| “LIFE UNWORTHY OF LIFE”: THE
GENETIC CURE |
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to eternal secrecy taken by all involved in the killing, at
several of the killing centers outsiders — for example, the local
Gauleiter (district leader) and other prominent Nazi personages at
Hartheim — were received and, on some occasions, permitted to witness the
killing of patients.
There were inconsistencies concerning who was
permitted to know everything and who was not. While the nature of the medical
killing project was not openly discussed, it was not completely withheld
either. Courses consistent with the "euthanasia" program were given at large
mental hospitals such as Eglfing-Haar, not an official killing center but a
place where mental patients were nonetheless killed. An estimated twenty
thousand Nazi military and civilian leaders and SS men were thus exposed to
films* and “case demonstrations” of highly regressed patients,
especially Jewish patients, as “life unworthy of life”: recall Dr.
Pfannmüller’s demonstration of the “most simple method” of
starving a child to death.72
These and other
bureaucratic contradictions had to do with uncertainty concerning the official
view of the program as necessary but difficult for the population to accept
— that view accompanied by the sense that the program was on the one hand
dirty, ugly, and unacceptable (to be hidden at all costs) and on the other a
liberating therapy for the race (and therefore openly demonstrable). It is
quite possible that the Nazi doctors and their companions in the bureaucracy of
deception held all three images at once. |
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New Technology and the
Killing of Jews:
T4 in Poland and the Final Solution |
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From the beginning of the T4 operation, Jewish patients
were viewed as a group apart. They were, before long, caught up in broader Nazi
extermination policies. That was the time (late 1939 to early 1940) when the
doctrine of “elimination [in the sense of removal] of Judaism as a
whole” was being developed. Soon after Poland was overrun by German armies
(September 1939) Heydrich formulated a plan to build a “Jewish
reservation” in Lublin. Although this plan never materialized, deportation
trains left for Poland during the winter of 1939-40, carrying Jews (who were
not mental patients) from Austria, Bohemia, and Moravia.73†
Though the Madagascar Plan (for the use of
that island as a “reservation” for Jews) was still being given some
consideration, there was in Party circles. increasing talk of a “radical
solution” (Radikallösung) for |
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* One such film was
“Existence without Life” (Dasein ohne Leben), which was
intended for the general public but rather for the education of T4 personnel
and trusted circles.71
† In all talk of resettlement, whether of Jewish inmates or of
Jews in general, the anti-Semitic attitude of the Polish population — the
possibility of stimulating Poles to pogroms or the like — was frequently
mentioned. |
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