. NMT02-T0197
Volume II · Page 197
Ministry the completed questionnaires were examined by so-called experts, who registered their professional opinions thereon, returned them to the appropriate office for final examination, and orders were issued for those patients who by this process were finally selected for extermination. Thereafter the condemned patients were gathered at collection points, from whence they were transported to euthanasia stations and killed by gassing.
Utmost secrecy was demanded of the executioners throughout the entire procedure. Persons actively concerned in the program were required to subscribe a written oath of secrecy and were warned that violation of that oath would result in most serious personal consequences. The consent of the relatives of the "incurables" was not even obtained; the question of secrecy being deemed so important.
Shortly after the commencement of operations for the disposal of "incurables", the program was extended to Jews, and then to concentration camp inmates. In this latter phase of the program, prisoners deemed by the examining doctors to be unfit or useless for labor were ruthlessly weeded out and sent to the extermination stations in great numbers.
Karl Brandt maintains that he is not implicated in the extermination of Jews or of concentration camp inmates; that his official responsibility for euthanasia ceased at the close of the summer of 1941, at which time euthanasia procedures against "incurables" were terminated by order of Hitler.
It is difficult to believe this assertion, but even if it be true, we cannot understand how this fact would aid the defendant. The evidence is conclusive that almost at the outset of the program non-German nationals were selected for euthanasia and exterminated. Needless to say, these persons did not voluntarily consent to become the subjects of this procedure.
Karl Brandt admits that after he had disposed of the medical decisions required to be made by him with regard to the initial program which he maintains was valid, he did not follow the program further but left the administrative details of execution to Bouhler. If this be true, his failure to follow up a program for which he was charged with special responsibility constituted the gravest breach of duty. A discharge of that duty would have easily revealed what now is so manifestly evident from the record; that whatever may have been the original aim of the program, its purposes were prostituted by men for whom Brandt was responsible, and great numbers of non-German nationals were exterminated under its authority.
We have no doubt but that Karl Brandt — as he himself testified — is a sincere believer in the administration of euthanasia to per- [...sons]
