Army of Evil: A History of the SS (29 page)

The sermon attracted attention both outside and inside Germany. It was reported by the BBC and in British newspapers, and transcripts were dropped by the RAF as propaganda pamphlets.
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Other representatives of the Catholic Church had been in secret negotiations to stop the killings since late 1940, but von Galen’s open denunciation spurred further public criticism. The disquiet reached such a pitch that even Himmler recommended that the killings should be stopped. Later in August 1941, Hitler duly ordered Brandt to call a “temporary” halt to the killings. However, by that stage, more than seventy thousand victims had already been murdered, and T-4 had almost achieved its original goal of killing one “incurable” patient for every thousand of the general population. So it seems likely that, rather than being swayed by public opinion, Hitler merely thought that this particular project had reached its conclusion.

Furthermore, although the centrally organised killing of psychiatric patients was now wound down, the euthanasia programme
per se
did not end. The children’s programme continued, T-4 still collected data and registered “incurables,” and the killing centres at Bernburg, Sonnenstein and Hartheim remained open.
†
Now, though, they focused on the sick from the original concentration camps. Although the latter were models of brutality, where the murder of inmates was routine, they were not equipped for mass killing.

The killing of concentration camp prisoners was organised by “Operation 14 f 13,” a name derived from the code used by camp administrations for inmates who died in custody. (14 f 5 indicated a prisoner killed while trying to escape; 14 f 8 a prisoner who committed suicide; 14 f 14 an executed prisoner; and so on.) From mid-1941, T-4 doctors toured the camps and made selections from preliminary lists of prisoners that had been drawn up by the SS camp administrators. This meant that the T-4 extermination net started to spread wider, because, in addition to the sick, these lists of those deemed unable to work included: antisocials (defined as “human beings with a hereditary and irreversible mental attitude who, due to this nature, incline towards alcoholism and immorality, have repeatedly come into conflict with government agencies and the courts and thus appear unrestrained and a threat to humanity”
¹⁴
); political prisoners; criminals; and Jews.

The launch of 14 f 13 caused some problems for the SS. By March 1942, the Inspectorate of Concentration Camps had seen such a decline in the number of prisoners available for work that it ordered the camps to select for extermination only those who were
genuinely
unfit.
¹⁵
Nevertheless, by the next year, the labour shortage was still so acute that Himmler ordered the end of 14 f 13. Thereafter, the killing would be confined only to inmates with mental problems who could be dealt with within the camps themselves. The gas chambers at Bernburg and Sonnenstein were duly dismantled. The Hartheim killing centre continued to operate until December 1944, primarily to murder prisoners from the nearby Mauthausen concentration camp. These victims were selected by the camp authorities, without any involvement of T-4 staff.

Adult euthanasia, however, continued on a decentralised basis, in a similar way to the children’s programme, with a number of doctors authorised to kill selected patients in designated hospitals. As with the children, the adult victims were starved or overdosed until a fatal condition was induced, then cremated to destroy the evidence. Finally, a bogus death certificate was issued. According to Henry Friedlander:
“In fact, more victims of euthanasia perished after [Hitler’s] stop order than before.”
¹⁶
Long-term mentally ill patients from the asylum system continued to be murdered, but now the victims also included many Germans who had more recently succumbed to mental illness under the pressure of Allied bombing raids and other aspects of the war, as well as foreign labourers who had been conscripted into the service of the Third Reich from the occupied territories of Europe. Any forced labourer who became sick—either physically or mentally—was vulnerable: they were only in Germany to provide labour at minimal cost, so their long-term medical care was deemed economically prohibitive. Consequently, if their condition suggested they would not make a speedy recovery, they were killed.

T
HE STERILISATION AND
euthanasia programmes are key elements in the history of the SS, even though the organisation itself played only a supporting role in them. Ever since details of the programmes first came to light, sociologists have attempted to explain how so many members of the medical profession—traditionally regarded as an essentially altruistic group—were so quickly and easily converted into enthusiastic mass murderers. Partly, it seems, they were stimulated by the idea of working in supposedly revolutionary times. The National Socialists constantly emphasised the need to “improve” the German
Volk
and rid Germany of other races and associated “inferior” elements. By taking part in the sterilisation and euthanasia operations, doctors and nurses placed themselves in the front line of this “national improvement” project, which not only gave them a sense of importance and prestige, but allowed them to continue to believe in their own altruism: to their minds, they were no longer caring merely for individuals, but for the whole of German society.

More prosaically, they were materially rewarded for taking part. In addition to extra pay and allowances, they had access to, for example, a “rest centre” at a castle near Salzburg, which provided meals that
were not available to the heavily rationed ordinary people. Such VIP treatment contributed to their sense that they constituted an elite.

Even those with moral qualms about the programmes could manage to convince themselves that there was some scientific benefit from what they were doing. An unprecedented supply of corpses became available for dissection as a result of the euthanasia programme, and physicians were in the novel position of being able to combine clinical and pathological observations. In practice, this meant that doctors like Julius Hallervorden, of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Brain Research in Berlin, would visit the killing centres and personally select individuals. Once they were killed, Hallervorden would remove their brains and take them back to Berlin for dissection.

The “mercy killing” of the incurably ill still attracts adherents to this day. So, especially given the moral and ideological context of the Third Reich, it is scarcely surprising that well-educated, intelligent doctors and nurses became advocates of it. However, in reality, the overwhelming majority of the killings were far from merciful: gassing and starvation, the two principal means of death that were employed, inflicted great suffering on the victims. Moreover, as the programmes progressed, it is clear that those involved lost any moral compass they may previously have possessed.

