Reassessing the Beginning of the ‘Euthanasia’ Programme

Reassessing the Beginning of the ‘Euthanasia’ Programme

Reassessing the Beginning of the ‘Euthanasia’ Programme
by Ulf Schmidt
University of Oxford
While books have been written about the programme to kill handicapped children and adults, euphemistically called the ‘euthanasia’ programme and code-named ‘Aktion T–4’ to camouflage the involvement of Hitler’s Chancellery of the Führer (KdF), the precise beginning of this first systematic killing programme is somehow shrouded in mystery. We know that the ‘euthanasia’ programme began with the killing of the most defenceless and vulnerable populations: with children. Historians, until recently, have primarily relied on post-war testimony of those involved in the killing programme to establish exactly when and in what context the first child was killed and how this triggered Hitler’s decision to entrust his personal physician, Karl Brandt, and the head of the Chancellery of the Führer, Philipp Bouhler, with organising the ‘euthanasia’ programme.[1]
The origins of the ‘euthanasia’ programme are complex and cannot be dealt with in this brief paper.[2] The article will, however, highlight the beginning of the programme and attempt to clarify some of the various accounts as to how it actually started. According to the accounts of those involved in the killing operation, the ‘euthanasia’ programme was triggered by the so-called severely handicapped ‘Knauer child’, whose parents had petitioned the Chancellery of the Führer to ‘put their child to sleep’. Though some of the accounts varied quite considerably with regard to the timing and circumstances of this incident, in the past historians have strongly believed in the existence of the ‘Knauer child’ and agreed upon the approximate time when the child was killed.[3]
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Questioned at the Nuremberg Doctor’s Trial in 1946/47, the key defendant, Brandt, testified to the circumstances in which the ‘Knauer child’ supposedly was killed:
Brandt: The father of a deformed child approached the Führer and asked that this child or this creature should be killed. Hitler turned this matter over to me and told me to go to Leipzig immediately - it was in Leipzig - to confirm the fact on the spot. It was a child which had been born blind, an idiot - at least it seemed to be an idiot - and it lacked one leg and part of an arm
Question: Witness, you are speaking about the Leipzig affair, about this deformed child. What did Hitler order you to do?
Brandt: He ordered me to talk to the physicians who were looking after the child to find out whether the statements of the father were true. If they were correct, then I was to inform the physicians in his name that they could carry out euthanasia. The important thing was that the parents should not feel themselves incriminated at some later date as a result of this euthanasia - that the parents should not have the impression that they themselves were responsible for the death of this child. I was further ordered to state that if these physician should become involved in some legal proceedings because of this measure, these proceedings would be quashed by order of Hitler (...).
Question: What did the doctors who were involved say?
Brandt: The doctors were of the opinion that there was no justification for keeping such a child alive. It was pointed out that in maternity wards under certain circumstances it is quite natural for the doctors themselves to perform euthanasia in such a case without anything further being said about it. No precise instructions were given in that respect.[4]
Brandt’s statement corresponded to that of other defendants and ‘euthanasia’ doctors, including Hans Hefelmann, the man in charge of the children’s ‘euthanasia’ programme. In August 1960 Hefelmann told a German court: ‘The mentioned case occurred in the year 1938; I cannot name a precise date anymore. It was concerned with the child Knauer. According to my memory the Knauer child was lacking three extremities and was blind’.[5] In November 1960 he added to his statement that he could ‘remember with certainty’ that the Chancellery of the Führer had become involved after a petition of the grandmother of the child had reached the office and that Hefelmann thought that ‘the case Knauer occurred at the latest in the first two months of the year 1939’.[6] All of those involved in setting up the programme agreed that the ‘case K.’, as it was called by some of the defendants, had led Hitler to authorise Brandt and Bouhler to perform euthanasia in cases of similar nature in accordance with that of the Knauer child. Thus the precise context of this case is of significant historical interest.
