Less Than Human
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[Pages 404-439]
| Frontispiece | |
| 1 | James Waller, Becoming Evil. How Ordinary People Commit Genocide and Mass Killing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p.248. Return |
| 2 | Vasily Grossman, Everything Flows, (London: Harvill Secker, 2010), p.128. Return |
| Introduction | |
| 3 | Michael Burleigh, Eugenic Utopias and the Genetic Present (Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions: Vol. 1, No. 1, 2000), p.62. Koltsov was a Russian biologist and geneticist. Following denunciation of his theories as “fascistic nonsense” by disciples of Stalin's favourite, the agronomist, supporter of the theory of the inheritance of acquired characters, and charlatan, Trofim Lysenko, Koltsov was allegedly poisoned by the NKVD in 1940. Under Stalin a complete ban on the practice and teaching of genetics, condemned as a “bourgeois perversion”, was imposed,. Return |
| 4 | Hugh Gallagher, What the Nazi “Euthanasia Program” Can Tell Us About Disability Oppression (Journal of Disability Policy Studies, Vol.12, No.2, 2001) 96-99, p.96. Return |
| 5 | Robert N Proctor, Racial Hygiene: Medicine Under the Nazis (Cambridge Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1989), pp. 10-13. Return |
| 6 | Richard Weikart, From Darwin to Hitler. Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics, and Racism in Germany (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2004), pp 36-37. Return |
| 7 | Marius Turda, 'A New Religion'? Eugenics and Racial Scientism in Pre-First World War Hungary (Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions: Vol.7, No. 3, September 2006), p.308. Return |
| 8 | Ibid., p.308. Return |
| 9 | Ibid., p.309. Return |
| 10 | Weikart, From Darwin to Hitler, p. 15. Return |
| 11 | Turda, 'A New Religion'?, p.324, note 46. Return |
| 12 | Ulf Schmidt, Karl Brandt: The Nazi Doctor – Medicine and Power in the Third Reich (London: Hambledon Continuum, 2007), p.362. Return |
| 13 | Most sources attribute first use of the word to Galton in his 1883 work “Human Faculty”, although the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary dates its first appearance to 1833. Return |
| 14 | Rachel Iredale, Eugenics and its Relevance to Contemporary Health Care, (Nursing Ethics, 7 (3), 2000), p.206. Return |
| 15 | Michael Burleigh, Ethics and extermination: Reflections on Nazi genocide, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p.144. Return |
| 16 | Iredale, Eugenics and its Relevance to Contemporary Health Care, p.206. Return |
| 17 | Daniel J Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), p.291. Return |
| 18 | Reinhard Heydrich, who died on 4 June 1942 following an assassination attempt by Czechoslovakian patriots nine days earlier, held this position. Return |
| 19 | Philip Boobbyer, Moral Judgements and Moral Realism in History (Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions, Vol. 3, No. 2, 2002), p.85. Return |
| 20 | Ibid., p.86. Return |
| 21 | Henry Friedlander, The Origins of Nazi Genocide: From `Euthanasia' to the Final Solution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,1995), p.xxii Return |
| Chapter 1. Towards Utopia | |
| 22 | Michael W Perry, (ed), G K Chesterton - Eugenics and Other Evils: An Argument Against the Scientifically Organised State (Seattle: Inkling Books, 2001), p.124. A convert to Catholicism, Chesterton managed to be simultaneously both anti-eugenic and anti-Semitic, thus proving that one is not necessarily the prerequisite of the other. [Richard S Levy (ed), Antisemitism: A Historical Encyclopedia of Prejudice and Persecution (Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO Ltd, 2005), pp.115-116]. Return |
| 23 | Marius Turda and Paul J Weindling (eds.), “Blood and Homeland”. Eugenics and Racial Nationalism in Central and Southeast Europe, 1900-1940, (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2007), p.196. Return |
| 24 | There has been an enormous volume of literature published on this subject during the last 150 years posing arguments, some vehemently for, others equally vehemently against, Darwin's evolutionary principle, as well as the innumerable variations on specific issues raised by that topic. The concern of this text is primarily the impact and consequences of this debate on the development and implementation of specific Nazi policies derived from and subsequently endorsed by the then prevalent general eugenic theory. Return |
| 25 | Michael Burleigh, and Wolfgang Wipperman, The Racial State: Germany 1933-1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p.28. Return |
| 26 | John W Dower, War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (New York: Pantheon Books, 1986), pp. 153-154. Return |
| 27 | http://tinyurl.com/3yeronw (Accessed 21 August 2008). Return |
| 28 | Richard Weikart, From Darwin to Hitler. Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics, and Racism in Germany (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2004), p.1. Return |
| 29 | The term first appeared in an 1879 article by Oscar Schmidt. Return |
| 30 | Sylvia Anne Hoskins, Nurses and National Socialism - a Moral Dilemma: One Historical Example of a Route to Euthanasia (Nursing Ethics, 12 (1), 2005), p.80. Return |
| 31 | Dennis Sewell, The Political Gene – How Darwin's Ideas Changed Politics (London: Picador, 2009), p.35. Return |
| 32 | Mike Hawkins, Social Darwinism in European and American Thought 1860-1945: Nature as model and nature as threat (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p.7. Return |
| 33 | Henry Friedlander, The Origins of Nazi Genocide: From `Euthanasia' to the Final Solution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), p.4. Return |
| 34 | Rachel Iredale, Eugenics and its Relevance to Contemporary Health Care, (Nursing Ethics, 7 (3), 2000), p.206. Return |
| 35 | “Survival of the fittest”, perhaps the term most associated with Social Darwinism, is often incorrectly attributed to Darwin himself. In fact, Darwin wrote that “It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change,” a doctrine which might be termed the “survival of the most adaptable”, a concept much more difficult to politicise than Spencer's dangerous interpretation of natural selection. Return |
| 36 | Marius Turda, 'A New Religion'? Eugenics and Racial Scientism in Pre-First World War Hungary (Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions: Vol.7, No. 3, September 2006), p.316. Return |
| 37 | William Graham Sumner, The Challenge of Facts and Other Essays, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1914).p.423. Return |
| 38 | David Masson, Macmillan's Magazine, Vol XII (London: Macmillan and Co, 1865). pp.324-325. Return |
| 39 | Richard Lynn, Eugenics: A Reassessment (Westport: Praeger Publishers, 2001), pp. 215-216. Return |
| 40 | Weikart, From Darwin to Hitler, p.78. Return |
| 41 | Darwin's view of natural selection through the struggle for existence was derived from Thomas Malthus' concept of an organism's tendency towards overpopulation, one consequence of which was the propensity of humans to reproduce faster than their food supply. Ergo, the racial hygienists concluded, the need of the stronger nation to expand its living space (Lebensraum) at the expense of the weaker, even as it bred allegedly superior stock to populate the living space gained and at the same time restricted the ability of its supposedly inferior stock to procreate. (Weikart, From Darwin to Hitler, p.185). Malthus set out his argument in his 1798 treatise, Essay on the Principle of Population. Some consider Malthus a proto-eugenicist, going so far as to label him “the founding father of scientific racism.” [Patrick Brantlinger, Dark Vanishings: Discourse on the Extinction of Primitive Races, 1800-1930 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003), p.17)]. Return |
| 42 | Robert N Proctor, Racial Hygiene: Medicine Under the Nazis-(Cambridge Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1989), p.342, note 30. Return |
| 43 | James W Trent, “Who shall say who is a useful person?” Abraham Myerson's opposition to the eugenic movement (History of Psychiatry, No. 12, 2001), p.42. Return |
| 44 | Turda, 'A New Religion'?, p.309. Return |
| 45 | http://tinyurl.com/27mf4wx (Accessed 16 November 2009). Return |
| 46 | Kathleen Wilson, The Island Race: Englishness, empire and gender in the eighteenth century (London: Routledge, 2003), P.54. Return |
| 47 | http://tinyurl.com/34nq7aj (Accessed 5 December 2009). Return |
| 48 | Mark Mazower, Hitler's Empire – Nazi Rule in Occupied Europe (London: Allen Lane, 2008), pp.182-183. Return |
| 49 | Turda and Weindling, “Blood and Homeland”, p.438. Return |
| 50 | Karl Pearson (ed), The Life, Letters and Labours of Francis Galton, Volume Three, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1930), p.321. Return |
| 51 | Karl Pearson (ed), The Life, Letters and Labours of Francis Galton, Volume Two, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1924). p.119. Return |
| 52 | Herbert Henry Goddard approvingly defined feeble-mindedness as a “state of mental defect existing from birth or from an early age and due to incomplete or abnormal development in consequence of which, the person affected is incapable of performing his duties as a member of society in the position of life to which he is born.” [Henry Herbert Goddard, Feeble-mindedness: Its Causes and Consequences (New York: Arno Press, 1973), p. 4)]. This could (and was) interpreted to mean almost anybody who did not fit a particular set of established parameters. Return |
| 53 | Friedlander, The Origins of Nazi Genocide, p. 6. Return |
| 54 | Samuel Totten, William S Parsons, Israel W Charny (eds.), Century of Genocide: Eyewitness accounts and Critical Views (New York: Routledge, 2004), p. 213. Return |
| 55 | Daniel J Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), p.97. Return |
| 56 | Friedlander, The Origins of Nazi Genocide, p. 8-9. More than 65,000 Americans were subject to involuntary sterilisation during the inter-war years. [Philip Zimbardo, The Lucifer Effect: How Good People Turn Evil (London: Rider Books, 2007), p.313]. Return |
| 57 | Sheila Faith Weiss, Race Hygiene and National Efficiency: The Eugenics of Wilhelm Schallmayer (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), p.29. Return |
| 58 | King, Desmond, In the Name of Liberalism: Illiberal Social Policy in the United States and Britain, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p.69, note 24. Return |
| 59 | H G Wells, Mankind in the Making, (Charleston: BiblioBazaar, 2006), p.35. Return |
| 60 | H G Wells, Anticipations, (Charleston: BiblioBazaar, 2007), pp.187-188. Return |
| 61 | In 1926 `Education' was dropped from the Society's title. (Sewell, The Political Gene, p.247, note 3). Return |
| 62 | Dan Stone, Breeding Superman: Nietzsche, Race and Eugenics in Edwardian and Interwar Britain (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2002), p.127. Return |
| 63. | Ibid., p.130. Return |
| 64 | Dan Stone, Race in British Eugenics (European History Quarterly, Vol.31, no.3, 2001), p. 399. Return |
| 65 | David Pilgrim, The Eugenic Legacy in Psychology and Psychiatry (International Journal of Social Psychiatry, Vol.54, No.3, 2008), p.274. Return |
| 66 | Stone, Race in British Eugenics, p. 400. Return |
| 67. | Ibid., p. 401. Return |
| 68 | Turda, 'A New Religion'?, p.312. Return |
| 69 | Proctor, Racial Hygiene, p.180. Return |
| 70 | Andrés Horacio Reggiani, God's Eugenicist: Alexis Carrel and the Sociobiology of Decline, (New York: Berghahn Books, 2007), p.71. Return |
| 71 | Iredale, Eugenics and its Relevance to Contemporary Health Care, p.207. Return |
| Chapter 2. Racial Hygiene | |
| 72 | Michael Burleigh and Wolfgang Wipperman, The Racial State: Germany 1933-1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p.31. Return |
| 73 | Richard Weikart, From Darwin to Hitler. Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics, and Racism in Germany (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2004), pp.12-13. Return |
| 74 | Haeckel sets out his theory in detail in The Riddle of the Universe: At the Close of the Nineteenth Century (Charleston: BiblioBazaar, 2009). For example: “Only thus can we attain a clear knowledge of the long scale of psychic development which runs unbroken from the lowest, unicellular forms of life up to the mammals, and to man at their head.” (p.103). Return |
| 75 | Weikart, From Darwin to Hitler, p.160. Return |
| 76 | Ibid., p.148. Return |
| 77 | Sheila Faith Weiss, Race Hygiene and National Efficiency: The Eugenics of Wilhelm Schallmayer (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), pp.34-35 Return |
| 78 | Richard J Evans, The Coming of the Third Reich (London: Allen Lane, 2003), p. 36. Return |
| 79 | Mike Hawkins, Social Darwinism in European and American Thought 1860-1945: Nature as model and nature as threat (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p.140. Return |
| 80 | http://tinyurl.com/32wwwm7 (accessed 21 March 2008). Return |
| 81 | Jonathan Peter Spiro, Defending the Master Race: Conservation, Eugenics, and the Legacy of Madison Grant, (Burlington: University of Vermont Press, 2008) , p.123. Return |
| 82 | Weikart, From Darwin to Hitler, p.70. Return |
| 83 | Daniel Gasman, The Scientific Origins of National Socialism (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2004), p.147. Return |
| 84 | Weikart, From Darwin to Hitler, p.70. Return |
| 85 | Ernst Heinrich Philipp August Haeckel, Freedom in Science and Teaching (Charleston: BiblioBazaar, 2009) , pp.90-91. Return |
| 86 | David Olusoga and Casper Erichsen, The Kaiser's Holocaust – Germany's Forgotten Genocide and the Colonial Roots of Nazism (London: Faber and Faber, 2010), pp.108-111. Return |
| 87 | Weikart, From Darwin to Hitler, p.15. Return |
