Nazi Euthanasia: Why People Collaborated

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Why were the Nazis and their government, willing to conduct euthanasia on the mentally disabled, the physically disabled, and to those whom Hitler called, “asocials?” How did the Nazis enlist German citizens to participate in a program that existed to murder its own citizens? These are important questions that anyone studying the Holocaust should ask, especially anyone who serves as a medical doctor or a nurse practitioner. While many have given excuses or attempted to rationalize these actions, there are researchers who seem to have answered the previously stated questions: Henry Friedlander in his book, The Origins of Nazi Genocide: From Euthanasia to the Final Solutions, Susan Benedict shares her thoughts in the fifth chapter of Experience and Expression: Women, the Nazis, and the Holocaust, and Sheila Faith Weiss, in her article titled “The Race Hygiene Movement in Germany. Each of the three authors provides a litany of information on the implementation of euthanasia in Germany during the Third Reich. The information provided by Friedlander, Benedict, and Weiss, has areas of intersection and divergence. The common rationale seems to be: The Germans were true believers in their mission to purify the Reich, and the German people saw euthanasia as a more “humane” means of dealing with people who lived “lives not worth living,” and the always cited reason, because people were given orders.

In Henry Friedlander’s book, The Origins of Nazi Genocide: From Euthanasia to the Final Solution, Friedlander gives a comprehensive examination of the Holocaust and the systematic genocide orchestrated by the Nazis during their regime. Friedlander’s argument is that the Nazis’ initial policy of euthanasia for disabled and mentally ill individuals paved the way for the implementation of the Final Solution. Friedlander reveals the process of how hospitals that were built for helping people, were transformed into what he calls “Killing Centers.” Friedlander highlights the connection between the “T4” euthanasia program and the subsequent mass murder of Jews and other targeted groups during the Holocaust. (Friedlander, 86-110). Through this description, one can identify an improvised nature in how the Nazis conducted their executions. They began with overdosing patients with barbiturates through lethal injections. However, when Hitler supposedly asked one of his physicians, Karl Brandt, “’ Which is the more humane way?’ Brandt recommended the usage of gas.” (Friedlander, 86).

The book thoroughly explores how the Nazis justified and institutionalized the killing process, relying on ideologies, pseudo-science, and propaganda to rationalize their actions. Propaganda and pseudo-science are common themes in Holocaust research, but Friedlander shares the following “In theory, only physicians were supposed to administer the gas because it was considered a medical procedure, and Hitler had only authorized selected physicians, ‘designated by name,’ to ‘[grant] mercy death.’” (Friedlander, 96). The theme of “mercy death,” is a common rationalization for murdering the defenseless, but the idea that Hitler entrusted this detail to select people is very telling. Even the Führer had to hide his agenda, because most of the country were not members of the Nazi party, especially in the early years of the Reich. The “public secret” of euthanasia was met largely with indifference, in fact, many people who were not Nazis, agreed and supported the movement. (Friedlander, 107). “The perpetrators or passive collaborators involved were in no way conscious of their crimes, they were Germans and not Nazis. Among them were Catholic sisters. The chief nurse who had confessed without coercion, that she had murdered ‘approximately’ 210 children in the course of two years by intramuscular injection, asked simply ‘Will anything happen to me?’” (Friedlander, 218). While it is true that people supported the program, there were those who were cautious enough to conceal their identities. Specifically, the doctors. The older doctors mostly refused to participate in sterilizing and murdering children and the sick. However, younger doctors, used pseudonyms, like “Dr. Jager” and “Dr. Schmidt.” (Friedlander, 103). For these doctors to use fake names, they must have known what they were doing was antithetical to their oath to heal the sick, but the politics and promise of a racially superior nation were too fantastic for them to abstain from sterilization and murder.  

In the book, In Experience and Expression: Women, the Nazis, and the Holocaust, Susan Benedict contributes her thoughts on euthanasia in Chapter 5 titled, “The Nurses Trial at Hadamar and the Ethical Implications of Health Care Values.” Through the chapter, Benedict goes into the minds and motives of the Nurses that were conducting the sterilizations and executions. There is a sense that the Nurses thought that what they were doing was the right thing to do, that a painless execution was preferable to a life of suffering, and that the women needed to get paid. In one example, Benedict discloses, “Anna G was accused of participating in the killing of 150 patients. Her testimony exemplifies the rationalization used to convert the act of murder to one of mercy within the context of her Christianity. Interestingly, she regarded theft as a crime she would have been unwilling to commit, yet murder was transformed into an ‘act of mercy’” (Benedict, 102). The Nurses decision to ignore their conscience was emboldened by financial incentives. It is important to recognize that the Germans were in a recovery period from the Great Depression, over a decade of failed governments, and the oppressive conditions enforced by the Treaty of Versailles. While none of those conditions are excuses for immoral behavior, there were those that seized the opportunity to make money. Benedict reveals:

Economic factors influenced some nurses. Nurses working in the euthanasia units received pay raises and/ or bonus payments. For example, the nurses in the children’s euthanasia wards at Eglfing-Haar [a mental hospital] received about $10 extra per month. Other nurses later testified that they continued to work in the euthanasia programs because they were afraid of losing their jobs. As civil servants, the nurses had benefits not available in other employment positions.

