Culture Of Life 101… “The First Time Around: Euthanasia In Nazi Germany”

By BRIAN CLOWES

Conclusion

(Editor’s Note: Brian Clowes has been director of research and training at Human Life International since 1995. For an electronic copy of chapter 23 of The Facts of Life, a 150-page treatise on all of the aspects of euthanasia, e-mail him at bclowes@hli.org.)

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Step 2: Dehumanization

The first step toward the legalization of euthanasia is the launch of a saturation propaganda campaign with the eager assistance of the media. The second step is to dehumanize the target populations.
Most societies consider it morally repugnant to exterminate those who are traditionally recognized as human beings, so the elderly and ill must be demoted from persons to non-persons.
Nazi Germany. It is significant that anti-Semitism flourished simultaneously in both the early American and Nazi euthanasia movements. Leaders of the Nazi eugenics/euthanasia movement referred to Jews as “human ballast,” “garbage,” “human weeds,” “empty shells,” and “infections,” and believed that Jews and others not of Aryan quality “had to be treated like tuberculosis bacilli, with which a healthy body may become infested. This was not cruel, if one remembers that even innocent creatures of nature, such as hares and deer, have to be killed so that no harm is caused by them.”
In his book Mein Kampf (“My Struggle”), Adolf Hitler referred to Jews as “maggots in a rotting corpse”; “a plague worse than the Black Death”; “mankind’s eternal germ of disunion”; “drones in the human hive”; “spiders sucking blood out of the people’s pores”; “a pack of rats eating one another”; “the eternal bloodsucker”; “the vampire of peoples”; and “a harmful bacillus that spreads,” among many other degrading terms.
The Nazis referred to their extermination of the Jews as “resettlement”; “evacuation”; “clearing the area(s) of Jews”; “cleansing,” “disinfection,” “special treatment,” “moving to labor in the East,” “injecting off,” “putting to sleep like animals,” “discharging,” “the cleanup of the Jewish question,” and “the final solution to the Jewish question.”
The United States. In the mid-1930s, the pathologically anti-Semitic American Madison Grant argued that “sentimental beliefs” (such as Christianity) short-circuited the practice of infanticide, which he saw as a natural weeding out process necessary to the “preservation of the [human] species.”
Charles Davenport, another prominent American eugenicist, fumed: “Our ancestors drove Baptists from Massachusetts Bay into Rhode Island, but we have no place to drive the Jews to. Also, they burned the witches, but it seems to be against the mores to burn any considerable part of our population.”
Today, euthanasiasts routinely refer to profoundly handicapped people as “vegetables,” “mere collections of organs,” “post-human,” and “technological artifices.” Persons in intensive care units (ICUs) whom physicians consider “hopeless cases” are called “GORKs” (God Only Really Knows) or “GOMERs” (Get Out of My Emergency Room).

Step 3: Testing The Waters

The leaders of a social movement are constantly polling the populace in order to measure their attitudes. When they consider the time right, they test their theories in the real world — always on the hardest of cases at first — to see what the media and public reaction will be.
Nazi Germany. In 1935, Adolf Hitler convened a series of high-level conferences to discuss the possibility of establishing programs for liquidating the “incurably ill.” Just a couple of months later, the first large-scale murders of helpless people by the Nazi regime occurred when 12 mental patients were involuntarily euthanized at Hadamar.
Three years after that, Baby Boy Knauer of Leipzig was born blind and missing part of one arm and one leg. He was the ideal test case for Germany’s euthanasia/eugenics program. Hitler’s personal physician, Karl Brandt, murdered the child. The German euthanasiasts carefully observed the reaction of the judicial system and the media to this murder.
It was positive.
The United States. In 1967, euthanasia societies in the United States began to hold high-level conferences for the purpose of discussing the liquidation of “human vegetables” and the “incurably ill elderly.”
Twenty years later, the first large-scale murders of helpless people by American euthanasiasts occurred when eight elderly persons were starved to death at a nursing home in Galveston, Texas.
In 1982, Baby Doe of Bloomington, Ind., was born with an esophageal defect and spina bifida, both of which are surgically treatable. He was the ideal test case for America’s euthanasia/eugenics program. The baby was allowed to die of thirst and starvation. The euthanasiasts carefully observed the reactions of the judicial system and the press to this murder.
It was positive.

