoned with lethal injections was nearer 100,000 than 70,00o.202 The ‘halt order’ ended the ‘euthanasia programme’ neither completely nor permanently. Tens of thousands of concentration-camp prisoners, ill or incapable of work, were, after selection by doctors, to perish in existing, or newly established, ‘euthanasia’-centres by 1945.203 As for the T4 personnel: new tasks were rapidly found for them. The experts in gassing techniques were, within a few weeks, already being redeployed to start the planning in Poland of a far larger mass-killing ‘programme’: the extermination of Europe’s Jews.