| 88 | Forel was a founder member of the Monist League. Haeckel tried unsuccessfully to persuade him to become president of the organisation. (Bernhard Kuechenhoff, The psychiatrist August Forel and his attitude to eugenics (History of Psychiatry, No. 19(2), 2008), p.218). Return |
| 89 | Weikart, From Darwin to Hitler, p.86. Return |
| 90 | Kuechenhoff, The psychiatrist August Forel, p.220. Return |
| 91 | Robert N. Proctor, Racial Hygiene: Medicine Under the Nazis (Cambridge Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1989), p.96. Forel later wrote: “By 1885, without knowing the work of Galton, I had suggested negative eugenics, sometimes under the pretence of medical reasons, but in reality to prevent those disgusting species of mankind from reproducing.” (Kuechenhoff, The psychiatrist August Forel, p.220). Return |
| 92 | Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Foundations of the Nineteenth Century, Volume I (Port Chester: Adegi Graphics, 1977), p.290. Return |
| 93 | Kuechenhoff, The psychiatrist August Forel, pp.215-216. Return |
| 94 | Membership of the Society grew rapidly. In 1905 there were 32 members; by 1930 there were more than 1,300. The growth in the number of branches was equally impressive. By 1935 there were as many branches in Germany and Austria as there had initially been individual members. (Proctor, Racial Hygiene, p.18). Return |
| 95 | Weikart, From Darwin to Hitler, p.93. Return |
| 96 | Marius Turda and Paul J Weindling (eds.), “Blood and Homeland”. Eugenics and Racial Nationalism in Central and Southeast Europe, 1900-1940, (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2007), p.290. Return |
| 97 | Burleigh and Wipperman, The Racial State, p.32. Return |
| 98 | István Apáthy defined racial hygiene in the following terms: “Public hygiene is concerned with the improvement of public life conditions and public health; racial hygiene fights against certain maladies which endanger not only the survival of isolated individuals but the survival of the entire species”. (Marius Turda, 'A New Religion'? Eugenics and Racial Scientism in Pre-First World War Hungary (Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions: Vol.7, No. 3, September 2006), p.315). Return |
| 99 | Weikart, From Darwin to Hitler, p.118. Return |
| 100 | Proctor, Racial Hygiene, p.21. Return |
| 101 | http://tinyurl.com/389f33p (Accessed 23 November 2008). Return |
| 102 | Burleigh and Wipperman, The Racial State, p.24 Return |
| 103 | Proctor, Racial Hygiene, p.179. Return |
| 104 | Olusoga and Erichsen, The Kaiser's Holocaust – pp.106-107. Return |
| 105 | Turda and Weindling, “Blood and Homeland”, p.283. Return |
| 106 | Henry Friedlander, The Origins of Nazi Genocide: From Euthanasia to the Final Solution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), p 6. Return |
| 107 | Daniel J Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), p.74. Return |
| 108 | Weikart, From Darwin to Hitler, p.119. Return |
| 109 | The term `anti-Semitism was coined by the Hamburg journalist, Wilhelm Marr, in 1879. The meaning ascribed to it was racial rather than religious, although baptism could, in some circumstances, make acceptance in academic and professional circles somewhat easier. Gustav Mahler, for example, famously converted from Judaism to Catholicism in 1897 in order to secure the position as director of the Vienna Court Opera (later renamed the Vienna State Opera). Return |
| 110 | Weikart, From Darwin to Hitler, p.152. Return |
| 111 | Robert Jay Lifton, The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide (London: Papermac, 1990), p.24. Return |
| 112 | Weikart, From Darwin to Hitler, p.152. Return |
| 113 | Proctor, Racial Hygiene, p.15 Return |
| 114 | Weikart, From Darwin to Hitler, p.177. Return |
| 115 | Ibid., p.169. Return |
| 116 | Margit Szöllösi-Janze (ed), Science in the Third Reich (Oxford: Berg, 2001), p.188. Return |
| 117 | Ibid., p.165 Return |
| 118 | Evans, The Coming of the Third Reich, p.35. Return |
| 119 | Mark B Adams (ed), The Wellborn Science: Eugenics in Germany, France, Brazil, and Russia (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), p.16. Return |
| 120 | Weiss, Race Hygiene and National Efficiency, pp.39-41 Return |
| 121 | Weikart, From Darwin to Hitler, p.15. Return |
| 122 | Ibid., p.16. Return |
| 123 | Ibid., p.51. Return |
| 124 | Burleigh and Wipperman, The Racial State, p.31. Return |
| 125 | Weiss, Race Hygiene and National Efficiency, p.44 Return |
| 126 | Weikart, From Darwin to Hitler, p.35. Return |
| 127 | Burleigh and Wipperman, The Racial State, p.93. Return |
| 128 | Evans, The Coming of the Third Reich, p.36. Return |
| 129 | Proctor, Racial Hygiene, pp.18-19. Return |
| 130 | Burleigh and Wipperman, The Racial State, p.119. Return |
| 131 | Weikart, From Darwin to Hitler, p.177. Return |
| 132 | Ibid., p.205. Return |
| 133 | Dan Stone (ed), The Historiography of Genocide (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), p.325. Return |
| 134 | Jürgen Zimmerer, The Birth of the Ostland out of the Spirit of Colonialism: a Postcolonial Perspective on the Nazi policy of Conquest and Extermination, Patterns of Prejudice, Vol.39, No 2, 2005), p.205. Return |
| 135 | Ibid., p.206. Return |
| 136 | Ibid., p.207. Return |
| 137 | L H Gann and Peter Duignan, The Rulers of German Africa, 1884-1914 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1977), p.44. Return |
| 138 | Olusoga and Erichsen, The Kaiser's Holocaust, p. 112. Return |
| 139 | Zimmerer, The Birth of the Ostland out of the Spirit of Colonialism, p.209. Return |
| 140 | Stone, The Historiography of Genocide, p.326. Return |
| 141 | Isabel V Hull, Absolute Destruction – Military Culture and the Practices of War in Imperial Germany (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006), p.135. Return |
| 142 | Stone, The Historiography of Genocide, p.326. Return |
| 143 | Zimmerer, The Birth of the Ostland out of the Spirit of Colonialism, p.209. Return |
| 144 | Weikart, From Darwin to Hitler, p.206 Return |
| 145 | Hull, Absolute Destruction, p.33. Return |
| 146 | Zimmerer, The Birth of the Ostland out of the Spirit of Colonialism, p.209. Return |
| 147 | Weikart, From Darwin to Hitler, p.206 Return |
| 148 | It has been suggested that Leutwein's policy of cultural genocide would ultimately have been as destructive as von Trotha's physical version. (Stone, The Historiography of Genocide, pp.323-343, particularly note 23). Return |
| 149 | Gann and Duignan, The Rulers of German Africa, p.75. Return |
| 150 | Olusoga and Erichsen, The Kaiser's Holocaust, p.360. Return |
| 151 | Stone, The Historiography of Genocide, p.327. Return |
| 152 | Olusoga and Erichsen, The Kaiser's Holocaust, p.226. Return |
| 153 | Benjamin Madley, From Africa to Auschwitz: How German South West Africa Incubated Ideas and Methods Adopted and Developed by the Nazis in Eastern Europe (European History Quarterly, Vol. 35 No.3, 2005), p.431 Return |
| 154 | Olusoga and Erichsen, The Kaiser's Holocaust, p.330. Return |
| 155 | Gann and Duignan, The Rulers of German Africa, p.41. Return |
| 156 | Zimmerer, The Birth of the Ostland out of the Spirit of Colonialism, p.217. Return |
| 157 | Marius Turda, 'A New Religion'? Eugenics and Racial Scientism in Pre- First World War Hungary (Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions: Vol.7, No. 3, September 2006), p.314. Return |
| 158 | Weikart, From Darwin to Hitler, p.37. Since he was Jewish, Lombroso was infrequently quoted by Nazi eugenicists, despite the fact that his views largely coincided with their own. (Proctor, Racial Hygiene, p.202). Return |
| 159 | Weikart, From Darwin to Hitler, p.141. Return |
| 160 | Ibid., p.84. Return |
| 161 | Ibid., p.95 Return |
| 162 | Ibid, pp.110-111. Return |
| 163 | Ibid., p.139 Return |
| 164 | Ibid., p.151. Return |
| 165 | Ibid., p.155. Return |
| 166 | Dan Stone, Breeding Superman: Nietzsche, Race and Eugenics in Edwardian and Interwar Britain (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2002), p.128. Return |
| 167 | Julius Evola, Eros and the Mysteries of Love: The Metaphysics of Sex (Rochester: Inner Traditions International Ltd, 1991), p.9. Return |
| 168 | Joshua D Zimmerman, Jews in Italy Under Fascist and Nazi Rule, 1922-1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p.139. Return |
| 169 | National eugenic societies, frequently involving physicians and psychiatrists, were established in Germany (1905), Great Britain (1907- 08), the USA (1910) and France in 1912. In that year an International Congress for Eugenics was also inaugurated. [Michael Burleigh, Eugenic Utopias and the Genetic Present (Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions: Vol. 1, No. 1, 2000), p.62)]. Other European countries formed eugenic societies in the years that followed [Turda and Weindling,“Blood and Homeland”, p.2-3]. The American Eugenics Society, founded in the United States in 1922, was one of the later arrivals on the scene. Return |
| 170 | See Weikart, From Darwin to Hitler, pp 209-227 for a brief analysis of the origins of Hitler's ethic, if such it can be called. Return |
| 171 | Weikart, From Darwin to Hitler, p.121. Return |
| 172 | Burleigh and Wipperman, The Racial State, p.38. Return |
| 173 | Olusoga and Erichsen, The Kaiser's Holocaust, p.245. Return |
| 174 | Friedlander, The Origins of Nazi Genocide, pp.11-12 Return |
| 175 | Olusoga and Erichsen, The Kaiser's Holocaust, p.250. Return |
| 176 | The institution was founded in 1927, an important step in the scientific recognition of racial hygiene in Weimar Germany. (Proctor, Racial Hygiene, p.39). Return |
| 177 | Zimmerer, The Birth of the Ostland out of the Spirit of Colonialism, p.213. Return |
| 178 | Proctor, Racial Hygiene, p.345, note 74. Return |
| 179 | Weikart, From Darwin to Hitler, p.121 Return |
| 180 | Turda and Weindling, “Blood and Homeland”, p.227. A copy of Lenz's jointly-authored book was presented to Hitler while he was imprisoned in Landsberg Prison in 1924 (Ibid., p.267), and is now housed in the US Library of congress. It bears a dedication to the Führer by the Nazi publisher, Julius Friedrich Lehmann. [Gretchen E.Schafft, From Racism to Genocide: Anthropology in the Third Reich (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004).pp 61-62]. In 1931 Lenz claimed that “many passages in it [the book] are mirrored in Hitler's expressions”. (Weikart, From Darwin to Hitler, p.223). Whether Hitler actually read the book is a matter of conjecture, although Lenz's son, Widukind stated that his father was told that Hitler had read it whilst in Landsberg. (Proctor, Racial Hygiene, p.352, note 51). The question of the literary influences on Hitler's Weltanschauung is the subject of ongoing debate. It is reasonable to assume that he would certainly have read the crackpot racist writings of authors like Jörg Lanz, Artur Dinter, Willibald Hentschel and many others, all freely available in post-First World War Germany and Austria. (Burleigh and Wipperman, The Racial State, p.37). Return |
| 181 | Weikart, From Darwin to Hitler, p.223. Return |
| 182 | Proctor, Racial Hygiene, pp. 50-59. Return |
| 183 | Turda and Weindling, “Blood and Homeland”, p.24. Return |
| 184 | Lifton, The Nazi Doctors, p.23. Return |
| 185 | Weikart, From Darwin to Hitler, p.223. Return |
| 186 | Lifton, The Nazi Doctors p.24. Return |
| 187 | Lisa Pine, Nazi Family Policy 1933-1945 (Oxford: Berg, 1999), p.105. Return |
| 188 | Weikart, From Darwin to Hitler, p.143. Return |
| 189 | Ibid., p.223. Return |
| 190 | Friedlander, The Origins of Nazi Genocide, p.19. Return |
| 191 | Turda, 'A New Religion'?, p.320. Return |
| 192 | Michael Berenbaum, Witness to the Holocaust (New York: HarperCollins, 1997) p.110. Return |
| 193 | Jill Stephenson, Women in Nazi Germany (Harlow: Pearson Education Limited, 2001), p.39. Return |
| 194 | Proctor, Racial Hygiene, p 124. Return |
| 195 | Turda and Weindling, “Blood and Homeland”, p.24. Return |
| 196 | Benno Müller-Hill, Murderous Science: Elimination by Scientific Selection of Jews, Gypsies, and Others in Germany 1933-1945 (Woodbury: Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, 1998), p.9. Return |
| 197 | Proctor, Racial Hygiene, p 350, note 9. Return |
| 198 | Arthur L Caplan, (ed), When Medicine Went Mad: Bioethics and the Holocaust (Totowa: Humana Press, 1992, )p.331, note 2. Return |
| 199 | Enzo Traverso, The Origins of Nazi Violence (New York: The New Press, 2003), p.127. Return |
| 200 | Alan Bullock, Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives (London: Harper Collins, 1991), p.1083. Return |
| 201 | NSDAP = National Socialist German Workers Party (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei), acronym `Nazi'. Return |
| 202 | See in particular Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Hitler's Willing Executioners - Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (London: Little, Brown and Company, 1996), where this thesis is explored at considerable length. For example: “Whatever else Germans thought about Hitler and the Nazi movement, however much they might have detested aspects of Nazism, the vast majority of them subscribed to the underlying model of Jews and in this sense (as the Nazis themselves understood) were `Nazified' in their views of Jews. It is, to risk understatement, no surprise that under Nazi dispensation the vast majority of Germans continued to remain anti-Semitic, that their anti-Semitism continued to be virulent and racially grounded, and that their socially shared `solution' to the `Jewish Problem' continued to be eliminationist.” (pp. 87-88). Such conclusions have been refuted by many distinguished scholars. One of these, Eberhard Jäckel, described Goldhagen's- book as “a failure of dissertation, faultily researched through and through…It is not state of the research, it does not live up even to mediocre standards, it is simply bad.” [Robert R Shandley (ed), Unwilling Germans – The Goldhagen Debate (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), p.87].
