From Euthanasia to Mass Murder Alex Grobman, PhD
In a ground breaking new study, Austrian medical historian Herwig Czech, debunks the myth that Hans Asperger, who was the first to describe a group of children with distinctive psychological features as “autistic psychopaths,” had opposed the Nazis and defended his patients against the Nazi ‘euthanasia’ program.
The article entitled “Hans Asperger, National Socialism, and ‘race hygiene’ in Nazi-era Vienna, published in Molecular Autism reports that Asperger sent patients to the Am Spiegelgrund clinic in Vienna, where almost 800 children were murdered by poisoning and other means from 1940 to 1945.
“The picture that emerges is that of a man who managed to further his career under the Nazi regime, despite his apparent political and ideological distance from it,” Czech concludes. “This was not least due to opportunities created by the political upheaval after Austria’s Anschluss (annexation) to Germany in 1938, including the expulsion of Jewish physicians from the profession.”
By making political compromises to Nazi dogma, Asperger advanced his career by cooperating with the race hygiene system, including the Nazis’ child “euthanasia” program.
The Evolution of Sterilization into Euthanasia Killing Centers
What is often overlooked, is that before the Nazis sent Jews to the gas chambers, where they were murdered with Zyklon-B or carbon monoxide, the Nazis created clandestine programs that systematically targeted certain groups of people for extermination.
The sterilization programs began in late 1933, as historian Henry Friedlander wrote in the Origins of Nazi Genocide. Within a year, 32,268 individuals were sterilized. In 1935 there were 73,174. Justification for this treatment included schizophrenia, epilepsy, alcoholism, deafness, blindness, manic-depression psychosis and feeblemindedness. Those deemed sex offenders were castrated.
In the summer of 1939 Adolf Hitler moved from sterilizing “inferiors” to euthanizing physically and mentally handicapped children and then adults who suffered from the same challenges. To conceal the murders, sizable doses of medicine were administered in a tablet or liquid in order to appear to be an overdose. Families were then informed of the death. Whenever a patient refused to take the medication, a lethal injection was used. After the number of deaths increased substantially, patients were relocated from secluded wards to separate killing wards.
Tiergarten Strasse no.4, Berlin
In 1939 the Nazis transferred the administrative operation to an office complex at Tiergarten Strasse no.4 in Berlin, a villa once owned by Jews noted German journalist Ernest Klee, who exposed and documented Hitler’s medical crimes. The program became known as Operation T4 or simply T4, the “Reich Work Group of Sanatoriums and Nursing Homes.” The physicians determined who would live and who would be murdered. Patients capable of performing only “routine” activity were killed. Before August 1941, historians estimate that about 5,000 children and 700, 000 adults were murdered in the euthanasia program.
As the number of killings rose, the demand to acquire a more efficient method of murdering the handicapped had to be found. Medication and injections were not efficient, and probably too expensive. According to testimony of Dr. Karl Brandt, who administered the T4 euthanasia program, he and Hitler conferred on different methods and determined that gas would be “the more humane way” to kill the enemies of the Third Reich.
After conducting a two-day series of gassing experiments at one facility, five other killing centers were established in Germany. Friedlander described the process, which took less than 24 hours: Gas chambers were made to look like showers. After the victims were gassed, their corpses were separated, marked with an “X” gold removed from their teeth and then cremated.
Friedlander concluded: “The success of the euthanasia policy convinced the Nazi leadership that mass murder was technically feasible, that ordinary men and women were willing to kill large numbers of innocent human beings, and that the bureaucracy would cooperate in such an unprecedented enterprise.”
After the war, T4 doctors asserted that since euthanasia was a means of “deliverance,” which Jews did not merit, they were not included in the euthanasia program. Friedlander exposed this claim after finding that Jews were listed among the earliest transports sent to theT4 killing center. Rather than being processed in the unhurried and uncertain routine procedure that involved individual medical examinations, Jews were transferred and murdered as a group.
Public Outcry in Germany Forced the Nazis to Conduct Mass Murder in the East
The Nazis also recognized that mass murder could not continue in Germany, because the German public objected to this “radical violation of the law.” If mass murder of Jews would be a primary objective of the Third Reich, the process had to be transferred to Poland and the occupied territories of the Soviet Union.
When the Nazis invaded Russia on June 22, 1941, Germany began its first systematic efforts to exterminate the Jews. Four Einsatzgruppen (A, B, C, and D action groups) followed frontline German army units to find and liquidate Jews, saboteurs, Communist political leaders and anyone deemed a threat to the Third Reich.
This campaign of mass murder soon proved to be too public and too costly. Friedlander explains that Reich Leader SS Heinrich Himmler and his men realized the lessons learned by T4 could be applied to their operation: transport the victims to a central location where they could be murdered in an efficient manner, away from public scrutiny and that the T4 killing centers would be used as a porotype in creating the extermination camps.
By 1945 six million Jews were murdered. The process started in January 1940 when the Nazis began murdering “the most helpless human beings, institutionalized handicapped patients.” When Hans Asperger and other physicians throughout Germany participated in the killing process, they lent credibility and legitimacy to the pseudo –science that led to murdering the “inferior” and “non-productive” members of their society.
Alex Grobman, a Hebrew University-trained historian, has written a number of books on the Shoah including Denying History: Who Says the Holocaust Never Happened and Why Do They Say It? with Michael Shermer; License to Murder: The Enduring Threat of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion; Battling for Souls: The Vaad Hatzala Rescue Committee in Post-War Europe; and Genocide: Critical Issues of the Holocaust with Rabbi Daniel Landes. He has also written fours guides for educators: “Anne Frank in Historical Perspective,” “Those Who Dared: Rescuers and Rescued,” a guide to “Schindler’s List” and a guide on the Danish rescue of the Jews. He served as director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles and as the founding director of the Holocaust Center in St. Louis, Missouri.
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