Step 4: Presenting
Motivations As Altruistic

Once the euthanasia program picks up steam and people begin to die by the thousands, organized opposition inevitably arises. Therefore, pro-euthanasia groups launch a dual-purpose propaganda program specifically designed to both portray themselves as rational and philanthropic, and to present their opponents as irrational and selfish.
These propaganda tools emphasize the benefits of euthanasia to the populace in general by helping to alleviate overpopulation. They also make always-vague promises that euthanasia will enable great advances in medical science to occur.
Nazi Germany. A primary concern of the Nazis was euthanasia for the purpose of expanding Lebensraum — “living space,” all for the good of Das Volk, of course.
The Nazis did not want the bodies of their victims to go to waste, so they salvaged their organs for the purposes of medical research that was touted as having the potential to provide vast medical benefits for all. As one of many examples, Nazi doctor Julius Hallervorden said to his concentration camp guards: “If you are going to kill all these people, at least take the brains out so that the material may be utilized.”
Nazi and American euthanasiasts even share the same language. By the end of World War II, a quarter of a million people had been exterminated under the euphemisms Den Recht Auf den Tod (“the right to die”), Todhilfe (“aid in dying”), and Gnadentod (“mercy killing” or “good [dignified] death”) — the exact words used by all American pro-euthanasia groups today.
A good example of the Nazis using this kind of language was the short directive signed by Adolf Hitler on September 1, 1939, authorizing his physicians to broaden the pool of those eligible for a “mercy death.” The complete text of the order read:
“Reichsleiter Bouhler and Dr. med. Brandt are instructed to broaden the powers of physicians designated by name, who will decide whether those who have — as far as can be humanly determined — incurable illnesses can, after the most careful evaluation, be granted a mercy death.”
The United States. Many American pro-euthanasia doctors would also like to eliminate “useless eaters,” and not just in our own country. The late Dr. Robert H. Williams of the University of Washington Medical School once said: “Planning to prevent overpopulation of the earth must include euthanasia, either negative or positive.”
In his ominously named book The Case for Compulsory Birth Control, Edgar R. Chasteen stated darkly: “Soon the world may well be engulfed by indescribable horrors as these nations of the starving are crushed under the weight of their teeming populations.”
Some American doctors are following the lead of their Nazi forerunners and are now proposing a “dissent form” approach to organ donation. These laws allow doctors to ransack any or all of the organs of those people who have not indicated a contrary wish in “Living Wills” or other legally binding documents. In 1988, Nevada became the first state to adopt this “dissent form” approach to organ donations.
The implications of this type of approach for medical experimentation are obvious. What euthanasia “doctor” could resist the opportunity to remove organs from a victim scheduled to die at a particular time?
Professor Ron Westover of Southern California wrote in 1985: “If subjects are needed to render accurate knowledge about the workings of the human mechanism, there is an endless supply. Take the extreme elderly, the senile, use the criminally insane, rapists, and murderers. They are largely useless and doomed anyway.”
Conclusions. It is certainly not necessary to make vague statements or insupportable comparisons between the German experience of euthanasia and the one that we are currently undergoing in the United States. We have hard quotes and facts to show that the progression is identical to that of Nazi Germany.
Pro-euthanasia activists are genuinely outraged at the comparison between their activities and those of the Nazi eugenicists. Just like pro-abortionists, they will do everything they possibly can to distract attention from their activities to tangential topics.
But the facts speak eloquently for themselves.
The lesson to be learned from all of this is as clear as mountain air. If the widespread killing of the handicapped and “useless” had been effectively opposed by ordinary Germans, there would have been no Holocaust.
This is a lesson from history that is especially important for us ordinary Americans to heed as the process begins again in our own nation. Nazi Germany offers us a stern lesson — and so far, we have ignored it.
Although the sequence of events in Belgium, the Netherlands, and the United States is not precisely the same as that of Nazi Germany, it is obvious from these events that we have already traveled far down the road to “euthanasia on command.”
The primary lesson we must learn from these progressions is that a certain utilitarian attitude toward human life will inevitably lead to a definite progression in euthanasia that is all but set in concrete. Thus, it comes as no surprise that many Nazi and American pro-euthanasia quotes are almost identical.