This is not to say that there are not others who support Goldhagen's position. These ultra-intentionalists are typified by observations such as: “…indifference was more than acquiescence. It was a willed desire throughout the German population, for the elimination and extermination of persons of the Jewish race.” [James M Glass, “Life Unworthy of Life” – Racial Phobia and Mass Murder in Hitler's Germany, (New York: Basic Books, 1997], p.3. As the eminent historian, Julius H. Schoeps observed: “It is absurd to blame `the Germans' in their totality for Nazi crimes. The accusation of collective guilt, which was levelled immediately after the war…is no more insightful just for being taken up again in 1996.” (Shandley, Unwilling Germans, p.79). Return |
| 203 | James Waller, Becoming Evil. How Ordinary People Commit Genocide and Mass Killing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp 36-49. Return |
| 204 | Richard Lynn, and Satoshi Kanazawa, How to explain high Jewish achievement: The role of intelligence and values (Science Direct, Personality and Individual Differences, Vol. 44, No.4, 2007, p.802). There were, of course, sound historical reasons for this ostensibly disproportionate number of Jews in certain professions, but then as now, the statistics provided useful propaganda for anti-Semites, something that could be used as evidence of an alleged `world-wide Jewish conspiracy' to dominate and control all of society, however preposterous that idea may have been (and is) in reality. Return |
| 205 | David S Wyman (ed), The World Reacts to the Holocaust (Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 1996), pp.476-477. Return |
| 206 | Saul Friedländer, The Years of Persecution: Nazi Germany and the Jews 1933-39 (London: Phoenix, 2007), pp.30-31. Return |
| 207 | Michael Burleigh (ed), Confronting the Past: New Debates on Modern German History (London: Collins & Brown Limited, 1996), p.100. Return |
| 208 | Even in the Weimar years advocates of positive eugenics were gradually losing the argument with the proponents of negative eugenics. (Friedländer, The Years of Persecution, p.39). Return |
| 209 | Proctor, Racial Hygiene, p.22-23. Return |
| 210 | Steven E Aschheim, The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany, 1890-1990 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), p.243. Return |
| 211 | Weikart, From Darwin to Hitler, pp 48-49 Return |
| 212 | Ibid., p.46. Return |
| 213 | Michael Burleigh, The Third Reich: A New History (London: Pan Books, 2001), p.98. Return |
| 214 | Aschheim, The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany, p.237. Return |
| 215 | Ibid., pp.244-245. Return |
| 216 | Ernst Klee, “Euthanasie” im NS-Staat: Die “Vernichtung lebensunwerten Lebens” (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1991), p.17. Return |
| 217 | Fred Bridgham, (ed), The First World War as a Clash of Cultures, (Rochester: Camden House, 2006), pp.215-218. Return |
| 218 | Although such genetic screening has generally fallen out of favour, it is practised in modern-day China. By 1914 it was also being enforced in 50 percent of U.S. states. (Burleigh, Eugenic Utopias and the Genetic Present, p.69.) Return |
| 219 | Horst Biesold, Crying Hands: Eugenics and Deaf People in Nazi Germany (Washington: Gallaudet University Press, 1999), pp.16-17. Return |
| 220 | Burleigh, Eugenic Utopias and the Genetic Present, p.69. Return |
| Chapter 3. “Euthanasia” | |
| 221 | http://tinyurl.com/2wgqj6d (Accessed 17 October 2009). Return |
| 222 | Hugh Gregory Gallagher, By Trust Betrayed: Patients, Physicians, and the License to Kill in the Third Reich (St. Petersburg: Vandamere Press, 1995). Return |
| 223 | http://tinyurl.com/397y34n (Accessed 20 January 2007) For a broader summary of medical research and sources regarding end-of-life issues, see http://tinyurl.com/32do55u (Accessed 20 January 2007), amongst many others. Return |
| 224 | Rachel Iredale, Eugenics and its Relevance to Contemporary Health Care, (Nursing Ethics, 7 (3), 2000), p.206. Return |
| 225 | an Dowbiggin, A Concise History of Euthanasia: Life, Death, God, and Medicine (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007), p.93 Return |
| 226 | Dan Stone, Breeding Superman: Nietzsche, Race and Eugenics in Edwardian and Interwar Britain, (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2002), p.71. Return |
| 227 | Another to broach the subject of involuntary euthanasia for those suffering from incurable diseases was the American author W. Duncan McKim, who in his 1899 book Heredity and Human Progress, wrote that its application would additionally perform the eugenic function of “artificial selection”, thereby “improving the human race.” [Enzo Traverso, The Origins of Nazi Violence (New York: The New Press, 2003), p.122.] Return |
| 228 | Philip Zimbardo, The Lucifer Effect: How Good People Turn Evil (London: Rider Books, 2007), pp 284-285. Return |
| 229 | Götz Aly and Susanne Heim, Architects of Annihilation: Auschwitz and the Logic of Destruction (London: Phoenix, 2003), p.255. There is evidence that similar plans for massive resettlements in western Europe were also contemplated [Jürgen Zimmerer, The Birth of the Ostland out of the Spirit of Colonialism: a Postcolonial Perspective on the Nazi policy of Conquest and Extermination, Patterns of Prejudice, Vol.39, No 2, 2005, p.200, note 9]. Return |
| 230 | http://tinyurl.com/39cbhzk Return |
| 231 | Ingo Haar and Michael Fahlbusch, German Scholars and Ethnic Cleansing, 1919-1945, (New York: Berghahn Books, 2005), p.15. Return |
| 232 | Robert Jay Lifton, The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide (London: Papermac, 1990), p.46. Return |
| 233 | In Prussia alone an estimated 45,000 mental patients died, while in Bavaria the mortality rate in asylums reached 70 percent. [Dick de Mildt, In the Name of the People: Perpetrators of Genocide in the Reflection of Their Post-War Prosecution in West Germany. The `Euthanasia' and `Aktion Reinhard' Trial Cases (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1996), p.335, note 19]. In some institutions in Baden it was not until 1925 that the mortality rate returned to its pre-war level. [Bronwyn Rebekah McFarland-Icke, Nurses in Nazi Germany (Chichester: Princeton University Press), p.23]. Return |
| 234 | Michael Burleigh, Death and Deliverance : `Euthanasia' in Germany c. 1900-1945 (London: Pan Books, 2002), pp 11-12. Bonhoeffer also realised where the risk lay in rationalising such thinking, for he went on to say: But in emphasising the right of the healthy to stay alive, which is an inevitable result of periods of necessity, there is also a danger of going too far: a danger that the self-sacrificing subordination of the strong to the needs of the helpless and ill, which lies at the heart of any true concern for the sick, will give ground to the demand of the healthy to live. (Ibid.) Karl Bonhoeffer is today regarded by many with something less than approbation. He was the father of the founder of the Confessing Church, Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Return |
| 235 | McFarland-Icke, Nurses in Nazi Germany, p.35. Return |
| 236 | Götz Aly, Peter Chroust, Christian Pross, Cleansing the Fatherland: Nazi Medicine and Racial Hygiene (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 1994) , p.157. Return |
| 237 | McFarland-Icke, Nurses in Nazi Germany, pp.36-38. Return |
| 238 | Ibid., p.64. Return |
| 239 | Mark P Mostert, Useless Eaters: Disability as Genocidal Marker in Nazi Germany (Journal of Special Education. Vol. 36, No. 3, 2002), p.156 Return |
| 240 | McFarland-Icke, Nurses in Nazi Germany, p.60. Return |
| 241 | Ibid., p.62. Return |
| 242 | Roderick Stackelberg, The Routledge Companion to Nazi Germany (London: Routledge, 2007), p.73. Return |
| 243 | Henry Friedlander, The Origins of Nazi Genocide: From Euthanasia to the Final Solution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press), p.15. Return |
| 244 | Mostert, Useless Eaters, p.157. Return |
| 245 | Burleigh, Death and Deliverance, p 17. Binding also proposed euthanasia as a means of accelerating the death of the terminally ill or mortally wounded, as well as its application to the mentally healthy who, unconscious or in a coma, would have approved of their own euthanasia had they been able. Of necessity, the latter employment would have required a considerable degree of mind reading on the part of those administering euthanasia. Return |
| 246 | Ibid., p.16. Hoche was opposed to the Nazi “euthanasia” programme, although his own writings had been a major inspiration for the policy. Return |
| 247 | de Mildt, In the Name of the People, p.53. Return |
| 248 | McFarland-Icke, Nurses in Nazi Germany, p.65. Return |
| 249 | Burleigh, Death and Deliverance, p. 15. Return |
| 250 | Lamb, David, Down the Slippery Slope: Arguing in applied ethics (London: Routledge, 2003), p.2. Return |
| 251 | Burleigh, Death and Deliverance, p.21. Return |
| 252 | McFarland-Icke, Nurses in Nazi Germany, p.66. Return |
| 253 | Burleigh, Death and Deliverance, p.41. Return |
| 254 | The Ministry of the Interior defined “asocials” in the following terms: Persons who through minor, but repeated, infractions of the law demonstrate that they will not adapt themselves to the natural discipline of the National Socialist state, e.g, beggars; tramps (Gypsies); alcoholics; whores with contagious diseases, particularly sexually transmitted diseases, who evade the measure taken by the health authorities. A further category, the “work shy” were persons against whom it can be proven that on two occasions they have, without reasonable grounds, turned down jobs offered to them, or who, having taken a job, have given it up after a short while without a valid reason. [Saul Friedländer, The Years of Persecution: Nazi Germany and the Jews 1933-39 (London: Phoenix, 2007), pp.203-204.] Return |
| 255 | Richard J Evans, The Coming of the Third Reich (London: Allen Lane, 2003), pp. 144-145. Return |
| 256 | Leo Alexander, Medical Science Under Dictatorship (The New England Journal of Medicine 241, 1949), p.39. Return |
| 257 | Michael Burleigh, Ethics and extermination: Reflections on Nazi genocide, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp 114-117. Return |
| 258 | Evans, The Coming of the Third Reich, p. 2 Return |
| 259 | There is an argument that the Versailles treaty can be viewed as being either too severe on Germany, or alternatively as not being severe enough – too harsh for Germany not to seek its revocation, yet not harsh enough to prevent its eventual emendation. [Donald Bloxham, The Final Solution: A Genocide (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), p.134]. Return |
| 260 | Evans, The Coming of the Third Reich, p. 62. Return |
| 261 | Ibid., p.236. Return |
| 262 | James Waller, Becoming Evil. How Ordinary People Commit Genocide and Mass Killing ((Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p.256. Return |
| 263 | Harald Welzer, Mass murder and moral code: some thoughts on an easily misunderstood subject (History of the Human Sciences, Vol.17 Nos 2/3, 2004, p.17.) Return |
| 264 | Ibid., pp.22-23. Return |
| 265 | Susan Benedict, and Jochen Kuhla, Nurses' Participation in the Euthanasia Programs of Nazi Germany (Western Journal of Nursing Research, Vol. 21(2), 1999),p.258. Return |
| 266 | Welzer, Mass murder and moral code, p.29. Return |
| 267 | Jonathan Peter Spiro, Defending the Master Race: Conservation, Eugenics, and the Legacy of Madison Grant, (Burlington: University of Vermont Press, 2008), pp.103-106 Return |
| 268 | Paul Weindling, Health, Race, and German Politics between National Unification and Nazism, 1870-1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p.108. Return |
| 269 | Richard S Levy (ed), Antisemitism: A Historical Encyclopedia of Prejudice and Persecution (Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO Ltd, 2005), pp. 113-115. Return |
| 270 | Stackelberg, The Routledge Companion to Nazi Germany, p.85. Return |
| 271 | Benno Müller-Hill, Murderous Science: Elimination by Scientific Selection of Jews, Gypsies, and Others in Germany 1933-1945 (Woodbury: Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, 1998), p. 23. Return |
| 272 | Victor Klemperer, The Language of the Third Reich: LTI – Lingua Tertii Imperii - A Philologist's Notebook (London, Continuum, 2006), p.163. Return |
| 273 | Robert N Proctor, Racial Hygiene: Medicine Under the Nazis (Cambridge Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1989), pp. 37-38. Return |
| 274 | Ibid., p. 149. Return |
| 275 | http://tinyurl.com/383ccnj (Accessed 1 September 2008). This website is an invaluable resource, consisting as it does of many examples of Nazi propaganda. Return |
| Chapter 4. A Marching Column | |
| 276 | Leo Alexander, Medical Science Under Dictatorship (The New England Journal of Medicine 241, 1949), p.44. Return |
| 277 | Robert N Proctor, Racial Hygiene: Medicine Under the Nazis (Cambridge Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1989), p.55. Return |
| 278 | Henry Friedlander, The Origins of Nazi Genocide: From Euthanasia to the Final Solution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), p. 12. Return |
| 279 | Proctor, Racial Hygiene, p.64 Return |
| 280 | Saul Friedländer, The Years of Persecution: Nazi Germany and the Jews 1933-39 (London: Phoenix, 2007), p.226. Return |
| 281 | Michael Burleigh, Death and Deliverance : `Euthanasia' in Germany c. 1900-1945 (London: Pan Books, 2002), p.45. Return |
| 282 | Horst Biesold, Crying Hands: Eugenics and Deaf People in Nazi Germany (Washington: Gallaudet University Press, 1999), p. 15. Return |
| 283 | Wolfgang Uwe Eckart (ed), Man, Medicine, and the State: The Human Body as an Object of Government Sponsored Medical Research in the 20th Century (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2006), P.76. Return |