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Unfortunately other sources which could have corroborated the sequence of events are believed to have been mostly destroyed or lost. For the Chancellery of the Führer only a single relevant file exists at the Federal Archive in Berlin.[7] For the Children’s Clinic at the University of Leipzig the patient files are considered to be lost.[8] Historians therefore assumed that the case had occurred either at the end of 1938 or at the beginning of 1939 and that about nine months later, after the German army had completed the Polish campaign in September 1939, Hitler instructed Brandt and Bouhler with organising the ‘euthanasia’ programme. Scholars also agreed that the child had been a boy and that it had been blind and physically disabled. This account was generally accepted, with only few exceptions. One such exception was reported in Philippe Aziz’s book Les medicins de la mort, which in general was neglected by historians because the author had dramatised the archival sources and provided the reader with no footnotes, thus making it almost impossible for scholars to verify or falsify Aziz’ account.[9] At the beginning of volume four of Doctors of Death, the English translation of Les medicins de la mort, Aziz described his visit to a family named ‘Kressler’ in Pomßen in April 1973.[10] Aziz’s interview with the family supposedly revealed that the case had happened much later, in the summer of 1939, and that Brandt had personally visited the family in Pomßen, located in close proximity to Leipzig, to examine the child.
The Kressler family seem to have been ‘ordinary’ Germans in the true sense of the word, believing most Nazi propaganda of a strong and healthy Germany: ‘We were poor and we worked hard’, Aziz recalled the family saying. ‘When Hitler came to power, we thought things were going to change - that he would build a better Germany ... For us, the Third Reich was not the horrible thing that history has made it out to be. Life was peaceful. I worked in a sawmill, and my wife was expecting a child’.[11] But according to Mr Kressler the child turned out to be a ‘monster’. The child was blind, part of his left arm was missing and his leg was deformed. The Kressler’s first asked Professor Werner Catel, head of the Children’s Clinic at the University of Leipzig and later heavily involved in the killing programme, for help. Catel, however, told the parents that ‘handicapped children like this should not go on living’ because he considered their lives as ‘worthless’.[12] The precise sequence of events which followed is not entirely clear from Aziz’s recollection of the interview, especially with regard to who exactly petitioned to Hitler.[13] Either one of the parents or the uncle seems to have written to the Chancellery of the Führer, requesting permission to help the child to die: ‘That was 1939, and we were on the brink of war. Then one day, ‘it was summer, and the afternoon was hot’, Mr Kressler was called out of his sawmill, where he was working, because Brandt had arrived in Pomßen to see their child. In Aziz’s account Mr Kressler recalled:
It was right here. Karl Brandt was standing, there near the window. He was tall and impressive. He seemed to fill up the whole room. He didn’t want to sit down. He explained to me that the Führer had personally sent him, and that my son’s case interested the Führer very, very much. The Führer wanted to explore the problem of people who had no future - whose life was worthless. That’s why he had sent his personal doctor to see us. From then on, we wouldn’t have to suffer from this terrible misfortune, because the Führer had granted us the mercy killing of our son. Later, we could have other children, handsome and healthy, of whom the Reich could be proud. [14]
Though Aziz’s historical narrative should be treated with care, it is quite surprising to what extent his report of Mr Kressler’s recollection of the events resembled those of Brandt, given to the American Military Tribunal in the Doctor’s Trial in 1946/47. But did the Kressler family really exist and if so, was their child the previously thought ‘Knauer case’? Did Aziz use pseudonyms to protect the identity of the family? When exactly did the ‘Knauer case’ occur? The German scholar Udo Benzenhöfer has recently investigated the ‘Knauer case’ as well as Aziz’ account of events.[15] He found out that the child was neither named ‘Knauer’ nor was the family called ‘Kressler’. It did in fact turn out that Aziz had given the family a pseudonym, but that the family had indeed lived in Pomßen, near Leipzig. It also became clear that the child had not been killed at the end of 1938, but in the late summer of 1939.
