| “Euthanasia”: Direct Medical
Killing |
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the "Jewish problem" which developed into the so-called
Final Solution (Endlösung).74
Under
T4, Jewish inmates of institutions in Germany did not have to meet the ordinary
criteria for medical killing (mental deficiency or schizophrenia, length of
hospitalization, capacity to work, etc.). For them, “no special
consultations or discussions . . . were necessary”: “The total
extermination of this group of asylum inmates was the logical consequence of
the ‘radical solution’ of the Jewish. problem being embarked
upon.”75
Only at this point does
direct medical killing provide an exact prefiguring of the Final Solution: Jews
were to be killed to the last man, woman, and child — simply because they
were Jews. For the Nazis, Jewish mental patients were unique among all Nazi
victims in that they could embody both “dangerous genes” in an
individual medical sense, and “racial poison” in a collective ethnic
sense.
Systematic T4 treatment of German Jews began in April i 940,
with a proclamation from the Reich Interior Ministry that, within three weeks,
all Jewish patients were to be inventoried. In June, the first gassings of Jews
took place, as two hundred men, women, and children died in the Brandenburg
facility, having been transported there in six Gekrat buses from the
Berlin-Buch mental institution. There were more killings in July. On 30 August,
another directive from the Interior Ministry ordered that Jews were to be
transferred to various centers, depending on their geographic location. It was
explained that employees and relatives of Aryan patients had complained about
being treated and housed with Jews.76
The Bavarian collection center was Eglfing-Haar, where Dr.
Pfannmüller had once declared proudly: “No Jews are allowed in my
institution!”77 Now the Jews transferred
in were placed in two special houses (where they were separated by sex rather
than degree of illness) and thrust into propaganda-film roles depicting them as
“typical Jews” and “the scum of humanity.” This segregation
reflected the general policy that, in Schmidt’s ironic words,
“‘Aryan’ mental patients could, not be expected to die together
with Jewish patients, much less live together.”78
In the fall of 1940, Jewish patients
began to be transported to Nazi-occupied Poland as part of the policy of
removing all Jews from Germany. In December, it was announced that henceforth
Jewish patients would be transferred to a facility for mentally impaired
children in Bendorf near Neuwied in the Rhineland. This was a privately owned
Jewish institution going back to 1869. Beginning in the spring of 1942, Bendorf
patients were sent to Poland, in trains with sixty to seventy patients sealed
in each freight car, trains that carried ordinary Jewish citizens as well. The
Bendorf hospital was supposed to be used for soldiers, but never was. The
director, a “privileged Jew” (married to an Aryan), stayed on to act
as caretaker in the empty facility.79
Once the Jewish patients were herded into trains, the pretense of
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