(Benedict, 105).

Benedict concludes by describing a strange, polarized relationship that the Nurses had with their patients. On one hand, the Nurses were there as healthcare workers, while at the same time, they were murderers. Unlike the stories of Nazi guards at concentration camps or the soldiers on the front lines, the Nurses felt compassion for their victims. As Benedict wrote, “The paradoxical behavior of nurses gently holding patients while feeding them lethal doses of medication, killing while caring, should remain a visible part of nursing history so that nurses will remember that at a time in the not-too-distant past personal morality was set aside for political purposes.” (Benedict, 107).

Sheila Faith Weiss focuses heavily on the Nazis’ implementation of targeted euthanasia, or what they called “Race Hygiene.” The idea of “cleaning” the population of negative traits that were thought to be transferred through bloodlines. The Nazis believed that they could kill off the undesirable elements of their society, or at least sterilize them so that they could not procreate, to see Hitler’s vision of an Aryan Nation, come to fruition. Weiss dispels the idea that racial purification was solely a desire held by the Nazis. Weiss writes, “Looking only at developments during the Third Reich, it would be easy to come to the false conclusion that race hygiene was always a right-wing movement. German eugenics, however, was far more heterogeneous in its politics and ideology than is generally assumed.” (Weiss, 194).

Moreover, Weiss continues by exposing the theme that the eugenic policies of the Nazis were desired by other groups and shared with other nations. While it is true that most Germans were not Nazis, it is also true that non-Nazis agreed with what the Nazis were doing. Weiss exposes the mostly liberal Weimar Republic as also participating in the popular pseudo-science of eugenics. “The attempt to popularize eugenics during the Weimar period was also accompanied by substantial institutional expansion. Before 1920 Germany lacked any institutional center for eugenics and could boast only a few isolated university courses in race hygiene.” (Weiss, 221). Weiss continues by showing that Germany was looking to the West for guidance in euthanasia, “Race Hygiene,” and other solutions to social issues. “The drafting of a sterilization law in Germany was a long time coming. Prominent eugenicists had carefully monitored events in the United States, where sterilization was legally practiced after 1907.” (Weiss, 227). While it is true that many Western countries engaged in euthanasia and that they did it long before Hitler rose to power, those nations did not systematically kill children to create a Racial State. The Germans who were destroyed after WWI, saw the prosperous Western countries and chose to emulate them. Unfortunately, they did not emulate the parts about freedom, civil liberties, and capitalism. Instead, they sought the eugenics angle. “Like eugenicists in the United States and Britain, the Germans also analyzed the cost of maintaining the army of the unfit. The word most often used to describe these individuals was Minderwertigen a term that literally means ‘the less valuable’ and was frequently employed as a synonym for nonproductive people.” (Weiss, 210). Like Benedict, Weiss reminds her readers of the economic incentives surrounding euthanasia. She reveals, “The depression that began in 1929 not only eventually made more than six million people unemployed, but also forced a reexamination of the continued expansion of the welfare state. Calls were heard from industrial circles to trim Germany’s welfare budget; ‘social policy must be limited by the productivity of the economy.’”

In conclusion, the economically dismantled Germans looked to productive Western nations and sought to emulate their eugenics policies to fulfill their own goals of creating a hyper-productive racial State. The people who participated in the policies were either true believers of the Nazi mission or they saw the practice as a necessary evil; either as “Mercy killings” or for their own financial means. The Nurses who may have claimed to be just following orders must have known that what they were doing was wrong, by the secretive nature of their actions. The doctors who participated, most of whom were heavily indoctrinated by the Nazi philosophy and were very young, had the common sense to hide their names. Clearly, a person who goes through the efforts of using a pseudonym knows that what they are doing may and probably will hold negative consequences. When other nations found out about the T4 program, Hitler shifted his efforts to killing his primary target, the Jews of Europe.

Bibliography

Baer, Elizabeth Roberts, Myrna Goldenberg, and Susan Benedict. “Chapter 5: The Nurses Trial at Hadamar and the Ethical Implications of Health Care Values.” Essay. In Experience and Expression: Women, the Nazis, and the Holocaust, 95–110. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2003.

Friedlander, Henry. The Origins of Nazi Genocide: From Euthanasia to the Final Solutions.Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1995.

Weiss, Sheila Faith. “The Race Hygiene Movement in Germany.” Osiris 3 (1987): 193–236. http://www.jstor.org/stable/301759.