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was used when patients were moved from one institution to
another in order to bring them closer to the euthanasia institutions and
finally into the euthanasia institutions themselves. These three organizations,
Reichsarbeitsgemeinschaft, "Stiftung," and Patients Transport
Corporation, were in fact camouflaged names for the operation of the Euthanasia
Program and were under the supervision of one management. They did not work
independently but together. (Tr. p.1874.)
As to the questionnaires, three
experts received photostated copies, and, independently of each other, they
expressed their opinion on individual cases. Then so-called top experts
expressed their opinion. A list was made up of the patients who were judged
subject to euthanasia, and the patients were removed from the institution to
so-called collecting points, and from there were transferred to euthanasia
institutes. (Tr. pp. 1877, 1878.) Non-German nationals and Jews were
subjected to euthanasia as well as Germans. (Tr. p. 1881.)
The activities of the experts were
extended in the early summer of 1940 to inmates of concentration camps. A
doctors commission, which consisted of doctors and officials from the
Euthanasia Program, filled out the questionnaires on inmates from among those
who had been preliminarily selected by the camp doctors. Numerous concentration
camps were visited, some of them twice, in the period between 1940 and the end
of 1941. (Tr. pp. 1882, 1883.) Dr. Mennecke, who visited a number of
concentration camps to select inmates, received the orders for these activities
from the top experts in the Euthanasia Program and from the defendant Brack.
(Tr. p. 1882.) Announcements about these trips were made from the Berlin
agency of the program to the individual concentration camps. (Tr. p.
1885.) Non-German Nationals and Jews who were inmates of concentration
camps were subjected to the Euthanasia Program in extensive numbers. (Tr. p.
1887.)
Another function of the Euthanasia
Program was the killing of mentally and bodily deficient children. The witness
Walter Schmidt testified that the agency which handled this part of the program
was called the Reich Committee for Research on Hereditary and Constitutional
Severe Diseases [Reichsausschuss zur wissenschaftlichen Erfassung von erb-und
anlagebedingten schweren Leiden]. The questionnaires were filled out by the
health departments, the chief of children's clinics, physicians, doctors,
midwives, hospitals, etc., and reports were made to Dr. Linden's office in
Berlin. Linden was a member of the Ministry of the Interior. There a committee
of chief experts, on the strength of these reports, decreed euthanasia through
so-called authorizing orders in the form of a photostatic copy of the report,
which had been approved in writing. These activities continued until 1944.
(Tr. pp. 1833, 1834.) Schmidt himself was in charge
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