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Benzenhöfer places great emphasis on having found the real name of the child, though he is adamant not to disclose it by reason of Germany’s data-protection laws. He argues that historians should call this case in the future the ‘child K.’ and that the main importance of his discovery lies in its factual value; in other words that it is now safe to say that this child ‘really existed’.[16] Though this approach is understandable and sensitive to the feelings of the parents and relatives of the child, it somehow overlooks the personality of the child itself and the individual suffering of the boy. Let us be precise in the context. The parents of this child wanted the child to be killed. According to the available documentation they were ardent Nazis, who regarded their child as ‘not worth living’ and saw to it that their child would be killed in accordance with Nazi ideology. By calling this child the ‘Case K.’ we would not only medicalise the child’s history, but also place the justified claim of the parents for anonymity over the personality and suffering of the first ‘euthanasia’ victim.
The church register (Begräbnisbuch) in Pomßen provides convincing evidence about this first child and we wish to reveal, at least in so far as is permissible, the identity of this child and the context in which the boy was killed. The Pomßen church register lists seven deaths from January until October 1939. Among these there was only one child, aged five months and five days.[17] The child was called Gerhard Herbert K., born on 20 February 1939 and died on 25 July 1939 in Pomßen, Saxony.[18] Three days later the boy was buried in the same village. The cause of death was given as ‘heart weakness’, an indication that the doctors may have used drugs such as luminal or morhium-scopolamin, two drugs generally used in the children’s ‘euthanasia’ programme to camouflage an unnatural death.[19] Gerhard’s father was an agricultural labourer. He and his wife both lived in Pomßen and were of the Protestant-Lutheran faith.[20] With the father an agricultural labourer, it can be assumed that they may have been poor, as ‘Herr Kressler’ stated in Aziz’ account. It also can be assumed that Brandt really visited the family, as the date of death corresponds to ‘Herr Kressler’s’ recollections of Brandt’s visit during a ‘hot summer day’ in 1939.
The date of the child’s death in July 1939 as a crucial turning point in the regime’s decision to go ahead with the actual beginning of the ‘euthanasia’ programme is further corroborated if we take the overall preparation of the programme into account. To launch such a nation-wide programme it was crucial to inform doctors of mental asylums and health administrators in the Ministry of the Interior about the imminent plan to kill handicapped patients. In other words the bureaucratic machinery had to be set up and put on stand-by. And this is what seems to have happened in July 1939. In Nuremberg Werner Heyde, one of the most notorious doctors of the killing programme, told his interrogators that he had received a telephone call in July 1939 to attend a meeting at the Chancellery of the Führer.[21] At this meeting approximately ten to fifteen psychiatrists from all parts of Germany were present. They were informed by Brandt, Bouhler, Conti and Linden, the key organisers of the programme, that action in this question was imminent: ‘We were told that the „euthanasia" of the mentally ill should in practice be put into reality and we were asked to offer our support as experts and advisors. This meeting was followed by a series of meetings from September 1939 onwards ... At the meeting in September or October 1939 it became clear for me and also for the others that Philipp Bouhler as well as Karl Brandt were the men in charge of the so called „euthanasia" programme’.[22]
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Though Heyde’s statement corroborates that there was increasing activity in the Chancellery of the Führer in July 1939 with regard to the imminent beginning of the ‘euthanasia’ programme, it also reveals, to some extent, that preparations for the programme must have been in the pipeline at the highest levels of the Nazi hierarchy for some months at least. A careful reading of some of the statements of the T-4 personnel does support this assumption. By May 1939, for example, Brandt told Hefelmann that Hitler had ordered him (Brandt) to set up an advisory committee which would supervise and prepare the killing of mentally ill children; for reason of secrecy the ‘Reich Committee for the Scientific Registering of Serious Hereditary and Congenital Illnesses’ would serve as a cover.[23] What is more, if we assume that the parents, or the child’s uncle, submitted their petition to the Chancellery of the Führer shortly after the child was born in February 1939, then Hefelmann’s earlier mentioned account from 1960 that ‘the case Knauer ... occurred in the first two months of the year 1939’ also suddenly makes a lot of sense. What Hefelmann probably meant by ‘the case Knauer ... occurred’, was the point at which the case was first brought to the attention of the Chancellery of the Führer, which may well have been in the spring of 1939. The petition of one of Gerhard’s relatives to ‘put him to sleep’ was certainly not the only one the KdF received from German parents since 1933, especially after racial propaganda had stressed that such children where ‘ballast existences’ for the German Volkskörper and should be eliminated. Hefelmann, for instance, stated that two thousand petitions reached the Chancellery each day.[24] But it is very likely that Gerhard’s case caught the attention of the KdF officials as they may have realised that this case could well serve as a precedent because of the clear-cut nature of the many disabilities of the boy.