| 284 | http://tinyurl.com/2uywdc2 (Accessed 10 January 2007). Return |
| 285 | Robert Jay Lifton, The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide (London: Papermac, 1990), p.28. Return |
| 286 | Michael Burleigh, The Third Reich: A New History (London: Pan Books, 2001), p.356. In terms of physique, colouring and facial features, Heinrich Himmler was about as far removed from the Nordic ideal (a long skull, narrow forehead, blonde hair, blue eyes) as it was possible to be. [Peter Padfield, Himmler: Reichsführer-SS (London: Papermac, 1990), pp. 104-105]. Return |
| 287 | http://tinyurl.com/36gen3y (Accessed 25 January 2008). Bumke ignored his own prophetic remarks. Within a few years he had become an enthusiastic advocate of Nazi eugenic legislation. (Burleigh, Death and Deliverance, p.44.) Return |
| 288 | Michael H Kater, Doctors Under Hitler (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), p. 135. Return |
| 289 | http://tinyurl.com/35lo4re (Accessed 25 January 2008). Return |
| 290 | Proctor, Racial Hygiene, p 114. Return |
| 291 | Burleigh, The Third Reich, p. 382. Return |
| 292 | `The Inner Mission' was the principal Protestant health and welfare organisation. [Michael Burleigh, Ethics and extermination: Reflections on Nazi genocide, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p.130]. Return |
| 293 | Ibid. Return |
| 294 | Dick de Mildt, In the Name of the People: Perpetrators of Genocide in the Reflection of Their Post-War Prosecution in West Germany. The `Euthanasia' and `Aktion Reinhard' Trial Cases (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1996), p.302. Emphasis in original. Return |
| 295 | Burleigh, Ethics and extermination, pp 130-141. Return |
| 296 | Burleigh, Death and Deliverance, p.182. The films were Sünden der Väter (Sins of the Fathers, 1935); Abseits vom Wege (Off the Path,1935); Erbkrank (Hereditarily Ill, 1936); Alles Leben ist Kampf (All Life is a Struggle, 1937); Was du ererbt (What You Have Inherited, date unknown). Far from being concerned by these manifestations of National Socialist propaganda, American eugenicists organised screenings of an English-language version of Erbkrank at the Carnegie Institute, and the film was then distributed to churches and high schools. [Michael Burleigh, Eugenic Utopias and the Genetic Present (Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions: Vol. 1, No. 1, 2000), p.63.] Return |
| 297 | Lifton, The Nazi Doctors, p.48; Mark P Mostert, Useless Eaters: Disability as Genocidal Marker in Nazi Germany (Journal of Special Education. Vol. 36, No. 3, 2002), p.160. Return |
| 298 | Schweninger, a school friend of Viktor Brack, was employed by Gekrat (see below) as a transport leader, and had been involved in the deportation of thousands of patients from Southern Germany to killing centres. [Götz Aly, Peter Chroust, Christian Pross, Cleansing the Fatherland: Nazi Medicine and Racial Hygiene (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 1994), p.27]. Return |
| 299 | Proctor, Racial Hygiene, p.207. Return |
| 300 | Mostert Useless Eaters, p.160. Return |
| 301 | Lifton, The Nazi Doctors, p.48 Return |
| 302 | SD= Sicherheitsdienst, Security Service, the intelligence arm of the SS. Return |
| 303 | Michael Burleigh, and Wolfgang Wipperman, The Racial State: Germany 1933-1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p.157. Return |
| 304 | Burleigh, Death and Deliverance, p. 189 ff. Return |
| 305 | Burleigh and Wipperman, The Racial State, p.159. Return |
| 306 | Ibid., p.167 Return |
| 307 | Ulf Schmidt, Karl Brandt: The Nazi Doctor – Medicine and Power in the Third Reich (London: Hambledon Continuum, 2007), pp.189-190. This kind of `either-or 'reasoning was typical of Hitler, who only saw matters in terms of absolutes. It is not surprising to see it repeated in the pronouncements of his minions. Return |
| 308 | Michael Wildt, An Uncompromising Generation – The Nazi Leadership of the Reich Security Main Office (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2009), p.9. Return |
| 309 | Burleigh, Death and Deliverance, p.51. Bernotat's sole interest was in making economies. When Dr Friedrich Mennecke, himself responsible for countless “euthanasia” deaths, protested about overcrowding in mental hospitals, Bernotat responded, “strike them all dead and then you'll have space.” (Ibid, p.53.) Return |
| 310 | Burleigh, Ethics and extermination, pp.117-118. Return |
| 311 | Michael Burleigh (ed), Confronting the Past: New Debates on Modern German History (London: Collins & Brown Limited, 1996), p.101. Return |
| 312 | Burleigh, Death and Deliverance, p. 47 ff. Return |
| 313 | Padfield, Himmler, p.261. Return |
| 314 | Robert E Conot, Justice at Nuremberg (New York: Harper & Row, 1983), p.204. Return |
| 315 | The legislation of 7 April 1933 was of fundamental importance, since it represented the first attempt by the Nazis to legally define a Jew. A “non-Aryan” was “anyone descended from non-Aryan, particularly Jewish, parents or grandparents. It suffices if one parent or grandparent is non-Aryan.” (Friedländer, The Years of Persecution, p.27). The requirement to produce evidence of `Aryan' ancestry had a long history in Germany. By the end of the nineteenth century, some organizations had introduced bylaws excluding Jews on the basis of “race”. The use of this so-called “Aryan paragraph” expanded exponentially after the First World Way. For example, in 1920 the nationalist student fraternities (Burschenschaften) adopted a rule that required prospective members to provide evidence of “Aryan” descent as far back as their grandparent's generation, and prohibited marriage to Jewish or “coloured” women. [Richard S Levy (ed), Antisemitism: A Historical Encyclopedia of Prejudice and Persecution (Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO Ltd, 2005), pp.39-40]. In this respect , as in so much else, the Nazis were unoriginal, simply more radical. Return |
| 316 | Bronwyn Rebekah McFarland-Icke, Nurses in Nazi Germany (Chichester: Princeton University Press, 1999), p.96. Return |
| 317 | Burleigh, Ethics and extermination, p.163. Return |
| 318 | Burleigh and Wipperman, The Racial State, pp.46-48. Return |
| 319 | Clarence Lusane, Hitler's Black Victims: The Historical Experiences of Afro-Germans, European Blacks, Africans, and African Americans in the Nazi Era (London: Routledge, 2003) p.134. Return |
| 320 | The law was further amended in 1935. According to Hans Heinrich Lammers, even at this early stage Hitler was contemplating the killing of mental patients (Burleigh, Death and Deliverance, p.99). Return |
| 321 | Alleged hereditary diseases were defined as including congenital mental deficiency, schizophrenia, manic-depressive insanity, hereditary epilepsy, Huntington's Chorea, hereditary blindness, hereditary deafness, and severe hereditary physical malformation. (Ibid., p.61) Return |
| 322 | In 1935 there were 205 lower courts and 31 higher courts. Although a much higher number of courts had been anticipated, it is unlikely that these figures were exceeded. (Proctor, Racial Hygiene, p 361, note 33). Return |
| 323 | Proctor, Racial Hygiene, pp.102-103. In June 1938 membership of the Heredity Health Court was expanded to include two laypersons “of German or related blood” who “have an understanding of family life.” (Ibid, p.116). Return |
| 324 | Burleigh and Wipperman, The Racial State, p.48. The new law even provided for the use of force in cases where this was considered necessary (Ibid, p.137). Return |
| 325 | Proctor, Racial Hygiene, p 102. Return |
| 326 | Ibid., pp 106-107. Return |
| 327 | Ibid., pp 110-112. Hitler reputedly believed that Jews could be identified on the basis of whether the earlobes were or were not attached to the neck. (Ibid., p.150). Return |
| 328 | McFarland-Icke, Nurses in Nazi Germany, p.133. Return |
| 329 | Ibid., p.133-151. Return |
| 330 | Ibid., p.131. Return |
| 331 | de Mildt, In the Name of the People, p.50. Return |
| 332 | Burleigh, Ethics and extermination, p.119. Return |
| 333 | George Lachmann Mosse, Nazi Culture: Intellectual, Cultural and Social Life in the Third Reich (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003), pp. 89-90. Return |
| 334 | David F Crew, (ed), Nazism and German Society, 1933-1945 (London: Routledge, 1994),p.120. Return |
| 335 | Mary D Lagerway, Nursing Ethics at Hadamar (Qualitative Health Research, Vol.9, No.6, 1999), p.764. Return |
| 336 | Ibid., p.765. Return |
| 337 | Mosse, Nazi Culture, p. 261. Return |
| 338 | Lagerwey, Nursing Ethics at Hadamar, p.767. Return |
| 339 | Proctor, Racial Hygiene, p.112. Return |
| 340 | Burleigh and Wipperman, The Racial State, pp.128-130. Return |
| 341 | http://tinyurl.com/33qp234 (Accessed 24 May 2008). Return |
| 342 | Burleigh, Eugenic Utopias, p.63. Return |
| 343 | Proctor, Racial Hygiene, p.360, note 9. Return |
| 344 | Ibid., p.295. Return |
| 345 | http://tinyurl.com/33xq6cw (Accessed 31 August 2008). Return |
| 346 | James W Trent, “Who shall say who is a useful person?” Abraham Myerson's opposition to the eugenic movement (History of Psychiatry, No. 12, 2001), p.33. Return |
| 347 | Proctor, Racial Hygiene, p.400, note 11. Return |
| 348 | http://tinyurl.com/4kx84 (Accessed 31 August 2008). Return |
| 349 | Stefan Kühl, The Nazi Connection: Eugenics, American Racism, and German National Socialism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002)., p.34. Return |
| 350 | Dennis Sewell, The Political Gene – How Darwin's Ideas Changed Politics (London: Picador, 2009), p.145. Return |
| 351 | Kühl, The Nazi Connection, p.35. Return |
| 352 | Proctor, Racial Hygiene, pp 97 - 101. Return |
| 353 | Kühl, The Nazi Connection, pp. 61-63. Return |
| 354 | Matthew Thomson, The Problem of Mental Deficiency: Eugenics, Democracy, and Social Policy in Britain, c.1870-1959 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 60-61. Return |
| 355 | Gunnar Broberg and Nils Roll-Hansen, Eugenics and the Welfare State: Sterilization Policy in Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and Finland (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2005), p.105 Return |
| 356 | Burleigh, Eugenic Utopias, pp 66-67. Return |
| 357 | Broberg and Roll-Hansen, Eugenics and the Welfare State, p.107. Return |
| 358 | http://tinyurl.com/2us9wq3 (Accessed 18 July 2010). The minister went on to say that the government was “anxious to show that similar policies were pursued in the US, Germany, Austria and Finland, among others.” – a classic example of tu quoque. Return |
| 359 | David S Wyman (ed), The World Reacts to the Holocaust (Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 1996), p.230. Return |
| 360 | Trent, “Who shall say who is a useful person?”, p.37. Return |
| 361 | Ibid., p.40. Return |
| 362 | Ibid., p.45. Return |
| 363 | Ibid., p.41. Return |
| 364 | Ibid., p.43. Return |
| 365 | Robert N Proctor, The Nazi War on Cancer (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), p.91. Return |
| 366 | The number was equally divided between males and females. The same source suggests a total of 320,000 sterilisations between 1934 and the outbreak of war.(Burleigh, Racial State, p.253). Return |
| 367 | Friedlander, The Origins of Nazi Genocide, p. 25 ff. The total of 375,000 sterilised represented about 0.5 percent of the Reich's population – an extraordinarily high percentage. A total of 400,000 sterilisations is quoted in other sources, (for example Burleigh, Eugenic Utopias, p.70.) Even this was nowhere near the figure Fritz Lenz had in mind of 10-15 percent of the population. [George J Annas and Michael A Grodin, The Nazi Doctors and the Nuremberg Code: Human Rights in Human Experimentation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), p.21]. Return |
| 368 | Burleigh and Wipperman, The Racial State, p.253. Return |
| 369 | Proctor, The Nazi War on Cancer, pp.90-91. Return |
| 370 | Ina R Friedman, The Other Victims: First-Person Stories of Non-Jews Persecuted by the Nazis (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1995) , pp.67-75. Return |
| 371 | Burleigh and Wipperman, The Racial State, pp.252-258. Return |
| 372 | Panikos Panayi (ed), Weimar and Nazi Germany: continuities and discontinuities (White Plains: Longman, 2000), p.206. Return |
| 373 | http://tinyurl.com/3xfen38 (Accessed 19 August 2008). Return |
| 374 | de Mildt, In the Name of the People, p. 52 Return |
| 375 | Friedlander, The Origins of Nazi Genocide, pp. 23-24 Return |
| 376 | Burleigh and Wipperman, The Racial State, p.122. Return |
| 377 | Friedlander, The Origins of Nazi Genocide, p.30. Return |
| 378 | Proctor, Racial Hygiene, pp.121-123. Return |
| 379 | The `Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honour' of 15 September 1935 began: “Imbued with the realisation that the purity of German blood is a prerequisite for the continued existence of the German people…” This was Nazi racist ideology in a nutshell. The law went on to ban marriage or sexual relations between Jews and “Aryans”, prohibit the employment in Jewish households of “Aryan” females under 45 years of age, and forbid Jews to fly the Reich flag. [Reinhard Rürup (ed), Topography of Terror: Gestapo, SS and Reichssicherheitshauptamt on the “Prinz-Albrecht-Terrain.” A Documentation (Berlin: Verlag Willmuth Arenhövel, 2000), pp. 114-116.] “ In Germany,” declared a 1936 publication, “ the Jewish question is simply the race question.” The first supplementary decree to the Law, issued on 14 November, broadened the prohibition on sexual relations and marriage to include not only those between Germans and Jews, but also those between Germans and persons of “alien blood”. Shortly thereafter “alien blood” was defined as that flowing through the veins of “Gypsies, Negroes, and their bastards”. [Friedländer, The Years of Persecution, pp.151-153]. Return |
