Euthanasia in the Third Reich (Satis Shroff)

N MEMORY OF CHILDREN MURDERED IN THE NAME OF MEDICINE (Satis Shroff)

Rcently, I went to an exhibition at the Meckelhall at ths Sparkasse-Finanz-Zentrum in downtown Freiburg. The exhibits had the title ‘Im Gedenken der Kinder,’ in memory f children. The subtitle was: the Children’s physicians (Kinderärzte) and the crimes on children during the reign of the National Socialists.

It was a guest-exhibition of the German Society for children and youth Medicine (DGKJ) in cooperation with the Historical Commision of Brandenburg and the Institute for History of Medicine of the Charite university medicine in Berlin.

There was a map showing the children’s special department, which ranged from Schleswig-Hesterberg and Königsberg in the north of Germany to Graz ‘Feldhof’ and Klagenfurt in the South, and Waldniel’ Bonn, in the west to Tiegenhof Loben, and Vienna ‘Am Spiegelgrund’ in the east.

This exhibition has become a reality 75 years after the initiation of the systematic killing of mental and physically disabled humans in the years 1939-40. This was the time Children’s Euthanasia (mercy killing) during the years of the Third Reich.

By applying the laws of Nazi racist-ideology, medical crimes were committed on ill, disabled children and youth. Over 10,000 young people were murdered in medical experiments till 1945 in different programmes for the elimination of lives that were deemed as ‘unworthy’ by the nazi racist scientists and medical professionals.

The exhibition shows that the male and female physicians were not interested in treating individual sufferings of the patients but were merely concerned with the extinction of lives that the Nazis thought to be a ballast for the supercilious and arrogant German racist society in accordance with the  national socialist racist-ideology—if they could ‘serve science.’

A poster with a smiling blonde girl, wearing a tie and a white blouse and braided hair, depicted: ‘Jugend dient dem Führer.’ Youth serves the leader, with the suggestion that ‘all ten year olds should join the Hitler Youth.’

In those days all the previous youth associations were disbanded and were replaced by the state association called Hitler Jugend (youth).

The Hitler Jugend became an instrument of national socialist education and pre-military training. Hitler wanted to create a youth which was supposed to be ‘tough as leather, as hard as Krupp steel and fast as grey-hounds.’

The state educational institutions held a grip on citizens from childhood onwards and the children were taught to think nothing but German, to feel German and to behave in the German way. The Ministry for Propaganda under Joseph Goebbels was responsible for all dissemination of information and it enabled a perfect control of public opinion.

Germany, Italy and Spain had one thing in common in those days: disillusionment. Germany had lost the 1914-18 war, Italy was resentful about her small post-war gains. Spain had become a third-rate power. People were growing restless under the Catholic church, the aristocracy who owned lots of property and the army. In Italy, the slogan was ‘Mussolini is always right’ and its members wore black shirts (brown shirts in Germany and black for the Gestapo (secret police) and were organised in military formations and used the Roman greeting of outstretched arms.

For Hitler, the racist ideology was the central point in his philosophy, which made its debut in the Party Programme of 1920. It was anti-Semitism: a fellow citizen can only be some who is a fellow German. A fellow German can only be someone who is of German blood, regardless of his religion Therefore, no Jew could be a German. There was also the Aryan paragraph’ against doctors, dentists, chemists, lawyers, solicitors, artists and journalists. Among many discriminatory laws was § 1 1 which declared as forbidden for Jews, who had reached the age 7, to appear in public without the mark of a Jewish star.

Final solution: The concentration camps were set up by the Nazis in Poland such as Auschwitz, Belzeck, Majdanek, Sobibor and Treblinka, were turned into extermination camps in which Jews were murdered. The poisonous nerve gas Zyklon B was used in special gas chambers of the extermination camps. Added to these were other victims who died due to forced labour and malnutrition. Others were shot by special firing squads (Einsatzgruppen) in the occupied territories. Between 5 to 6 million Jews were murdered by the Nazis.

A discussion was held on February 26, 2018 at 7pm with the theme: ‘On Idiot-institutes and family nursing with children and euthanasia: a comparative look at the German-French history of how people dealt with retarded children from 1880-1940. The lecture was held by Prof. Dr. Christian Bonah and Dr. Gabriele Moser SAGE, university of Strasbourg.

On March 8, 2018 a film ‘Mist in August’ was shown, followed by a discussion with Prof Dr. Michael von Cranach at the big hall of the Centre for Children and Youth Medicine in Freiburg.

Today, we have a modern democracy in Germany and it is democratic to discuss about political and religious question in public. Whereas, Chancellor Merkel from the CDU made a statement that Muslims belong to Germany, her new Minister for Internal Affairs Seehofer, CSU,  contradicted her and said Germany is a Catholic country.  It must also be mentioned that the rightist party AfD has acquired seats in the German Bundestag legally via elections, which goes to show that a lot of things are possible for leftists, rightists, greens and different shades of democrats under the German Fundamental Laws.