More important than the context of the first ‘euthanasia’ murder, sanctioned by Hitler himself, is the actual meaning of this case. The relevance of this finding lies in the fact that the ‘beginning’ of the euthanasia programme would move much closer to the outbreak of war, thus changing not only the chronology of events quite significantly but also the speed with which the programme to kill handicapped infants was in practice implemented. No one questions that Hitler had for long anticipated killing handicapped children and adults, that plans and committees had been set up, and that he had informally confided his killing programme to some of his closest allies during the years 1933 to 1935 and thereafter. But it is one thing to plan something and state that you will do something, and quite another to actually perform the action. Moreover, in the context of the ‘euthanasia’ programme and even more so in that of the Holocaust, a change of chronology of about six to eight months can be of great importance and may enable us to gain a better insight into how the regime functioned in implementing its murderous policy.
For the events following Gerhard Herbert K.’s death, the following picture seems to emerge. Only three weeks after Gerhard died, on 18 August 1939, the ‘Reich Committee for the Scientific Registering of Serious Hereditary and Congenital Illnesses’ introduced the compulsory registering of all ‘malformed’ new-born children. Doctors were told to report all cases of idiocy, Down’s Syndrome, microcephaly, hydrocephaly, physical deformities such as the absence of a limb, and all forms of spastic paralysis. The decision to kill the children was taken by three expert referees, one of whom had been directly involved in the case of Gerhard Herbert K. His name was Professor Catel from Leipzig. The other two were Hans Heinze of Brandenburg-Görden and the paediatrician, Ernst Wentzler, a successful director of a private paediatric clinic in Berlin-Frohnau.[25]
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If Brandt is to be believed, then the sequence of events also reveals the extent to which the expeditious introduction of the children’s ‘euthanasia’ programme during the summer of 1939 was tightly intertwined with the killing of adults in the much larger killing programme ‘Aktion T-4’. Shortly after the conclusion of the Polish campaign Brandt was ordered to see Hitler at the Obersalzberg where, according to Brandt, the following conversation took place:
I was called to him for some reason which I can no longer remember, and he told me that because of a document which he had received from Reichsleiter Bouhler, he wanted to bring about a definite solution in the euthanasia question. He gave me general directives on how he imagined it [emphasis by the author], and the fundamentals were that the insane persons who were in such a condition that they could no longer take any conscious part in life were to be given relief through death. General instructions followed about petitions which he himself had received, and he told me to contact Bouhler himself about the matter.[26]
What we know about Hitler and his personalised rule, his informal decision making, his reluctance to commit himself on paper, his preference to provide his loyal servants with the ‘general gist’ of his ‘wishes’ which would give them an idea ‘how he imagined’ certain policy measures, all this makes Brandt’s statement plausible and credible. As Ian Kershaw has recently pointed out in his impressive Hitler biography, one of the key driving forces of Nazi Germany was that the people were, as he calls it, ‘working toward the Führer’, i.e. that they tried to fulfil those ideas which they imagined would be in the interest of their Führer and which Hitler had broadly outlined.[27]
The evidence which has been presented changes the chronology of events for the introduction of the children’s ‘euthanasia’ programme and gives additional weight to the argument that much of Nazi policy was implemented if actual policy developments suddenly corresponded to previously stated policy intentions. Nazi policies were often introduced shortly after the general situation seemed to indicate to Hitler the possible success of his measures, with the least possible resistance from any kind of opposition. To start the ‘euthanasia’ programme at the beginning of the war seemed to be the right timing, and, as often before, the incident of Gerhard Herbert K. played conveniently into Hitler’s hands. It provided him with a rationale to introduce his murderous policy which he had formulated in the 1920s and which remained surprisingly consistent once he was in power up until his suicide in the bunker under the Chancellery of the Führer.

