On 1 September 1939, the very day of the German attack on Poland, and
after a great deal of discussion between Dr. Karl Brandt, Dr. Leonardo
Conti, Philipp Bouhler, the Chief of the Chancellery of the Fuehrer, and
others, Hitler issued the following authority to the defendant Karl
Brandt (_630-PS_):
“Reichsleiter Bouhler and Dr. Brandt, M. D., are charged with
the responsibility of enlarging the authority of certain
physicians to be designated by name in such a manner that
persons who, according to human judgment, are incurable can,
upon a most careful diagnosis of their condition of sickness, be
accorded a mercy death.
[Signed] ADOLF HITLER”
After the receipt of this order, an organization was set up to execute
this program, Karl Brandt headed the medical section and Philipp
Bouhler, the administrative section. The defendant Hoven, as chief
surgeon of the Buchenwald concentration camp, took part in the program
and personally ordered the transfer of at least 300 to 400 Jewish
inmates of different nationalities, mostly non-German, to their death in
the euthanasia station at Bernburg. The defendants Brack and Blome
participated in their capacities as assistants to Bouhler and Conti.
Questionnaires were forwarded to the Ministry of the Interior from the
various institutes and were then submitted to Karl Brandt and his staff
for an expert opinion in order to determine the status of each patient.
Then each of those experts indicated his opinion as to the eventual
disposition of the patient; that is, whether or not the patient should
be transferred to a killing station. The questionnaires were supposedly
returned to the Ministry of the Interior, which, in turn, sent lists of
the doomed patients to the different insane asylums, ordering the
directors of the asylums to hand over the patients to a thing called the
General Sick Transport Corporation for transfer to the particular
stations where the killings took place. This Transport Corporation was
not a real organization, but one of the code names used to disguise the
true nature of the activities. The patients were then transferred to the
station where they were immediately killed. This entire procedure took
place without the consent of the relatives, but the relatives did
receive a death certificate on which the cause of death was falsified.
The Euthanasia Program was an open secret in top Nazi circles. However,
every possible effort had been made to keep it from the public in order
to avoid intervention by the churches. In spite of all these
precautions, it became commonly known in Germany as early as the summer
of 1940 that these killings were going on and church authorities, as
well as various legal officials, tried in vain to stop the killings.
Typical of the letters reaching the Minister of Justice and the Minister
of Interior is the following:
Addressed to The Reich Minister of Justice:
“I have a schizophrenic son in a Wuerttemberg mental
institution. I am shocked about the following absolutely
reliable information.
“Since some weeks insane persons are being taken from the
institutions allegedly on the grounds of military evacuation.
The directors of the institutions are enjoined to absolute
secrecy. Shortly afterwards the relatives are informed that the
sick person has died of encephalitis. The ashes are available if
so desired. This is plain murder just as in the concentration
camps. This measure uniformly emanates from the SS in Berlin.
The institutions dare not inform the authorities. Inquire at
once at Rottenmuenster, Schassenried, Winzertal, all in
Wuerttemberg. Have the lists of 2 months ago examined and
submitted to you, check upon the inmates who are there now and
ask where the missing persons went to. For 7 years now this gang
of murderers have defiled the German name. If my son is
murdered, woe! I shall take care that these crimes will be
published in all foreign newspapers. The SS may deny it as they
always do. I shall demand prosecution by the public prosecutor.
“I cannot give my name nor the institution where my son is,
otherwise I, too, won’t live much longer.
Heil Hitler
Oberregierungsrat N.”
If this program had stayed within the bounds set forth in Hitler’s
letter to Karl Brandt, it would have been bad enough. We may pass over
as quite irrelevant any such question as whether mercy killing may not
in some circumstances be desirable, and whether a statute authorizing
mercy killings under proper safeguards would be valid.
Such questions may be debatable, but they do not confront us here. No
German law authorizing mercy killings was ever adopted. Hitler’s
memorandum to Brandt and Bouhler was not a law, not even a Nazi law. It
was not intended to be a law or regarded as such even by the top Nazi
officials. That is why the program was carried out with the utmost
secrecy. The program was known to be utterly illegal by those who were
in charge of it; they knew it was nothing but murder.
This is brought out very clearly in a letter from Himmler to the
defendant Brack in December 1940 (_NO-018_):
“Dear Brack:
“I hear there is great excitement on the Alb because of the
institution Grafeneck.
“The population recognizes the gray automobile of the SS and
think they know what is going on at the constantly smoking
crematory. What happens there is a secret and yet is no longer
one. Thus the worst feeling has arisen there, and in my opinion
there remains only one thing, to discontinue the use of the
institution in this place and in any event disseminate
information in a clever and sensible manner by showing motion
pictures on the subject of inherited and mental diseases in just
that locality.
“May I ask for a report as to how the difficult problem was
solved.”
But there are more fundamental matters here. The program did not stay
even within the bounds of the secret Hitler authority. Euthanasia became
merely a polite word for the systematic slaughter of Jews and many other
categories of persons useless or unfriendly to the Nazi regime. The
evidence before the International Military Tribunal proved this clearly,
and the judgment states, and I quote:[11]
“Reference should also be made to the policy which was in
existence in Germany by the summer of 1940, under which all
aged, insane, and incurable people, ‘useless eaters’, were
transferred to special institutions where they were killed, and
their relatives informed that they had died from natural causes.
The victims were not confined to German citizens, but included
foreign laborers, who were no longer able to work, and were
therefore useless to the German war machine. It has been
estimated that at least some 275,000 people were killed in this
manner in nursing homes, hospitals, and asylums, which were
under the jurisdiction of the defendant Frick, in his capacity
as Minister of the Interior. How many foreign workers were
included in this total it has been quite impossible to
determine.”