| 380 | Friedlander, The Origins of Nazi Genocide, p. 31. Return |
| 381 | Burleigh and Wipperman, The Racial State, p.49. Return |
| 382 | Proctor, Racial Hygiene, p.141. Return |
| 383 | Enzo Traverso, The Origins of Nazi Violence (New York: The New Press, 2003), pp.52-54. Return |
| 384 | Ibid., p.137. Return |
| 385 | Padfield, Himmler, p.103. Return |
| 386 | Ibid., p.104. Return |
| 387 | Pine, Lisa, Nazi Family Policy 1933-1945 (Oxford: Berg, 1999), p.88. Return |
| 388 | Ibid., p.91. Return |
| 389 | Ibid., p.101. Return |
| 390 | Burleigh and Wipperman, The Racial State, p.250. Return |
| 391 | de Mildt, In the Name of the People, p.224. Return |
| 392 | David Pilgrim, The Eugenic Legacy in Psychology and Psychiatry (International Journal of Social Psychiatry, Vol.54, No.3, 2008), p.276. Return |
| 393 | Proctor, Racial Hygiene, p.117. Return |
| 394 | Aart Vos, “Wegens bijzondere omstandigheden…” – s'Hertogenbosch in bezettingstijd 1940-1945 (Alphen aan de Maas: Uitgeverij Veerhuis, 2008), p.207. My thanks to the late Martin van Liempt for providing this information. Return |
| 395 | Proctor, Racial Hygiene, p.183. Return |
| 396 | Ibid., p.185. Return |
| 397 | Gabriel M Ronen, Brandon Meaney, Bernard Dan, Fritz Zimprich, Walter Stögmann, Wolfgang Neugebauer, From Eugenic Euthanasia to Habilitation of ``Disabled'' Children: Andreas Rett's Contribution (Journal of Child Neurology, Vol.24, No.1, 2009), p. 118. Return |
| 398 | Eugen Kogon, Hermann Langbein, Adalbert Rückerl (eds.), Nazi Mass Murder: A Documentary History of the Use of Poison Gas (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), p.14. Hitler commented that in time of war it would be easier to “free the people from the burden of the mentally ill.” He is also reported as stating that “the food supply does not allow for the incurably ill to be dragged through the war.” (McFarland-Icke, Nurses in Nazi Germany, p.211). Return |
| 399 | http://tinyurl.com/344joa2 (Accessed 1 September 2008). Return |
| 400 | de Mildt, In the Name of the People, p.54. Return |
| 401 | McFarland-Icke, Nurses in Nazi Germany, p.131. Return |
| 402 | Mostert Useless Eaters, p.160. Return |
| 403 | Burleigh, Death and Deliverance, pp. 169-170; Burleigh, Ethics and extermination, pp.138-139; Gitta Sereny, Into That Darkness - From Mercy Killing to Mass Murder (London: Pimlico, 1995, pp.64-73 Return |
| 404 | Burleigh, Death and Deliverance, p. 170-171; Burleigh, Ethics and extermination, pp.138-139. Return |
| 405 | Friedlander, The Origins of Nazi Genocide, pp. 39-40. Hitler maintained four separate chancelleries. In addition to the KdF there was the Nazi Party Chancellery, based in Munich and headed by Martin Bormann, the Presidential Chancellery under Otto Meissner, and the Reich Chancellery headed by Hans Heinrich Lammers. (Ibid, p.40). Return |
| 406 | Browning, Christopher R, The Origins of the Final Solution: The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy, September 1939 – March 1942 (London: William Heinemann, 2004) p.185. The child's father had first approached Werner Catel to perform a Gnadentod, but Catel had refused on legal grounds – or so he claimed. [Michael S Bryant, Confronting the “Good Death”: Nazi Euthanasia on Trial 1945-1953 (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2005). p.28]. Return |
| 407 | Schmidt, Karl Brandt, p.118. Return |
| 408 | http://tinyurl.com/38gz537 (Accessed 17 September 2009.) Return |
| 409 | Burleigh, Death and Deliverance, pp. 97-99; Friedlander, The Origins of Nazi Genocide, pp. 39-40. It has been suggested that Brandt personally carried out the killing of the `Knauer' child, which was indeed possible [Friedländer, The Years of Persecution, p. 331]. He certainly had no compunction about administering, together with Conti, the first lethal injections of adult “euthanasia” [Schmidt, Karl Brandt, p.122]. Return |
| 410 | Schmidt, Karl Brandt, pp.;117-122. Return |
| 411 | Aly, Chroust, Pross, Cleansing the Fatherland, p.35. Return |
| 412 | Schmidt, Karl Brandt, p.120. Return |
| 413 | Members of the committee included Karl Brandt, Helmut Unger, Carl Schneider, Ernst Wentzler, Hans Heinze, and Werner Catel. (Proctor, Racial Hygiene, p.186). Return |
| 414 | Friedlander, The Origins of Nazi Genocide, p.44. The Committee's mailing address was a post office box. Return |
| 415 | Florian P Thomas, Alana Beres, Michael I Sheveli, “A Cold Wind Coming”: Heinrich Gross and Child Euthanasia in Vienna (Journal of Child Neurology, Vol.21, 2006), p.343. Return |
| 416 | Proctor, Racial Hygiene, p.188. Return |
| 417 | Hefelmann's doctorate was in agronomy, not medicine. (Burleigh, Death and Deliverance, p.269). Von Hegener was a former bank clerk (de Mildt, In the Name of the People, p.67). Return |
| 418 | Burleigh, Death and Deliverance, pp 103-104; Aly, Chroust, Pross, Cleansing the Fatherland, p.190. Return |
| 419 | Friedlander, The Origins of Nazi Genocide, pp 39-61. Return |
| 420 | Meltzer's questionnaire, distributed to the male parents or guardians of 200 children residing in the Katharinenhof institution, posed four questions; the first three asked whether the recipient would give their consent to a “painless shortening of your child's life” in certain hypothetical circumstances. The fourth question asked for the recipients' wife's response to the first three questions. Of the 162 replies received, 73 percent contained at least one “yes” response. (Aly, Chroust, Pross, Cleansing the Fatherland, pp.29-30). Return |
| 421 | Götz Aly and Susanne Heim, Architects of Annihilation: Auschwitz and the Logic of Destruction (London: Phoenix, 2003), p.171. Meltzer concluded that people were glad to release both themselves and the child from the burden whilst not wishing to have their consciences troubled. [Ibid., p.330 note 29]. If his research contributed to the implementation of children's “euthanasia” (to which he was opposed), Meltzer lived to regret his efforts. The Katharinenhof institution was taken under state supervision, many children were killed with or without their parents' or guardians' consent, and Meltzer was forcibly retired. [Aly, Chroust, Pross, Cleansing the Fatherland, pp.30-31 footnote]. Return |
| 422 | Proctor, Racial Hygiene, p.194. Return |
| 423 | Aly and Heim, Architects of Annihilation, p.172-173. Return |
| 424 | Aly, Chroust, Pross, Cleansing the Fatherland, p. 92. Return |
| 425 | Friedländer, The Years of Persecution, pp.59-60. Return |
| 426 | Brandt, Bouhler, Conti, and Linden were also present at this meeting. (Browning, The Origins of the Final Solution, p.186.) Return |
| 427 | Padfield, Himmler, p.262. Return |
| 428 | Robert Gellately, Backing Hitler: Consent and Coercion in Nazi Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), P.101. Return |
| 429 | Peter Longerich, The Unwritten Order: Hitler's Role in the Final Solution (Stroud: Tempus Publishing Limited, 2003), p.80. Return |
| 430 | Burleigh, Death and Deliverance, pp.114-115. Return |
| 431 | Lucy S Dawidowicz, The War Against the Jews 1933-1945 (New York: Bantam Books, 1979), p.177. Return |
| 432 | Proctor, Racial Hygiene, p.188. Return |
| 433 | It has been suggested that the KdF was chosen by Hitler to administer the “euthanasia” programme simply because of the office's low profile, something that made it the perfect vehicle for such an important top secret project. [Donald Bloxham, The Final Solution: A Genocide (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), p.171]. Return |
| 434 | Schmidt, Karl Brandt, pp.;128-130. Return |
| 435 | Ibid., p.371. Return |
| 436 | Burleigh, Death and Deliverance, p. 115. Return |
| 437 | Gerald Reitlinger, The SS, Alibi of a Nation: 1922-1945 (New York: Viking Press, 1957), pp.272-273. Return |
| 438 | Aly and Heim, Architects of Annihilation, pp. 169 – 170. On 6 September 1940, Schlaich wrote to the Reich Minister of Justice, protesting against the “euthanasia” programme (Kogon, Langbein, Rückerl (eds.), Nazi Mass Murder, p.33.) Return |
| 439 | “Very often, and in many places, it has been the case that individuals, already in previous years, have waited for commands and orders. Unfortunately, that will probably also be so in future. Rather, however, it is the duty of every single person to attempt, in the spirit of the Führer, to work towards him. Anyone making mistakes will come to notice it soon enough. But the one who works correctly towards the Führer along his lines and towards his aim will in future as previously have the finest reward of one day suddenly attaining the legal confirmation of his work.” Werner Willikens, quoted in Ian Kershaw, Hitler 1889-36: Hubris (London: Allen Lane, The Penguin Press, 1998), p.529.] Return |
| 440 | Lifton, The Nazi Doctors, p. 63. It is possible that the document was created as late as winter 1939. (Schmidt, Karl Brandt, p.131). The authorization is frequently (and mistakenly) referred to as a decree, which implies a spurious legality. Return |
| 441 | Raul Hilberg, Perpetrators Victims Bystanders: The Jewish Catastrophe 1933-1945 (New York: Harper Collins, 1993), pp.15-16. Return |
| 442 | Schmidt, Karl Brandt, pp.131-132. Conti was also almost certainly involved in drafting the authorization, but was prepared to be the eminence grise in this endeavour. (Ibid). Others see the hand of de Crinis in the wording. [Lifton, The Nazi Doctors, p.63 (footnote)]. Return |
| 443 | Bryant, Confronting the “Good Death”, p 78 – 85. No West German court ever accepted the authorization as a valid law (Ibid, p.38). Return |
| 444 | de Mildt, In the Name of the People, note 6. Return |
| 445 | de Mildt, In the Name of the People, p.338, note 73; Schmidt, Karl Brandt, pp.145-146; Friedlander, Nazi Genocide,p.120-121. Return |
| 446 | Schmidt, Karl Brandt, pp.132-133. Return |
| 447 | The 1940 `Law on Euthanasia for the Incurably Ill' was drafted, but never implemented. It included provision for both voluntary and involuntary euthanasia. (Aly, Chroust, Pross, Cleansing the Fatherland, p. 26). The draft read in part:
Anyone suffering from an incurable illness that leads to strong debilitation of either oneself or others can, upon explicit request of the patient and with permission of a specially appointed physician, receive dying help from a physician. A patient who, as a consequence of incurable mental illness requiring lifelong care, can, through medical intervention and without his knowledge, have his life terminated. (Proctor, Racial Hygiene, p.193). The planned euthanasia law contained provision for the creation of a central state office, which would take control of the various existing institutions. As part of the proposed eventual legislation, the new office of Reich Commissioner for Mental Hospitals was created by a statute of 23 October 1941; its first and only occupant was Herbert Linden. (Aly, Chroust, Pross, Cleansing the Fatherland, pp. 165-166). Return |
| 448 | Friedlander, Nazi Genocide, p.154; Burleigh, Death and Deliverance, p. 166. It is probable that there were also other considerations. Hitler may have believed such a law would be unacceptable to the German people. He may also have felt any such law might restrict his options by defining potential victims too specifically. (Gellately, Backing Hitler, p.102). Return |
| 449 | McFarland-Icke, Nurses in Nazi Germany, p.9. Return |
| 450 | Burleigh, Death and Deliverance, p. 115. Return |
| 451 | http://tinyurl.com/2vk36w4 (Accessed 25 February 2008.) Return |
| 452 | Burleigh, The Racial State, p.250. Return |
| 453 | Aly, Chroust, Pross, Cleansing the Fatherland, p. 55. Return |
| 454 | This rather strange title described legislation amending the 1933 `Law for the Prevention of Genetically Diseased Offspring' (Burleigh, The Racial State, p.140). Return |
| 455 | Ibid., p.49. Return |
| 456 | Schmidt, Karl Brandt, pp.143-145. Return |
| 457 | de Mildt, In the Name of the People, pp.80-81. Return |
| 458 | Ibid., p.26. Return |
| 459 | Dick van der Vat, The Good Nazi: The Life and Lies of Albert Speer (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1997), p.108. Return |
| 460 | Ibid., pp.129-130, passim. Sauckel, who joined the SA in 1922 and the Nazi party the following year, was appointed Commissioner-General for the Deployment of Labour in March 1942. [Ernst Klee, Das Personenlexikon zum Dritten Reich - Wer war was vor und nach 1945 (Frankfurt am Main: S.Fischer, 2005), p.520]. Return |
| 461 | Paul Julian Weindling, Nazi Medicine and the Nuremberg Trials – From Medical War Crimes to Informed Consent (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), p.256. Return |
| 462 | Schmidt, Karl Brandt, p.250. Return |
| 463 | Albert Speer, Inside the Third Reich (London: Sphere Books Limited, London,1971), p.164. Return |
| 464 | Roderick Stackelberg, The Routledge Companion to Nazi Germany (London: Routledge, 2007), pp.122-124. Return |
| 465 | Ian Kershaw, The Nazi Dictatorship: Problems and Perspectives of Interpretation (London: Arnold, 1996), p.107. Return |
| 466 | David Welch, Hitler: Profile of a Dictator (London: Routledge, 2001), P.98. Return |
| 467 | Ibid., P.46. Return |
| 468 | Samuel Totten, William S Parsons, Israel W Charny (eds.), Century of Genocide: Eyewitness accounts and Critical Views (New York: Routledge, 2004), p. 206. Return |
| 469 | Thomas, Beres, Sheveli, “A Cold Wind Coming”, p.343. Return |
| 470 | Burleigh, Ethics and extermination, p.120. Return |
| 471 | Aly, Chroust, Pross, Cleansing the Fatherland, p.31. Return |
| Chapter 5. T4 | |
| 472 | Michael S Bryant, Confronting the “Good Death”: Nazi Euthanasia on Trial 1945-1953 (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2005), p 103. Return |
| 473 | Robert N Proctor, Racial Hygiene: Medicine Under the Nazis (Cambridge Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1989), p.182. Return |
