| “LIFE UNWORTHY OF LIFE”: THE
GENETIC CURE |
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knew that a very different kind of killing had long been
under way and had in fact already ended, at least officially, by the time the
film was shown.
Hitler’s Involvement — The
First “Mercy Killing”
Hitler had an intense interest in
direct medical killing. His first known expression of intention to eliminate
the “incurably ill” was made to Dr. Gerhard Wagner at the Nuremberg
Party rally of 1935. Karl Brandt, who overheard that remark, later testified
that Hitler thought that the demands and upheavals of war would mute expected
religious opposition and enable such a project to be implemented smoothly.
Hitler was also said to have stated that a war effort requires a very healthy
people, and that the generally diminished sense of the value of human life
during war made it “the best time for the elimination of the incurably
ill.” And he was reportedly affected by the burden imposed by the mentally
ill not only on relatives and the general population but on the medical
profession. In 1936, Wagner held discussions with “a small circle of
friends” (specifically, high-ranking officials, some of them doctors)
about killing “idiotic children” and “mentally ill” people,
and making films in “asylums and idiot homes” to demonstrate the
misery of their lives. This theoretical and tactical linking of war to direct
medical killing was maintained throughout.13
By 1938, the process had gone much further. Discussions moved beyond
high-level political circles; and at a national meeting of leading government
psychiatrists and administrators, an SS officer gave a talk in which he stated
that “the solution of the problem of the mentally ill becomes easy if one
eliminates these people.”14
Toward the end of 1938, the Nazi regime was receiving requests from
relatives of newborns or very young infants with severe deformities and brain
damage for the granting of a mercy killing.15
These requests had obviously been encouraged, and were channeled directly to
the Chancellery — that is, to Hitler’s personal office. Whatever the
plans for using war as a cover, the program for killing children was well under
way by the time the war began. And from the beginning, this program
circumvented ordinary administrative channels and was associated directly with
Hitler himself.
The occasion for initiating the actual killing of
children, and of the entire “euthanasia” project, was the petition
for the “mercy killing” (Gnadentod, really “mercy
death”) of an infant named Knauer, born blind, with one leg and part of
one arm missing, and apparently an “idiot.” Subsequent recollections
varied concerning who had made the petition and the extent of the deformity, as
the case quickly became mythologized.* |
__________
* Hans Hefelmann, chief of
the responsible Chancellery office, remembered that the child lacked three
limbs and that its grandmother made the request. Brandt made the father the
petitioner. |
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