History Unfolded: US Newspapers and the Holocaust

Headline: Practice of 'Mercy Killing' Reported Spreading in Germany
Sub-Headline: Bishop Denounces Nazi Principle Of Death for 'Unproductives'

Publication Date: Friday, October 10, 1941
Historical Event: German Bishop Condemns The Killing Of People With Disabilities
This database includes 241 articles about this event
Tags: Gannett full page downloadable; Deportation and Mass Murder; Resistance; Anti-Nazi Protest and Activism; Eugenics and People with Disabilities
Article Type: News Article
Newspaper: Poughkeepsie New Yorker
Location: Poughkeepsie, New York
Page Section and Number: 9
Author/Byline: Correspondence of the Special News Service
Article Text: BERLIN—(Correspndence of the Special News Service)—The spreading practice of "mercy killing," quietly advocated by certain Nazi quarters, has come into the spotlight in Germany.

An officially approved film, "Ich Klage An," ("I accuse") has made the question of killing mental defectives, invalids and the incurably sick, because they are "unproductive" under the Nazi concept, one of public debate.

Expose Made
At the same time the outspoken Bishop of Muenster, Count Clemens August Von Galen, has made an expose of Nazi "mercy deaths" and denounced the practice. Some months ago the Lutheran bishop, Theophil Wurm, of Wuerttemberg also attacked "mercy death" teaching in a letter addressed to Adolf Hitler.

Bishop Von Galen, who unhesitatingly speaks his mind and of late has even defied the Gestapo (secret police), warned that if the principle of "killing unproductive fellow creatures" is recognized, then even the lives of crippled war veterans and the aged aren't safe.

"I have been assured that in the ministry of the interior and in the office of the Reich's leader of physicians (health director) Dr. Leonardo Conti, no secret is made of the fact that a great number of insane in Germany already have been deliberately killed and in the future are to be killed," he declared as recently as August 3 in a sermon at St. Lamberti's church, Muenster, Westphalia.

The film, which received widespread and extensive press notice, had its premiere in the presence of Dr. Conti. It is a story of a doctor and his young wife who is wracked by an insurable disease. Unable to find the means to check her illness, the doctor takes the life of his suffering wife with an overdose of poison upon learning she has only two months to live.

The film deals at length with the court trial of the doctor on a charge of murder but ends without the verdict, leaving that to the audience. The course of the evidence is an appeal made to the human side of the case and a suggestion of a change in the present German law which would, for example, permit medical commissions to decide whether a person should legally be given a mercy death.

The film undoubtedly was designed to do the necessary spade work.

Thousands Believed Killed
There is no reliable information as to how many thousands of Germans already have been given a mercy death, apparently through painless gas.

Catholic bishops, in a letter read in all churches last June in which they warned that "Christianity was at stake in Germany," also made a fleeting generalized reference to mercy kill.

There are sacred obligations of conscience," their letter said,"from which no one can free us and which we must fulfill even if it costs us our lives. Never under any circumstances may a human being, aside from war and justified self-defense, kill an innocent person.'"

Bishop Von Galen elaborated that statement in his sermon, now making the rounds of Germany in chain letter fashion.

"For several months," the bishop said, "we have heard reports that patients who have been ill for a long time and perhaps appear to be incurable have been forcefully removed from sanatoriums and asylums for the insane by orders from Berlin.

"Regularly then, after a short time, a relative received notice that the person had died, the body had been cremated, and the ashes could be delivered. A suspicion, bordering on certainty, exists generally that these numerous and unexpected cases of the death of the insane don't happen of themselves but are intentionally brought about, that the teaching is being followed which maintains that one may destroy the lives of so-called 'persons unworthy to live,' and so kill innocent persons if one thinks their lives are no longer of use to the nation and state."

This was a reference to the cardinal Nazi principle that the nation is everything and the individual nothing.

"Only what is of use to the nation may be a binding guide for that we do or don't do," Dr. Conti recently said.

