The Nizkor Project: Remembering the Holocaust (Shoah)

Shofar FTP Archive File: places/germany/euthanasia/program.08

Newsgroups: alt.revisionism
From: Ken McVay 
Subject: Holocaust Almanac: T4 - Endloesung
Followup-To: alt.revisionism
Organization: The Nizkor Project, Canada
Keywords: T4

Archive/File: places/germany/euthanasia program.08
Last-Modified: 1994/06/02

T4 - The camouflage organization created for the medical killing of adults
was known as the Reich Work Group of Sanatoriums and Nursing Homes

In "The Nazi Doctors," Lifton demonstrates the relationship between the
Nazi medical killing program, which led to the gassing technology later
employed with such brutal efficiency at the death camps, and the existence
of the death camps themselves. He shows how the T4 program inexorably led
to the extermination of the Jews et al, and clearly demonstrates that this
was done as a matter of policy, ordered by Hitler himself.

Contrary to assertions held true by the Holocaust denial set, the German
government of the day clearly developed and implemented planned
extermination. Whether or not the end result was planned in 1933 or 1942
matters not - planned it was.

"Under T4, Jewish inmates of institutions in Germany did not have to meet
the ordinary criteria for medical killing (mental deficiency or
schizophrenia, length of hospitalization, capacity to work, etc.). For
them, `no special consultations or discussions ... were necessary.': `The
total extermination of this group of asylum inmates was the logical
consequence of the `radical solution' of the Jewish problem being embarked
upon. <75>

Only at this point does direct medical killing provide an _exact
_ prefiguring of the Final Solution: Jews were to be killed -- to the last
man, woman, and child -- simply because they were Jews. For the Nazis,
Jewish mental patients were unique among all Nazi victims in that they
could embody both `dangerous genes' in an individual medical sense, and
`racial poison' in a collective ethnic sense.

Sytematic T4 treatment of German Jews began in April 1940, with a
proclamation from the Reich Interior Ministry that, within three weeks, all
Jewish patients were to be inventoried. In June, the first gassings of Jews
took place, as two hundred men, women and children died in the Brandenburg
facility, having been transported there in six `Gekrat' buses from the
Berlin-Buch mental institution. There were more killings in July. On 30
August, another directive from the Interior Ministry ordered that Jews were
to be transferred to various centers, depending on their georaphic
location. It was explained that employees and relatives of Aryan patients
had complained about being treated and housed with Jews.<76>

The Bavarian collection center was Eglfing-Haar, where Dr. Pfannmueller had
once declared proudly: `No Jews are allowed in my institution!'<77> Now the
Jews transferred in were placed in two special houses (where they were
separated by sex rather than degree of illness) and thrust into
propaganda-film roles depicting them as `typical Jews' and `the scum of
humanity.' This segregation reflected the general policy that, in Schmidt's
ironic words, ``Aryan' mental patients could not be expected to die
together with Jewish patients, much less live together.'<78>
In the fall of 1940, Jewish patients began to be transported to
Nazi-occupied Poland as part of the policy of removing all Jews from
Germany. In December, it was announced that henceforth Jewish patientws
would be transferred to a facility for mentally impaired children in
Bendorf near Neuwied in the Rhineland. This was a privately owned Jewish
institution going back to 1869. Beginning in the spring of 1942, Bendorf
patients were sent to Poland, in trains with sixty to seventy patients
sealed in each freight car, trains that carried ordinary Jewish citizens as
well. The Bendorf hospital was supposed to be used for soldiers, but never
was. The director, a `privileged Jew' (married to an Aryan), stayed on to
act as caretaker in the empty facility.<79>

Once the Jewish patients were herded into trains, the pretense of
medicalized treatment ended. The trains arrived in Lublin, an area where
Polish Jews were being concentrated and where Jewish confiscated goods were
processed with slave labor. The precise fate of these patients is unknown
and probably varied, except for the final outcome -- their extermination in
such camps as Sobibor and Belzec.<80>

The T4 office set up a Jewish camouflage operation: on `Cholm Insane
Asylum' letterheads, statements of condolence and death certificates were
sent out. Couriers took the mail to Chelm (the Polish spelling), near
Lublin, where they were mailed with the proper postmark. As far as can be
determined, the `Cholm Insane Asylum' was a fiction.<81>" (Lifton, 71-72)

<75> Heyde Trial commentary, p.451
<76> Klee, "Euthanasia" [3], pp.258-60
<77> Hermann Pfannmueller, quoted in Schmidt, Selektion [37], p.68
<78> Ibid. p.67
<79> Klee, "Euthanasia" [3], pp. 261-63
<80> On Lublin, see Hilberg, "Destruction" [74] pp. 136-38, 292

                             Work Cited


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