| 474 | Fredric Wertham, A Sign for Cain: An Exploration of Human Violence, (New York: Paperback Library, 1969, p.161. Return |
| 475 | Götz Aly, Peter Chroust, Christian Pross, Cleansing the Fatherland: Nazi Medicine and Racial Hygiene (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 1994), p. 36. Return |
| 476 | Michael Burleigh, and Wolfgang Wipperman, The Racial State: Germany 1933-1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p.148. Return |
| 477 | Eugen Kogon, Hermann Langbein, Adalbert Rückerl (eds.), Nazi Mass Murder: A Documentary History of the Use of Poison Gas (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), p.17; Henry Friedlander, The Origins of Nazi Genocide: From Euthanasia to the Final Solution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), p.73. Return |
| 478 | http://tinyurl.com/3y99suz (Accessed 18 September 2009.) Return |
| 479 | Ulf Schmidt, Karl Brandt: The Nazi Doctor – Medicine and Power in the Third Reich (London: Hambledon Continuum, 2007), pp.133-134. Return |
| 480 | Aktion Reinhard was the code name given to the plan to exterminate the Jews of Poland, later extended to include the Jews of other European countries. Return |
| 481 | Schmidt, Karl Brandt, p.134. Return |
| 482 | Ibid., p.140. Return |
| 483 | Robin O'Neil, Belzec: Stepping Stone to Genocide (New York: JewishGen Inc, 2008), p.43. Return |
| 484 | Schmidt, Karl Brandt, pp.134-135. Return |
| 485 | Aly, Chroust, Pross, Cleansing the Fatherland, p. 28. Return |
| 486 | Proctor, Racial Hygiene, p.193. Return |
| 487 | http://tinyurl.com/2uctloc (Accessed 24 February 2008). Return |
| 488 | “Brack…saw everybody, including the chars [cleaners].” Allers to Sereny – [Gitta Sereny, Into That Darkness - From Mercy Killing to Mass Murder (London: Pimlico, 1995), p.81]. Return |
| 489 | SA = Sturmabteilung, or Storm Trooper. Return |
| 490 | Sereny, Into That Darkness, p.79. Return |
| 491 | Aly, Chroust, Pross, Cleansing the Fatherland, p. 43. Return |
| 492 Return | Ibid., p.62. |
| 493 | http://tinyurl.com/36oxq8v (accessed 5 November 2006). Return |
| 494 | Sereny, Into That Darkness, pp.48-53. Return |
| 495 | Ibid., p.57. |
| 496 Return | The Warthegau was part of western Poland incorporated into the Reich in October 1939. In a trade-off the same month, the Gauleiter of Pomerania, Franz Schwede-Coburg (nicknamed `Nero' by his constituents) agreed to allow the SS and Wehrmacht to use local asylums as barracks in return for first shooting the inmates. (Burleigh and Wipperman, The Racial State, p.148). Return |
| 497 | Bronwyn Rebekah McFarland-Icke, Nurses in Nazi Germany (Chichester: Princeton University Press, 1999), p.222. Return |
| 498 | Eimann, an unskilled labourer, joined the SS in 1932, rising to the rank of Sturmbannführer by 1939. He personally shot an unknown number of patients. In January 1941, the Eimann unit reported the killing of more than 3,000 victims to date. For these and other crimes, in 1968 Eimann received a sentence of four years imprisonment from a West German court. [Michael Burleigh, Death and Deliverance : `Euthanasia' in Germany c. 1900-1945 (London: Pan Books, 2002), pp. 128-129.] Return |
| 499 | Peter Padfield, Himmler: Reichsführer-SS (London: Papermac, 1990), p.262. Return |
| 500 | Israel Gutman (ed), Encyclopedia of the Holocaust (New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1990), p.283. Return |
| 501 | Christopher R Browning, Fateful Months: Essays on the Emergence of the Final Solution (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1991), p.3. Return |
| 502 | Kogon, Langbein, Rückerl, Nazi Mass Murder, p.37ff. The first gassings of patients from the Owinska Mental Hospital at Fort VII in Poznan were terminated no later than 15 November 1939. Return |
| 503 | Burleigh, Death and Deliverance, p. 130. |
| 504 Return | Dr. Wilhelm Gustav Schueppe was ordered to the Kiev Pathological Institute in September 1941 to be, first deputy head, then head of a commando of approximately twenty persons, including about ten physicians, augmented by members of the SD dressed as medical personnel. At the Institute Schueppe's commando conducted a special operation he described as the “destruction of life unworthy of life.” This “unworthy life” included the handicapped as well as members of “inferior Races”, that is, “Jews, Gypsies, and so forth”. Schueppe estimated that during his service at the institute 110,000-140,000 victims were killed by means of lethal injection within the period of nine months between his arrival and March 1942. This was almost certainly an over-estimate. Subsequent research suggests a figure of 80,000 victims during Schueppe's stay in Kiev. Schueppe testified: “I believe in this system. It is comparable to pruning a tree, thereby removing the old undesirable branches in order to produce the highest yield. In a nation this system must be carried out to prevent decadence” (Friedlander, The Origins of Nazi Genocide, p. 142, p.347, note 33); http://tinyurl.com/32mpehf (Accessed 20 December 2007). Return |
| 505 | Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), p.341. Return |
| 506 | Lucjan Dobroszycki, The Chronicle of the Lodz Ghetto (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984), p.67, note 79. Return |
| 507 | Ibid., pp. 67-69. Another account of this incident differs somewhat in detail. This source states that it was the Gestapo who ordered the compilation of the list of patients; these numbered 65, rather than 72, of whom 58 rather than 67 were killed. There is no mention of any medical commission, this being entirely a Gestapo inspired operation. [Alan Adelson and Robert Lapides, Lodz Ghetto: Inside a Community Under Siege (New York: Viking, 1989),pp.155-156]. Such confusion of detail is common in contemporary accounts. However, there can be no doubting the essentials of this matter. Return |
| 508 | Dick de Mildt, In the Name of the People: Perpetrators of Genocide in the Reflection of Their Post-War Prosecution in West Germany. The `Euthanasia' and `Aktion Reinhard' Trial Cases (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1996)., p.67. Return |
| 509 | This is the number of hospitals with children's killing wards that have been identified to date (April 2008). Return |
| 510 | Unlike adults, children were sometimes kept under observation in these hospitals for several weeks before being murdered. (Sereny, Into That Darkness, p.55 footnote). Return |
| 511 | Burleigh, Death and Deliverance, p.146; Friedlander, The Origins of Nazi Genocide, p.97-98; Kogon, Langbein, Rückerl, Nazi Mass Murder, Mass Murder, pp.27 -28; http://tinyurl.com/36h48sq Accessed 10 January 2007). Return |
| 512 | Burleigh, Death and Deliverance , p. 114. Von Hegener estimated that approximately 100,000 children's Meldebogen had been submitted by the war's end. About 20,000 of these had been forwarded to Heinze, Catel, and Wentzler, of which an estimated 5,200 had resulted in the murder of the child in question. Von Hegener, of course, had good reason to minimise the number of deaths in which he had been involved. (Aly, Chroust, Pross, Cleansing the Fatherland, p.190). Return |
| 513 | Bryant, Confronting the “Good Death”, p 35. Return |
| 514 | de Mildt, In the Name of the People, pp 68-69. Return |
| 515 | Robert Jay Lifton, The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide (London: Papermac, 1990), p. 62. Return |
| 516 | Bryant, Confronting the “Good Death”, p 195. Return |
| 517 | Burleigh, Death and Deliverance, p. 229. Return |
| 518 | http://tinyurl.com/3ahwjtk (Accessed 14 May 2010). Return |
| 519 | Friedlander, The Origins of Nazi Genocide, pp. 75-77. A list of men who served as a T4 Gutachter at various times includes the names of forty physicians, of whom nine were university medical professors. The list also indicates the names of other doctors who were either serving at T4 head office, the killing centres, or were engaged in research at Görden or Heidelberg. Some names are included more than once under different headings [Ernst Klee, “Euthanasie” im NS-Staat: Die “Vernichtung lebensunwerten Lebens” (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1991), p.228-229]. The forms were submitted to 54 selected psychiatrists, the elite of German psychiatry, university professors and hospital directors. [http://tinyurl.com/3ame5sa (Accessed 25 February 2008.)] A red plus or blue minus notation, similar to that employed in assessing children, was utilized on the forms to indicate death or life respectively. Doubtful cases were indicated with a question mark for review by senior evaluators (Obergutachter) [Burleigh and Wipperman, The Racial State, p.144]. Return |
| 520 | de Mildt, In the Name of the People, p.59. Return |
| 521 | Kogon, Langbein, Rückerl, Nazi Mass Murder, p.21-22. Return |
| 522 | Burleigh and Wipperman, The Racial State, p.146. Return |
| 523 | de Mildt, In the Name of the People, p.100. Return |
| 524 | Ibid., p.59. Return |
| 525 | Burleigh, Death and Deliverance, pp. 107-108. Return |
| 526 | Friedlander, The Origins of Nazi Genocide, p. 127. After a tortuous legal process lasting almost thirty years, on 28 May 1987 Bunke was convicted of having been an accessory to the murder of 11,000 individuals. For this he received a sentence of four years imprisonment. In December 1988, an appeal court reduced the assumed number of victims to 9,200, and cut the sentence proportionately to three years. [Burleigh, Death and Deliverance, pp. 279-280.] See the appendix to this manuscript for a brief biography of Bunke. Return |
| 527 | Aly, Chroust, Pross, Cleansing the Fatherland, p.34. Return |
| 528 | http://tinyurl.com/34txzeu (Accessed 5 November 2006). Return |
| 529 | de Mildt, In the Name of the People, p.57 Return |
| 530 | Aly, Chroust, Pross, Cleansing the Fatherland, pp. 60-61. Return |
| 531 | McFarland-Icke, Nurses in Nazi Germany, pp 177-178. Return |
| 532 | de Mildt, In the Name of the People p.337, note 45. Return |
| 533 | Kogon, Langbein, Rückerl, Nazi Mass Murder, p.20. Return |
| 534 | de Mildt, In the Name of the People, pp. 58-59. Return |
| 535 | RSHA = Reichssucherheitshauptamt, the Central Office for Reich Security, created by Himmler in 1939 to unify the SIPO (Sicherheitspolizei – Security Police) with the SD (Sicherheitsdienst – Security Service of the SS). Return |
| 536 | Burleigh, Death and Deliverance, p.131. Return |
| 537 | http://tinyurl.com/2w52z34 (accessed 20 December 2006) Return |
| 538 | Schmidt, Karl Brandt, p.137. Compare this incident with Arthur Nebe's remarkably similar alleged experience: “[Nebe] had come home drunk from a party one night and passed out in his garage with his car still running. The carbon monoxide from the exhaust nearly killed him…This near miss convinced him that gassing could be used effectively against the Jews and other Nazi enemies. Gas would be cheaper than bullets, and no Nazi would directly take a life.” [http://tinyurl.com/34jsolv (Accessed 19 January 2009)]. Return |
| 539 | Schmidt, Karl Brandt, p.138. In Widmann's version, it was Conti who had first proposed using gas (ibid). It is also possible that Brandt consulted individuals such as Ferdinand Flury, a professor of pharmacology at the University of Würzburg, and an expert on poison gas, before arriving at his decision. [Paul Julian Weindling, Nazi Medicine and the Nuremberg Trials – From Medical War Crimes to Informed Consent (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), p.183)]. Return |
| 540 | Burleigh, Death and Deliverance, pp 142; Friedlander, The Origins of Nazi Genocide, p.89. On 14 October 1939, Grafeneck Castle near Marbach in the Münsingen district was confiscated specifically for use as a “euthanasia” centre. At Brandenburg, close to Berlin, some of the buildings of the former prison/concentration camp were acquired by T4 in 1939 for the same purpose. A mental home was founded in 1875 at Bernburg, near Magdeburg and served as a T4 replacement for Brandenburg when the latter was closed in 1940. Originally a kind of half-way house for released prisoners, the Korrigenden-Anstalt at Hadamar, near Limburg-an-der-Lahn in Hesse, became a mental institution in 1906. Between November 1940 and January 1941 it was converted into a killing centre, superseding Grafeneck. Hartheim castle, situated in the village of Alkoven near Linz in Austria, and formerly a home for physically and mentally handicapped children, was similarly adapted between late 1939 and early 1940. Schloss Sonnenstein, located at Pirna near Dresden, had been used as a mental home since 1811. Between early 1940 and April of that year, the part of the castle located in buildings 1-3 at the front of the property was converted into a “euthanasia” killing centre. See chapter six of this monograph for more comprehensive details of the six principal T4 killing centres. Return |
| 541 | Grafeneck 9,839, Brandenburg 9,772, Hartheim 18,269, Sonnenstein 13,720, Bernburg 8,601, Hadamar 10,072. (Friedlander, The Origins of Nazi Genocide, p. 109). Return |
| 542 | Schmidt, Karl Brandt, p.155. Return |
| 543 | Ibid., p.164. Return |
| 544 | Friedlander, The Origins of Nazi Genocide, p.99. Return |
| 545 | Ibid., pp 87-.88. Return |
| 546 | Lifton, The Nazi Doctors, p. 71. Return |
| 547 | Friedlander, The Origins of Nazi Genocide , p. 210. Brandt and Brack had explicitly ordered that a doctor should operate the gas-tap, since the Führer authorization referred only to doctors. [de Mildt, In the Name of the People, p.61]. However, this instruction was often ignored. Doctors frequently delegated the task to others, and merely supervised the killing. [Friedlander, The Origins of Nazi Genocide, p. 96]. Return |
| 548 | Burleigh, Death and Deliverance, pp 131-132. Return |
