Killing humans and saving money

Death and Deliverance: "Euthanasia" in Germany 1900-1945 - Michael Burleigh

As many as 200,000 Germans were murdered by their fellow countrymen. Their crime in the eyes of the Nazi ideologues was that they were mentally ill or physically disabled.One aim was central to the Nazi ideology: the so-called "purification" of the race. The other was styled as practical: to save money and resources for the Reich, and to create space in the institutions that cared for the mentally ill so that civilian and military battle casualties could have the use of them. After the war the Americans found, at one of the main euthanasia centres, a careful calculation that had been made by the functionaries there as to the monetary savings which this mass murder had achieved for the Third Reich. Given the cost of maintaining each mental patient in that particular institution, and assuming a life expectancy of ten years per patient, the practitioners of euthanasia calculated a saving of almost a billion Reichsmarks.

The origins of these crude and criminal euthanasia killings lay in pre-Hitler scientific tracts and theories. But most of those who carried out the mass murder of those Germans who were labelled as "mental defectives" during the Hitler years were not men of science or theory. The euthanasia programme, Burleigh writes, "represented a modest form of social mobility, whereby butchers, cooks, policemen or tram-ticket collectors could, and did, become camp commandants". They were "brutal and insensitive" before they started their euthanasia work, "tough and hard-drinking working-class males, who could have a party around a corpse or weep drunkenly as they sang plangent songs about their homeland around the barrack stove in the extermination camps". Two years before Jews were being deported to their deaths, Germans with severe mental or physical disabilities were being taken from hospitals to gas chambers.

The euthanasia killings of Germans by Germans were, like the mass murder of Jews, the subject of many postwar trials. As late as 1987 one such trial found two Germans guilty of having been the accessories to the murder respectively of 11,000 and 4,500 people in mental institutions. They received four-year prison sentences which, Burleigh points out, were one year more than the statutory minimum sentence for the same offence involving one victim. Yet in 1988 a Federal court of appeal decided that as both men must have taken holidays and leave while working in extermination centres, the number of victims for which they were personally responsible must have been "only" 9,200 and 2,340 respectively, whereupon their sentences were cut to three years.

Burleigh shows that the number of people who courageously protested, among them the Roman Catholic Bishop of Munster, Bishop Galen, was very small. Ironically, by the time of Galen's public protest in August 1941, the main euthanasia killing programme had been halted, having slightly exceeded its target of killing one chronic patient per thousand inhabitants of Germany, a horrendous statistic. But, on Hitler's express instructions, the euthanasia of children continued and, when the personnel involved in the adult killings were released from their task, these same experts took part in the first killing of Jews by gas, in specially designed vans sent to the Baltic. Other euthanasia functionaries were transferred to one of the first death camps for Polish Jews, located in the remote village of Sobibor. Just as their work against Germans had taken place in isolated sanatoria, so much of their new work was deliberately hidden in obscure regions. One of those who had participated in the work of five separate euthanasia centres before 1941, Christian Wirth, was made the commandant of the death camp at Belzec, where 600,000 Jews were killed by gas.

From the Times Higher Educational