The letter, quoting the bishop's letter, continued:

Teaching Called 'Frightful'
"It is a frightful teaching which would justify the murder of the innocent, which fundamentally permits the violent killings of invalids no longer able to work, cripples incurably ill and those weakened with old age.

"According to reliable information, lists are now being made up in santoriums and asylums in the province of Westphalia of such patients who as so-called 'unproductive countrymen,' are to be taken away and in a short time deprived of their lives. The first transport left the institution at Marienthal near Muenster in the course of this week (July 31).

"No. 211 of the Reich's penal code still has the force of the law which prescribes: 'Whoever intentionally kills a person shall, if he carried out the act with deliberation, be punished with death because of murder.' In order to protect those who premeditatively kill those poor sick persons, members of our families, from this legal punishment, the sick who are intended for death are transported from their homeland to a distant institution.

"As the cause of death then, any kind of sickness is given. Because the body is immediately cremated, relatives and also the police later can no longer establish whether the sickness really existed and what was the cause of death.'

The bishop then outlined how upon learning of the Marienthal incident, he filed a complaint with the state's attorney and the police president in Muenster. His letter asked "for the protection of threatened countrymen by action against an official intending murder."

The bishop said he had received no information that the police or the state's attorney had interfered.

"The first transport of innocent persons condemned to death has left Marienthal," he continued, "and according to what I hear, 300 patients already have been taken from the sanatorium at Warstein."

Reasoning Assailed
Going into the reasons given for the "mercy deaths," the bishop said that "according to the judgment of some doctor, according to the opinion of some commission, they have become 'unworthy to live,' because according to these judgments, they belong to 'unproductive countrymen.' One judges that they no longer can produce goods, they are like an old machine which no longer runs; they are like an old horse which has become incurably lame; they are like a cow which no longer gives milk."

"What does one do with such old machines?" the letter continued. "They are scrapped, what does one do with a lame horse, with such unproductive cattle—no, I won't carry the comparison to the end x x x.

"But concerned here are no machines or horse or cows whose only purpose is to serve mankind, to produce goods for man. One may destroy them, slaughter them as soon as they are no longer able to fulfill their destiny. But concerned here are human beings, our fellow creatures, our brothers and sisters. Unfortunate human beings, sick human beings—unproductive human beings, for all I care. But have they thereby forfeited their right to live?"

"Have you, have I the right to live only so long as we are productive, so long as we are regarded as productive by others? x x x If it is once conceded that men have the right to kill 'unproductive fellow creatures' and if at first it affects only poor helpless insane persons—then fundamentally the murder of all unproductive persons is given free rein[sic], the murder of incurably sick persons and cripples unable to work, invalids of industry and war, of us all when we become old and weak with age and therewith unproductive.

"Then it is only necessary to issue a secret decree that the method tested on the insane also is to be extended to other unproductives, that this also may be used in incurable pulmonic patients, aged invalids, and soldiers seriously injured in the war!

"Then none of our lives is safe any more; some kind of commission can put you on a list of 'unproductives' who, according to their decision, have become unworthy to live. And the police won't protect you, no court will avenge the murder and mete out the justified punishment to murder! Who then can still trust his doctor! It isn't to be imagined what the letdown in morals and what general mutual mistrust will be carried even into families if this frightful teaching is tolerated, accepted and commanded."
History Unfolded Contributor: Jacob B.
Location of Research: Newspapers.com (https://www.newspapers.com)

Euthanasia Program (Holocaust Encyclopedia)
Nazi Persecution of the Disabled: “Murder of the Unfit”
Bishop of Muenster Protests Killings

Bibliography

Aly, Götz, Peter Chroust, and Christian Pross. Cleansing the Fatherland: Nazi Medicine and Racial Hygiene. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994.

Burleigh, Michael. Death and Deliverance: "Euthanasia" in Germany c. 1900-1945. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.

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

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