This is well illustrated by the case of Dr. Valentin Faltlhauser, director of the Kaufbeuren-Irsee asylum. In the early 1930s, Faltlhauser was a leading figure in the renaissance of German psychiatry and a vocal opponent of euthanasia. However, his position began to change after the National Socialists took power. Soon, he became one of the regional experts in sterilisation. He appeared before the hereditary health courts and initiated sterilisation proceedings, and his theories changed to accommodate National Socialism and eugenic thought. By the late 1930s, when funding for asylums and psychiatry was being drastically reduced, he was differentiating between those patients who could be cured and those who could not—directing resources towards the former at the expense of the latter. The euthanasia programme
“solved” many of his financial difficulties as an asylum director. And after Hitler’s stop order, Faltlhauser was an enthusiastic advocate of differential diets—starving the incurable to death while feeding those who responded to treatment. His ultimate moral bankruptcy is revealed by the case of Ernst Losser.

Ernst’s father was an itinerant pedlar who was classified as “asocial” and sent to Dachau (he was suspected of being a Gypsy), while Ernst himself and his two siblings were put into orphanages. But Ernst was poorly behaved at the orphanage—refusing to attend school and stealing from the other children—so at the age of ten or eleven he was referred to Kaufbeuren-Irsee for psychiatric evaluation. The psychiatrist took the view that Ernst could not be changed by education, and recommended that he should be transferred to the children’s unit at Kaufbeuren, even though he had neither psychiatric problems nor learning difficulties.

The transfer was duly made, and the staff at Kaufbeuren soon grew fond of Ernst: he responded much better to adult company, was friendly and liked to play. At least one member of staff even went so far as to take him home for the weekend, because they felt he should never have been in the asylum in the first place.

Before long, Ernst discovered that many of the patients at the asylum were being starved, so he started to sneak down to the kitchens at night to steal food—bread, apples and other staples—and then distributed them to the grateful inmates. When this came to the attention of Faltlhauser and the other psychiatrists, they determined that Ernst was a “bad character” and decided to eliminate him. A T-4 nurse was instructed to carry out the killing. Ernst was too streetwise to drink coffee laced with sedatives, but he was eventually given a lethal injection after being woken up in the middle of the night. He was dead within a few hours.

Faltlhauser was also responsible for the last death in the euthanasia programme. Four-year-old Richard Jenne was killed at Kaufbeuren on 29 May 1945, twenty-one days after Germany’s unconditional surrender
and thirty-three days after United States troops had occupied the local area. The Americans had not occupied the hospital because they had been warned that it might contain typhus patients, so Faltlhauser and his staff had simply got on with their work.

Faltlhauser was a well-educated, intellectual, previously moralistic doctor who became a remorseless mass killer in the context of the Third Reich; and he was far from the only member of the medical establishment to follow this path. Such men and women were easily persuaded that euthanasia and sterilisation were not only acceptable but positively desirable, so it should come as little surprise that much less sophisticated, “ordinary” people were willing to staff the concentration camps, special task groups, police battalions and extermination camps that carried out the Holocaust. The propaganda that convinced the doctors they were doing the right thing worked just as well—if not better—on the camp guards.

The euthanasia programme also provided the SS with the technical expertise that would soon be used in the extermination of the Jews. Even as the first victims of T-4 were being gassed, large numbers of Jews—and other supposed enemies of Germany—were being shot by SS special task groups in German-occupied Poland. This was time-consuming, manpower-intensive and stressful for the killers, so an alternative, more efficient means of mass murder was sought, and the euthanasia programme pointed the way. To a large extent, the procedures that had been used in the killing of the mentally ill were applied without adaptation in the killing of Jews. For instance, the gas chambers at Grafeneck and at Auschwitz were disguised as shower rooms for precisely the same reason—to try to preserve order among those who were about to be murdered. Moreover, many of the personnel from the T-4 killing centres were subsequently redeployed to the death camps: for instance, Christian Wirth, Franz Stangl and Irmfried Eberl all had roles in the extermination centres on the River Bug.

There is one final parallel between the euthanasia programme and the Holocaust. There can be little doubt that the former was a long-held
dream of Adolf Hitler: he discussed eugenic measures in
Mein Kampf
, and mentioned the subject on several occasions in the late 1920s and 1930s. However, the only practical measure he took towards implementing it was to secretly authorise “mercy killings” in October 1939. Partly this was because he feared a public backlash (in Germany as much as abroad) if he were ever to legalise euthanasia. For similar reasons, while he maintained a bitter hatred of the Jewish people and certainly welcomed their annihilation as a race, any instructions that he gave for the commencement of the extermination programme were kept entirely secret.
*

*
Bouhler was born in 1899. The son of an army officer and a veteran of the First World War, he was an early member of the NSDAP and became the party’s “second secretary” in the autumn of 1922. He was made Reich Secretary three years later and head of the Führer Chancellery in November 1934. He committed suicide after being arrested by the Americans in 1945.

*
In addition to Hartheim and Brandenburg, the other major T-4 killing centres were at Hadamar in Hesse, Sonnenstein in Saxony, Grafeneck in Baden-Württemberg and Bernburg in Saxony-Anhalt.

*
There is little concrete evidence that German soldiers were killed in the euthanasia programme, but it does appear to have happened. At the trial of a T-4 nurse in 1948, it was alleged that she had given lethal injections to soldiers who had gone “mad” during the winter of 1941–42.