| 549 | It has been suggested that postal vans were chosen because they would be relatively inconspicuous in more remote areas, and would also be easier to service and maintain nationwide. (Burleigh and Wipperman, The Racial State, p.148.) Return |
| 550 | http://tinyurl.com/34txzeu (Accessed 5 November 2006). Return |
| 551 | When Walter Heess, head of the KTI, was asked how one could justify using gas to kill human beings, he replied: “What are you talking about; after all, it works.” (Friedlander, The Origins of Nazi Genocide, p.86.) Return |
| 552 | Kogon, Langbein, Rückerl, Nazi Mass Murder, pp.30-31. Some asylums, for example Hadamar, obtained supplies via local pharmacies. [Aly, Chroust, Pross, Cleansing the Fatherland, p.83]. Return |
| 553 | http://tinyurl.com/34txzeu (accessed 5 November 2006). Return |
| 554 | Michael Burleigh, The Third Reich: A New History (London: Pan Books, 2001), p.393. Return |
| 555 | Friedlander, The Origins of Nazi Genocide, p.215. Having first undertaken the partial rebuilding and renovation of Tiergartenstrasse 4, the four killing centre gas chambers Lambert constructed were at Hartheim, Sonnenstein, Bernburg and Hadamar. He was also responsible for the building works and renovation of the T4 rest home, Haus Schoberstein, at Weissenbach am Attersee. Return |
| 556 | de Mildt, In the Name of the People, pp.266-267. Return |
| 557 | Friedlander, The Origins of Nazi Genocide, p.88. Return |
| 558 | de Mildt, In the Name of the People, p.60. Return |
| 559 | Some gas chambers were later enlarged to accommodate as many as 75 victims. Sometimes the numbers gassed together were even greater. A Hartheim staff member stated: “Once 150 persons were gassed at one time. The gas chamber was so full that the people in it could scarcely fall down, and the corpses were therefore so jammed together that we could pry them apart only with great difficulty.” (Friedlander, The Origins of Nazi Genocide, pp.96-97.) Return |
| 560 | It is probable that a department for the murder of children was established at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Brain Research in Berlin itself. (Aly, Chroust, Pross, Cleansing the Fatherland, p.220). Return |
| 561 | Mostert Useless Eaters, p.165. Return |
| 562 | Notes taken at a meeting on 23 April 1941 of the leaders of the legal profession addressed by Werner Heyde make the methodology clear, and the cynicism even clearer: “Patient dies of fabricated causes; reason: Führer's call for secrecy. Death certificate. Date and cause of death incorrect. In addition, however, a true registry will be kept. Now the estate is carefully processed, which is generally most important to the relatives…” (Aly, Chroust, Pross, Cleansing the Fatherland, p.44). Return |
| 563 | Friedlander, The Origins of Nazi Genocide, p.100 ff. Return |
| 564 | http://tinyurl.com/38gz537 (Accessed 18 September 2009.) Return |
| 565 | Burleigh and Wipperman, The Racial State, p.148. Return |
| 566 | Ibid., p.147. Return |
| 567 | de Mildt, In the Name of the People, p.146. Return |
| 568 | Horst Biesold, Crying Hands: Eugenics and Deaf People in Nazi Germany (Washington: Gallaudet University Press, 1999), p.102. Return |
| 569 | Aly, Chroust, Pross, Cleansing the Fatherland, pp.40-41. Return |
| 570 | Not to be confused with August Becker, mentioned above. Return |
| 571 | Aly, Chroust, Pross, Cleansing the Fatherland, pp.182-183. Return |
| 572 | Hugh Gallagher, What the Nazi “Euthanasia Program” Can Tell Us About Disability Oppression (Journal of Disability Policy Studies, Vol.12, No.2, 2001), p.97. Return |
| 573 | Aly, Chroust, Pross, Cleansing the Fatherland, pp 49-50; Biesold Crying Hands, pp. 161-162. Return |
| Chapter 5. The Killing Centres | |
| 574 | Claudia Koonz, The Nazi Conscience (Cambridge Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2003), p.166. Return |
| 575 | Michael Burleigh, Death and Deliverance : `Euthanasia' in Germany c. 1900-1945 (London: Pan Books, 2002), p.273 Return |
| 576 | The reader will find an encyclopaedic list of the institutions from where victims were selected at http://tinyurl.com/2w5p594 (Accessed 19 August 2008). Return |
| 577 | Henry Friedlander, The Origins of Nazi Genocide: From Euthanasia to the Final Solution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), p.233. Return |
| 578 | Ibid., p.90. Return |
| 579 | Ibid., p.328, note19. Return |
| 580 | Ibid., p.59. Return |
| 581 | Götz Aly, Peter Chroust, Christian Pross, Cleansing the Fatherland: Nazi Medicine and Racial Hygiene (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 1994), p.225. Return |
| 582 | Friedlander, The Origins of Nazi Genocide, p.130. Return |
| 583 | Ibid., p.106 Return |
| 584 | This statement was inaccurate - “About 4 inches above the floor, a pipe with a circumference of about one inch ran along the wall; in the pipe there were small holes through which the gas could enter the chamber.” (Friedlander, The Origins of Nazi Genocide, p.87). The shower heads here and in other gas chambers were solely for the purpose of camouflage. Return |
| 585 | Friedlander, The Origins of Nazi Genocide, p.278. Return |
| 586 | Ibid. Return |
| 587 | Bronwyn Rebekah McFarland-Icke, Nurses in Nazi Germany (Chichester: Princeton University Press, 1999)., p.212. Return |
| 588 | Friedlander, The Origins of Nazi Genocide, p. 92. Return |
| 589 | Ibid., p.94 Return |
| 590 | Ibid., p.233 Return |
| 591 | Ibid., p.110. Return |
| 592 | http://tinyurl.com/3xfu6az (Accessed 15 January 2008). Return |
| 593 | Gitta Sereny, Into That Darkness - From Mercy Killing to Mass Murder (London: Pimlico, 1995), p.77. Emphasis in original. Return |
| 594 | Aly, Chroust, Pross, Cleansing the Fatherland, p. 39 Return |
| 595 | Friedlander, The Origins of Nazi Genocide, p.101 Return |
| 596 | http://tinyurl.com/2uvfygj (Accessed 16 January 2008). Return |
| 597 | Ernst Klee, Das Personenlexikon zum Dritten Reich - Wer war was vor und nach 1945 (Frankfurt am Main: S.Fischer, 2005), p.594. Return |
| 598 | Robert N Proctor, Racial Hygiene: Medicine Under the Nazis (Cambridge Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1989), pp.78-79. Return |
| 599 | Friedlander, The Origins of Nazi Genocide, pp.90-91. Return |
| 600 | McFarland-Icke, Nurses in Nazi Germany, p.219 Return |
| 601 | Eugen Kogon, Hermann Langbein, Adalbert Rückerl (eds.), Nazi Mass Murder: A Documentary History of the Use of Poison Gas (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), p.28. Return |
| 602 | http://tinyurl.com/35mxb63 (Accessed 22 February 2009). Return |
| 603 | Friedlander, The Origins of Nazi Genocide, p.174 Return |
| 604 | Gutekunst's final paragraph is a variation of `ashes to ashes, dust to dust', difficult to translate precisely, but the general meaning is clear. Return |
| 605 | There is an alternative view that Grafeneck, like Brandenburg, was closed because both had completed their intended purpose and were scheduled to be shut down. (Friedlander, The Origins of Nazi Genocide, p.336, note 140.) Return |
| 606 | Kogon, Langbein, Rückerl, Nazi Mass Murder, p.18. Return |
| 607 | Friedlander, The Origins of Nazi Genocide, pp.119-120. Return |
| 608 | Kogon, Langbein, Rückerl, Nazi Mass Murder, p.19 Return |
| 609 | The number of victims for Grafeneck as recorded by Edmund Brandt (see chapter 7) was 9,839. However, the Tübingen court established that a further 815 individuals had been murdered there. (Kogon, Langbein, Rückerl, Nazi Mass Murder, p.37.) Return |
| 610 | http://tinyurl.com/36njnau (Accessed 12 December 2007). Return |
| 611 | Friedlander, The Origins of Nazi Genocide, pp.92-93. Return |
| 612 | Burleigh, Death and Deliverance, pp.142-149. Return |
| 613 | Friedlander, The Origins of Nazi Genocide, pp.92-.93. Return |
| 614 | Alexander Mitscherlich, and Fred Mielke, Doctors of Infamy: The Story of the Nazi Medical Crimes (New York: Henry Schuman, 1949), p.102. Return |
| 615 | Robert Jay Lifton, The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide (London: Papermac, 1990), pp. 73-74. Return |
| 616 | Doris L Bergen, War & Genocide: A Concise History of the Holocaust (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), p.127. Return |
| 617 | Friedlander, The Origins of Nazi Genocide, p.97. Return |
| 618 | Kogon, Langbein, Rückerl, Nazi Mass Murder, p.37 Return |
| 619 | Lifton, The Nazi Doctors, p.100 (footnote). Return |
| 620 | Leo Alexander, Medical Science Under Dictatorship (The New England Journal of Medicine 241, 1949), p.39. Alexander dates this document to December 1939, which is clearly not possible, since Hadamar only functioned as a killing centre between January and August 1941. The suggested use of hydro-cyanic acid gas (Zyklon B) is, of course, also incorrect. Return |
| 621 | Samuel Totten, William S Parsons, Israel W Charny (eds.), Century of Genocide: Eyewitness accounts and Critical Views (New York: Routledge, 2004), p.186. Return |
| 622 | Kogon, Langbein, Rückerl, Nazi Mass Murder, p.32 Return |
| 623 | Stackelberg, Roderick, and Winkle, Sally Anne, The Nazi Germany Sourcebook: An Anthology of Texts (London: Routledge, 2002), p.333. Return |
| 624 | Friedlander, The Origins of Nazi Genocide, p.149. Return |
| 625 | Lifton, The Nazi Doctors, p.143. Dieter Allers estimated the total number of T4 personnel sent to the Soviet Union in this operation at 400 (Sereny, Into That Darkness, p.84). Return |
| 626 | Burleigh, Death and Deliverance, pp.239-238 Return |
| 627 | The German term for people of mixed race is Mischlinge, inevitably interpreted by the Nazis in a pejorative sense to mean `mongrel.' Return |
| 628 | Friedlander, The Origins of Nazi Genocide, p.295. Return |
| 629 | For convenience usually referred to as the first and second Hadamar trials. The first trial was conducted by the US military, the second by the West German government. Return |
| 630 | Burleigh, Death and Deliverance, p.260. Return |
| 631 | Between August 1942 and March 1945 there were 4,422 recorded deaths at Hadamar. It is reasonable to assume that a minority of these were from natural causes. (Burleigh, Death and Deliverance, p.231.) Return |
| 632 | Burleigh, Death and Deliverance, p.143. Return |
| 633 | http://tinyurl.com/3akaork (Accessed 21 January 2008). Return |
| 634 | http://tinyurl.com/324m8ya (Accessed 22 January 2008). Return |
| 635 | Friedlander, The Origins of Nazi Genocide, p.91. Return |
| 636 | Kogon, Langbein, Rückerl, Nazi Mass Murder, p.49. Return |
| 637 | Ibid. Return |
| 638 | Friedlander, The Origins of Nazi Genocide, p.91. Return |
| 639 | Ibid., p.96. This was because George Renno, assistant physician-in- charge, initially refused to operate the gas taps, considering such tasks beneath his dignity as a trained doctor. On one occasion when Renno was absent, Vallaster did not administer sufficient gas; when the chamber was opened, not all of the victims were dead. On his return Renno was furious, and for the next two months operated the gas taps himself before permitting Vallaster to perform the task again, now always under supervision. [Mireille Horsinga-Renno, Cher oncle Georg: La bouleversante enquête d'une femme sur un médecin de la mort impuni (Strasbourg : La Nuée Bleue, 2006), p.59]. Return |
| 640 | Friedlander, The Origins of Nazi Genocide, p.328, note 31. Return |
| 641 | Horsinga, Cher oncle Georg, pp 104-105 includes a photograph taken on just such an outing. Return |
| 642 | An electric bone crusher was in use at Hartheim. (Horsinga, Cher oncle Georg, p.66). Return |
| 643 | Friedlander, The Origins of Nazi Genocide, p.233-234. Return |
| 644 | http://tinyurl.com/38gz537 (Accessed 17 September 2009.) Return |
| 645 | Friedlander, The Origins of Nazi Genocide, p.109. The transit period at Niedernhart was usually of 8-10 days duration. Lonauer also killed a number of patients at Niedernhart by means of lethal injection.(Horsinga, Cher oncle Georg, p.83). Return |
| 646 | http://tinyurl.com/36llbkw (Accessed 24 August 2008). Return |
| 647 | Estimates of the total number of victims at Hartheim range from 20,000 (Georg Renno, sometime director of the institution) to 400,000 (Franz Ziereis, former commandant of Mauthausen concentration camp.) The latter figure is clearly impossible. The generally accepted figure is 30,000 fatalities. (Lifton, The Nazi Doctors, p.142.) Return |
| 648 | Lifton, The Nazi Doctors, p. 138. Return |
| 649 | Kogon, Langbein, Rückerl, Nazi Mass Murder, p.47. Return |
| 650 | http://tinyurl.com/38jyw5e (Accessed 1 February 2008). Return |
| 651 | Kogon, Langbein, Rückerl, Nazi Mass Murder, p.49. Return |
| 652 | Friedlander, The Origins of Nazi Genocide, p.150. Return |
| 653 | Dick de Mildt, In the Name of the People: Perpetrators of Genocide in the Reflection of Their Post-War Prosecution in West Germany. The `Euthanasia' and `Aktion Reinhard' Trial Cases (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1996), p.78. Return |
| 654 | Burleigh, Death and Deliverance, p.154. This was the Brandt report referred to in chapter 7. Return |
| 655 | http://tinyurl.com/34kc2gp (Accessed 12 January 2008). Return |
| 656 | Friedlander, The Origins of Nazi Genocide, pp. 91-92. Return |
| 657 | Kogon, Langbein, Rückerl, Nazi Mass Murder, p.37. Return |
| 658 | Ibid., p.19. Return |
| 659 | Ibid., p.45, p.51. Return |
| 660 | Ibid., p.46. Return |
| 661 | Friedlander, The Origins of Nazi Genocide, p.98. Return |
| 662 | http://tinyurl.com/3ahkamx (Accessed 21 January 2008). Return |
| 663 | http://tinyurl.com/2una9x8 (Accessed 22 January 2008). Return |
| 664 | Mark P Mostert, Useless Eaters: Disability as Genocidal Marker in Nazi Germany (Journal of Special Education. Vol. 36, No. 3, 2002, p.165. Return |
| 665 | Marius Turda and Paul J Weindling (eds.), “Blood and Homeland”. Eugenics and Racial Nationalism in Central and Southeast Europe, 1900-1940, (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2007), p.329.