FOOTNOTES:
Ernst Klee, ‘Euthanasie’ im NS-Staat. Die Vernichtung lebensunwerten Lebens (Frankfurt am Main, 1983), pp. 77f; Michael Burleigh, Death and Deliverance, ‘Euthanasia’ in Germany, 1900-1945 (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 93ff; Ulrich Schultz, ‘Dichtkunst, Heilkunst, Forschung: Der Kinderarzt Werner Catel’, Aly, G. (ed.), Reform und Gewissen, ‘Euthanasie’ im Dienst des Fortschritts. Beiträge zur nationalsozialistischen Gesundheits- und Sozialpolitik (Berlin, 1985), pp. 107-124, pp. 118f; Hans-Walter Schmuhl, Rassenhygiene, Nationalsozialismus, Euthanasie. Von der Verhütung zur Vernichtung ‘lebensunwerten Lebens’, 1890-1945 (Göttingen, 1987), pp. 182ff; Robert Proctor, Racial Hygiene. Medicine under the Nazis (Cambridge, Mass., 1988), pp. 185ff; Götz Aly (ed.), Aktion T4, 1939-1945. Die"Euthanasie"-Zentrale in der Tiergartenstraße 4 (Berlin, 1989); Henry Friedlander, The Origins of Nazi Genocide. From Euthanasia to the Final Solution (Chapel Hill, 1995), pp. 39ff; Matthias Dahl, Endstation Spiegelgrund. Die Tötung behinderter Kinder während des Nationalsozialismus am Beispiel einer Kinderfachabteilung in Wien 1940 bis 1945 (Wien, 1998), pp. 26-32; see also the chapter ‘Building a Research Laboratory: Medical Film and Children’s ‘Euthanasia’ in Ulf Schmidt, ‘Medical Research Films, Perpetrators, and Victims in National Socialist Germany, 1933-1945’ (Husum, forthcoming 1999).[Return to text]
For a scholarly introduction to the literature on the origins of the ‘euthanasia’ programme see Burleigh (1994), pp. 93-129 and Friedlander (1995), pp. 39-61.[Return to text]
Friedlander, for example, assumes that the death of the first child occurred in 1938 and states that ‘the infant of a family named Knauer’ was ‘apparently born with severe handicaps. The exact nature of its affliction cannot be reconstructed with certainty, but testimony does seem to agree that it was born with a leg and part of an arm missing’; Friedlander, p. 39; Burleigh notes that ‘in the winter of 1938-1939, the parents of a malformed infant called Knauer petitioned Hitler in order to bring about its death’, but concedes that ‘there are being several versions how it [the ‘euthanasia’ programme] started’; Burleigh, p. 93f.[Return to text]
Quoted from Burleigh, pp. 94ff; see also National Archives and Records Service, Records of the United States Nuremberg War Crimes Trials. United States of America v. Karl Brandt et al. (Case 1) November 21, 1946-August 20, 1947 (Washington, 1974), pp. 2396ff.[Return to text]
Hessisches Hauptstaatsarchiv, Abt. 631a/79, GStA Frankfurt. Anklage Heyde, Bohne und Hefelmann, Js 17/59 (GStA), 22 May 1962, p. 48.[Return to text]
Hessisches Hauptstaatsarchiv, Abt. 631a/79, GStA Frankfurt. Anklage Heyde, Bohne und Hefelmann, Js 17/59 (GStA), 22 May 1962, pp. 49-51.[Return to text]
BAB, 62 ka1, Kanzlei des Führers, 242, Reichsausschuß zur wissenschaftlichen Erfassung von erb- und anlagebedingten schweren Leiden, Reichsbeihilfen für den Reichsausschuß, 1940-1945.[Return to text]
