NIH, Abstract: This article, in commemoration of the 70th anniversary of the Doctors’ Trial at Nuremberg, reflects on the Nazi eugenics and “euthanasia” programs and their relevance for today. The Nazi doctors used eugenic ideals to justify sterilizations, child and adult “euthanasia,” and, ultimately, genocide. Contemporary euthanasia has experienced a progression from voluntary to nonvoluntary and from passive to active killing. Modern eugenics has included both positive and negative selective activities.
The 70th anniversary of the Doctors’ Trial at Nuremberg provides an important opportunity to reflect on the implications of the Nazi eugenics and “euthanasia” programs for contemporary health law, bioethics, and human rights. In this article, we will examine the role that health practitioners played in the promotion and implementation of State-sponsored eugenics and “euthanasia” in Nazi Germany, followed by an exploration of contemporary parallels and debates in modern bioethics.1
Go to: MEDICINE AND PUBLIC HEALTH IN NAZI GENOCIDE
The involvement of health practitioners in conceptualizing, initiating, and implementing Nazi mass murder remains an unparalleled case of medicine and public health’s participation in genocide.2 By January 1933, more than half of the German medical profession had joined the Nazi Party and many participated in the murder of Jews, Sinti, and Roma; the disabled; the mentally ill; and other “unfit” persons under the guise of improving public health and Rassenhygiene (racial hygiene, the German version of eugenics).3,4
Doctors in Germany became tightly integrated into the Nazi Party and supportive of its ideals. During the Weimar period, a large number of German doctors were unemployed or under-employed and witnessed a decline in their honor and prestige. The Nazi Party seemed like an organization that could reestablish physicians with the power and status they had lost. In 1929, physicians within Germany formed Nationalsozialistischer Deutscher Ärtzebund (The National Socialist German Physicians’ League) and unified the goals of physicians and the State. Physicians joined the Nazi Party both earlier and in larger numbers than any other group of professionals...
More, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5719686/
- Euthanasia Centers in Germany, 1940 -1945, US Holocaust Memorial Museum,
https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/map/euthanasia-centers-germany-1940-1945
- Hartheim Euthanasia Centre where 18,000 people were killed by the Nazis in the 'Aktion T4 campaign.'
-(Wiki). Aktion T4 was a campaign of mass murder by involuntary euthanasia in Nazi Germany. The term was first used in post-war trials against doctors who had been involved in the killings. The name T4 is an abbreviation of Tiergartenstraße 4, a street address of the Chancellery department set up in early 1940, in the Berlin borough of Tiergarten, which recruited and paid personnel associated with T4. Certain German physicians were authorised to select patients "deemed incurably sick, after most critical medical examination" and then administer to them a "mercy death" (Gnadentod). In October 1939, Adolf Hitler signed a "euthanasia note", backdated to 1 September 1939, which authorised his physician Karl Brandt and Reichsleiter Philipp Bouhler to begin the killing.
The killings took place from September 1939 until the end of the war in 1945; from 275,000 to 300,000 people were killed in psychiatric hospitals in Germany and Austria, occupied Poland and the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia (now the Czech Republic). The number of victims was originally recorded as 70,273 but this number has been increased by the discovery of victims listed in the archives of the former East Germany. About half of those killed were taken from church-run asylums, often with the approval of the Protestant or Catholic authorities of the institutions.
The Holy See announced on 2 December 1940 that the policy was contrary to divine law and that "the direct killing of an innocent person because of mental or physical defects is not allowed" but the declaration was not upheld by some Catholic authorities in Germany. In the summer of 1941, protests were led in Germany by the Bishop of Münster, Clemens von Galen, whose intervention led to "the strongest, most explicit and most widespread protest movement against any policy since the beginning of the Third Reich", according to Richard J. Evans.
Several reasons have been suggested for the killings, including eugenics, racial hygiene, and saving money. Physicians in German and Austrian asylums continued many of the practices of Aktion T4 until the defeat of Germany in 1945, in spite of its official cessation in August 1941. The informal continuation of the policy led to 93,521 "beds emptied" by the end of 1941. Technology developed under Aktion T4, particularly the use of lethal gas on large numbers of people, was taken over by the medical division of the Reich Interior Ministry, along with the personnel of Aktion T4, who participated in Operation Reinhard. The programme was authorised by Hitler but the killings have since come to be viewed as murders in Germany. The number of people killed was about 200,000 in Germany and Austria, with about 100,000 victims in other European countries... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aktion_T4
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