To date, killing wards for children have been identified in the following 31 locations: Ansbach, Berlin – Wiesengrund, Brandenburg-Görden, Breslau, Dortmund Applerbeck, Egelfing – Haar, Eichberg bei Eltville, Graz, Grossschweidnitz bei Löbau, Hamburg – Langenhorn, Hamburg – Rotenburgsort, Kalmenhof-Idstein, Kaufbeuren, Königsberg, Konradstein, Leipzig – Dösen, Leipzig – Universitätskinderklinik, Loben/ Oberschlesien, Lüneburg, Niedermarsberg, Sachsenberg bei Schwerin, Schleswig, Stadtrhoda in Türingen, Stuttgart, Tiegenhof/Gnesen, Uchtspringe, Ueckermünde, Waldniel, Wien, Wiesengrund bei Pilsnen, Wiesloch bei Heidelberg. [http://tinyurl.com/3x8p824 (Accessed 27 February 2008.)] Return |
| 666 | Susan Benedict, Arthur Caplan, Traute Lafrenz Page, Duty and `Euthanasia': the Nurses of Meseritz-Obrawalde (Nursing Ethics, Vol. 14(6), 2007), p.783 Return |
| 667 | McFarland-Icke, Nurses in Nazi Germany, p.17. Return |
| 668 | Susan Benedict, and Tessa Chelouche, Meseritz-Obrawalde: a `wild euthanasia' hospital of Nazi Germany (History of Psychiatry, Vol. 19 (1), 2008), p.70. Return |
| 669 | Benedict, Caplan, Lafrenz, Duty and `Euthanasia', p.783 Return |
| 670 | McFarland-Icke, Nurses in Nazi Germany, p.213. Return |
| 671 | Friedlander, The Origins of Nazi Genocide, p.160. Return |
| 672 | Benedict, Chelouche, Meseritz-Obrawalde, pp.70-71. Return |
| 673 | Benedict, Caplan, Lafrenz, Duty and `Euthanasia', p.783 Return |
| 674 | McFarland-Icke, Nurses in Nazi Germany, p.215. Return |
| 675 | Benedict, Chelouche, Meseritz-Obrawalde, p.71. Return |
| 676 | Benedict, Caplan, Lafrenz, Duty and `Euthanasia', p.783 Return |
| 677 | Michael S Bryant, Confronting the “Good Death”: Nazi Euthanasia on Trial 1945-1953 (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2005), p 118. A former salesman, Grabowski, described as an “unbearable person and an absolute despot”, was rumoured to have been involved in the murder of Jews in Kalisch before his appointment at Meseritz- Obrawalde. (McFarland-Icke, Nurses, p.214). Return |
| 678 | McFarland-Icke, Nurses in Nazi Germany, p.249. Return |
| 679 | Ibid., pp.242-245. Return |
| 680 | Benedict, Caplan, Lafrenz, Duty and `Euthanasia', p.78. Return |
| 681 | Friedlander, The Origins of Nazi Genocide, p.160. Return |
| 682 | Benedict, Caplan, Lafrenz, Duty and `Euthanasia', p.783. Return |
| 683 | McFarland-Icke, Nurses in Nazi Germany, p.213. Return |
| 684 | Benedict, Caplan, Lafrenz, Duty and `Euthanasia', p.783. Return |
| 685 | Ibid., p.784. Return |
| 686 | McFarland-Icke, Nurses in Nazi Germany, p.214. Return |
| 687 | Susan Benedict, and Jochen Kuhla, Nurses' Participation in the Euthanasia Programs of Nazi Germany (Western Journal of Nursing Research, Vol. 21(2), 1999), p.253. Return |
| 688 | Benedict, Caplan, Lafrenz, Duty and `Euthanasia', p.784õ Return |
| 689 | Benedict, Chelouche, Meseritz-Obrawalde, p.72. Return |
| 690 | Burleigh, Death and Deliverance, pp.257-258. This may have been an over-estimate. 30 patients murdered daily would amount to nearly 11,000 victims per annum, which in the two years that “euthanasia” was practised at Meseritz-Obrawalde would give a total of about 22,000 fatalities. Either the estimated size of the batches was incorrect, or killing did not occur every day. But this is really to split hairs. Return |
| 691 | Aly, Chroust, Pross, Cleansing the Fatherland, p.91. Return |
| 692 | Friedlander, The Origins of Nazi Genocide, pp.160-161. Return |
| 693 | A second Soviet investigation discovered part of the hospital's death register in which the final entry (dated 30 January 1945) listed death number 18,232 (de Mildt, In the Name of the People, p.65). Return |
| 694 | Lifton, The Nazi Doctors, p.78. Return |
| 695 | Bryant, Confronting the “Good Death”, p 52. Return |
| 696 | McFarland-Icke, Nurses in Nazi Germany, p.214. Return |
| 697 | Ibid., p.234. Return |
| 698 | Friedlander, The Origins of Nazi Genocide, p.166. Return |
| 699 | Benedict, Benedict, Caplan, Lafrenz, Duty and `Euthanasia', p.783. Return |
| 700 | McFarland-Icke, Nurses in Nazi Germany, p.16. Return |
| 701 | Friedlander, The Origins of Nazi Genocide, p.109. Return |
| 702 | Bryant, Confronting the “Good Death”, p.51. Return |
| 703 | McFarland-Icke, Nurses in Nazi Germany, p.226. Return |
| 704 | Ibid., p.224. Return |
| 705 | Bryant, Confronting the “Good Death”, p.123. Return |
| 706 | Ibid., p.121. Return |
| 707 | Lifton, The Nazi Doctors, p.97 (footnote). Return |
| 708 | McFarland-Icke, Nurses in Nazi Germany, p.217. Return |
| 709 | Ibid., p.228. Return |
| 710 | Ibid., p.229. Return |
| 711 | Friedlander, The Origins of Nazi Genocide, p.51. Return |
| 712 | Burleigh, Death and Deliverance, pp 54-55. Return |
| 713 | Ibid., p.75. It is sickening to contrast Mennecke's well recorded gluttony with the starvation of his patients at Eichberg. See Aly, Chroust, Pross, Cleansing the Fatherland, p. 238ff. Return |
| 714 | Burleigh, Death and Deliverance, pp.248-251. Return |
| 715 | McFarland-Icke, Nurses in Nazi Germany, p. 215. Return |
| 716 | Friedlander, The Origins of Nazi Genocide, p.156-157. Return |
| 717 | Ibid., p.131. Return |
| 718 | http://tinyurl.com/37oncrz (Accessed 22 February 2008). Return |
| 719 | Bryant, Confronting the “Good Death”, p.125 Return |
| 720 | Burleigh, Death and Deliverance, p.110. Return |
| 721 | Ibid., p.245, and p.337 (notes 85 and 86.) Return |
| 722 | Ibid., pp.248 – 251. Return |
| 723 | Ibid., p.62. Return |
| 724 | http://tinyurl.com/367sfg7 (accessed 23 February 2008.); Friedlander, The Origins of Nazi Genocide, pp. 273-274. Return |
| 725 | http://tinyurl.com/2vxfp8y (Accessed 25 February 2008.) Return |
| 726 | Friedlander, The Origins of Nazi Genocide, pp 273-274. Return |
| 727 | Between 1933 and 1939, over 21,000 people were treated to a tour of Eglfing-Haar. Almost 6,000 of them were members of the SS. (Burleigh, Death and Deliverance, p.47.) Return |
| 728 | Burleigh, Death and Deliverance, p.49. Return |
| 729 | de Mildt, In the Name of the People, p.53. Return |
| 730 | Friedlander,The Origins of Nazi Genocide, pp. 49-50. Return |
| 731 | http://tinyurl.com/34ac9by (Accessed 23 February 2008). Return |
| 732 | The World Medical Association (WMA) was created in late 1946. In September 1947, shortly after the final judgment at the Nuremberg Medical Trial, the first official meeting of the WMA was held in Paris. The WMA formulated a new physician's oath to promote and serve the health of humanity. One of the first issues discussed by the 1947 general assembly was the German “betrayal of the traditions of medicine.” The assembly asked, why did these doctors lack moral or professional conscience and forget or ignore the humanitarian motives and ideals of medical service, and how can a repetition of such crimes be averted? The “widespread criminal conduct of the German medical profession since 1933” was acknowledged. The WMA endorsed “the judicial action taken to punish those members of the medical profession who shared in the crimes” and it “solemnly condemned the crimes and inhumanity committed by doctors in Germany and elsewhere against human beings.” The assembly continued: “We undertake to expel from our organization those members who have been personally guilty of the crimes.... We will exact from all our members a standard of conduct that recognizes the sanctity, moral liberty and personal dignity of every human being.” Sewering had been a German delegate to the WMA since 1959 and its treasurer for twenty years. [John J Michalczyk (ed), Medicine, Ethics, and the Third Reich: Historical and Contemporary Issues (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 1994), pp.202-206]; Return |
| 733 | Michael A Grodin, George J Annas, Leonard H Glantz, Medicine and Human Rights: A Proposal for International Action (The Hastings Center Report, Vol. 23, Issue 4, 1993), pp.8-12. Return |
| 734 | In March 2001, Sewering was still practicing medicine. Return |
| 735 | Friedlander, The Origins of Nazi Genocide, p.51. Return |
| 736 | Ibid., pp.166-167 Return |
| 737 | Lifton, The Nazi Doctors, pp.98-99. Return |
| 738 | Ibid., p.51. Return |
| 739 | Burleigh, Death and Deliverance, pp.61-62. Return |
| 740 | http://tinyurl.com/2vxfp8y (Accessed 25 February 2008.) Return |
| 741 | Ibid. Return |
| 742 | McFarland-Icke, Nurses in Nazi Germany, p. 220. Return |
| 743 | Burleigh, Death and Deliverance, pp.229-230. Return |
| 744 | Lifton, The Nazi Doctors, p.98. Return |
| 745 | Burleigh, Death and Deliverance, p. 230. Return |
| 746 | http://tinyurl.com/3ame5sa (Accessed 25 February 2008). Return |
| 747 | Burleigh, Death and Deliverance, p.231. Return |
| 748 | Ibid., p.244. Return |
| 749 | http://tinyurl.com/2vxfp8y (accessed 25 February 2008). This authoritative source states that in 1943, 1944 and 1945, a total of 1,808 patients died in Kaufbeuren: The free beds were immediately filled by patients from other psychiatric clinics which were cleared to be used for different purposes, and also by so-called “eastern workers” (Ostarbeiter), Russian, Polish and Baltic forced labourers, who had become mentally ill in the camps where they had been interned. A directive from Berlin expected… the directors to stop any treatment if the patient was unable to return to work within four weeks. This meant death. [Ibid]. The life or death decision was thus no longer in the hands of a doctor, but was made by the Central Clearing Office for Mental institutions on the basis a report submitted by the hospital. [Aly, Chroust, Pross, Cleansing the Fatherland, p.184]. Return |
| 750 | http://tinyurl.com/2vxfp8y (Accessed 24 February 2008). Return |
| 751 | Aly, Chroust, Pross, Cleansing the Fatherland, p.91. Return |
| 752 | Friedlander, The Origins of Nazi Genocide, pp 51-52. Return |
| 753 | Proctor, Racial Hygiene, pp.192-193. Return | 754 | http://tinyurl.com/2vxfp8y (Accessed 25 February 2008.) Return |
| 755 | Friedlander, The Origins of Nazi Genocide, pp 162-163. Return |
| 756 | de Mildt, In the Name of the People, pp.189-190. Return |
| 757 | http://tinyurl.com/39rxf5n (Accessed 27 February 2008). Return |
| 758 | de Mildt, In the Name of the People, p.100. Return |
| 759 | http://tinyurl.com/39rxf5n (Accessed 26 February 2008.) Return |
| 760 | Bryant, Confronting the “Good Death”, p 173. Return |
| 761 | Friedlander, The Origins of Nazi Genocide, p.52. Return |
| 762 | http://tinyurl.com/39rxf5n (Accessed 28 February 2008.) One other child allegedly died of natural causes. Return |
| 763 | Bryant, Confronting the “Good Death”, p 173 Return |
| 764 | de Mildt, In the Name of the People, p.99. Return |
| 765 | Bryant, Confronting the “Good Death”, p 173 Return |
| 766 | Ibid., p 170 Return |
| 767 | de Mildt, In the Name of the People, p.104 Return |
| 768 | Ibid., p.105. Return |
| 769 | Sprauer threatened Dr Viktor Mathes of the Emmendingen hospital that “one could be sent to Grafeneck oneself.” (de Mildt, In the Name of the People, p.347, note 40.) Return |
| 770 | Bryant, Confronting the “Good Death”, pp. 170-171. Return |
| 771 | Whether Möckel 's memory failed him, or he deliberately offered incorrect dating, the fact was that 6,300 Jews from Baden were dumped in unoccupied France in October 1940. They were subsequently interned in camps at Gurs, Rivesaltes, Le Vernet, Les Milles and elsewhere; many died, either in these camps or after transportation to Auschwitz or Sobibor. Included in this expulsion were the Jews of the Saar-Palatinate. Both provinces had been earmarked for incorporation into the Reich, which were thus to be first rendered `Judenrein' [`Jew- free']. [Hilberg, Destruction of European Jews, pp. 651 and 665-666; Saul Friedländer, The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945 (New York: HarperCollins, 2007), pp.93-94.] Return |
| 772 | http://tinyurl.com/39rxf5n (Accessed 28 February 2008). Return |
| 773 | Ibid. Return |
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