According to the archive of the Children’s Clinic at the University of Leipzig all patient files and finding aids of the 1930s and 1940s have been destroyed. The only remaining finding aid is a so called ‘coded card-index’ (Verschlüsselungskartei) which dates back to the beginning of the 1950s and provides references to files stored in what the archivist calls the ‘bunker’.[Return to text]
Philippe Aziz, Les medicins de la mort (Geneva, 1975).[Return to text]
Philippe Aziz, Doctors of Death (Geneva, 1976), vol.4, pp. 11-15.[Return to text]Top of page
Aziz, Doctors, vol.4, pp. 11f.[Return to text]
Aziz, Doctors, vol.4, p. 13.[Return to text]
Schmuhl also notes that it is not possible to clarify who exactly petioned to the Chanclery of the Führer since the individual testimonies differ quite substantial from one another. Moreover, the letter requesting that the child should die has never been discovered; see Schmuhl, p. 430.[Return to text]
Aziz, Doctors, vol.4, p. 14.[Return to text]
Udo Benzenhöfer, ‘Der Fall „Kind Knauer"’, Deutsches Ärzteblatt, 95 (1998), No.19, pp. 954-955.[Return to text]
Benzenhöfer, p. 955.[Return to text]
Ev.-Luth. Pfarramt Pomßen mit Großsteinberg und Grethen, Hauptstraße 31, 04668 Pomßen, church register (Begräbnisbuch) for the year 1939. According to Benzenhöfer the two children who died in 1938 in Pomßen did not fit the profile of the ‘Knauer child’, i.e. that the child was severely handicapped and male, that the child was the first child in the family and that, according to Aziz, the killing occurred during the summer months; Benzenhöfer, p. 955.[Return to text]
Ibid.[Return to text]
Ibid; The children were killed separately; usually they were given an overdose of the sedative luminal (Phenobarbitone) and veronal (sleeping tablets) which caused congestion of the lungs. As a result the children generally contracted pneumonia, bronchitis or other breathing deficiencies which eventually resulted in death. The second choice was morphine-scopolamine, the third death by starvation. The children did not die of poisoning, but from the medical complications caused by the overdose of a common medicine; see also Burleigh, p. 103; Friedlander, pp. 54f.[Return to text]
Ibid.[Return to text]Top of page
Nürnberger Staatsarchiv, KV-Anklage, No-3008.[Return to text]
Nürnberger Staatsarchiv, KV-Anklage, No-3008.[Return to text]
Proctor, p. 186.[Return to text]
Burleigh, p. 93. [Return to text]
For Heinze see Franz-Werner Kersting, Anstaltsärzte zwischen Kaiserreich und Bundesrepublik. Das Beispiel Westfalen (Paderborn, 1996), pp. 351f; for Wentzler see Schmidt (forthcoming), pp. 229-268.[Return to text]
Quoted from Burleigh, p. 97; see also National Archives and Records Service, Records of the United States Nuremberg War Crimes Trials. United States of America v. Karl Brandt et al. (Case 1) November 21, 1946-August 20, 1947 (Washington, 1974), pp. 2396ff.[Return to text]
Ian Kershaw, Hitler. 1889-1936: Hubris (London, 1998), pp. 527-591.