- Headline
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A Horrible Story of the Cruel Murder of Tens of Thousands of Innocents
- Publication Date
- Monday, May 12, 1941
- Historical Event
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Other Noteworthy Findings
This database includes 1,580 articles about this event - Article Type
- Newspaper
- Location
- Page Section and Number
- 18
- Author/Byline
- --
- Article Text
- THE CURRENT number of the New Republic contains an accusation against the German Nazis at once so startling and so terrible that doubtless four persons out of five who read it will reject it as incredible. The temptation will be to consider it as merely a sample of an inevitable crop of atrocity tales. But the New Republic article is written by Michael Straight, formerly of the Department of State on the basis of information which he says was supplied to him by "a dignitary of the Church whose name must be withheld." It charges that last year the Gestapo quietly put to death 85,000 Germans who could make no contribution to the national war effort. These comprised the blind, the incurably sick, the mentally defective, and the senile.
The only thing in the way of documentary evidence that Mr. Straight's informant was able to supply was a copy, dated December 16, 1940, of the official Vatican journal in which the decrees of the COngregation of the Holy Office are published (in Latin) for the guidance of bishops. On one page of this issue appears a question as to whether it is lawful "by order of public authority directly to kill those who, although they have committed no crime deserving death, yet because of mental or physical defects, are no longer able to benefit the nation, and are considered rather to burden the nation and to obstruct its energy and strength." Beneath the question is published the reply: that to do so is contrary to both natural and divine law. This decree, dated December 16, was formally approved by Pope Pius XII.
Neither the idea of euthanasia of the unfit and nonproductive nor the rigid opposition to it of the Catholic Church is particularly new. Thus it seems unlikely that question a question on such an elementary and obvious point of Christian morals would have been submitted for purely theoretic reason. Barring the possibility of forgery, it is a fair inference that the question was referred to the Holy Office by some member of the hierarchy whose priests had actually come face to face with the problem. Mr. Straight says that the question came from a German bishop. And he adds that the persecution of the Church in that country has been intensified as the consequence of sermons preached there against euthanasia and sterilization, and that publication of the decree has been forbidden.
All this, to be sure, may amount to something less than proof positive The point, however, which distinguishes this horrible tale from the atrocity stories of twenty-five years ago is that, true or false, it fits logically into the totalitarian concept of the relation of the state and the individual. The right of the state to take, this or any other action, without regard to objective ethics, has been implicitly stated again and again in the preachments of Hitler, Ley, Rosenberg and other Nazi theologians. Euthanasia by the Germans of their own "unfit" would be merely a more efficient application of Bolshevik logic. In the Soviet Union the Bolshevik condemned not thousands but millions of innocent peasants to' death by starvation because their existence "obstructed the energy and strength of the nation," that is to say, because it hindered the collectivization of agriculture. And it is precisely on the same principle that the Nazis have justified the systematic extermination of the Jews and the Poles, and, by keeping the cream of French manhood as prisoners of war, of the French too. - History Unfolded Contributor
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Marisa A.
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