March 24, 2005
Traditional Values
The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum features an online display showing how German physicians under Adolf Hitler (and even before Hitler came to power) had created a euthanasia program to kill those deemed “unworthy of life.” According to the Museum: “The victims included the mentally retarded, the institutionalized mentally ill, and the physically impaired.”
The Museum noted: “The ‘euthanasia’ program required the cooperation of many German doctors, who reviewed the medical files of patients in institutions to determine which handicapped or mentally ill individuals should be killed. The doctors also supervised the actual killings. Doomed patients were transferred to six institutions in Germany and Austria, where they were killed in specially constructed gas chambers. Handicapped infants and small children were also killed by injection with a deadly dose of drugs or by starvation. The bodies of the victims were burned in large ovens called crematoria.
The roots of Hitler’s euthanasia program began in 1920 with the publishing of an essay by Dr. Alfred Hoche and law professor Karl Binding. The essay, “Releasing Persons from Lives Devoid of Value,” recommended a new medical ethic to deal with mental patients and those whose lives were considered worthless.
According to Hoche and Binding, useless individuals were to be killed to save money and to release them from the perceived miseries of living a life devoid of value.
Hoche introduced the concept of “mental death” to describe the retarded or those who suffered from other forms of brain damage (much like Terri Schiavo’s condition). He described these people as “human ballast” and said that killing them would be useful and allowable act under the law.
The idea of “mental death” and killing the handicapped swept rapidly through Germany. In 1931, a group of psychiatrists met in Bavaria to discuss the sterilization and killing of those with chronic mental illnesses. By 1936 the practice of killing the socially unfit was so common that it was mentioned only incidentally in a German medical journal.
Dr. Leo Alexander, a Boston psychiatrist, detailed the horrors of the pre-Nazi and Nazi euthanasia program in an essay titled, “Medical Science Under Dictatorship,” published in the July 14, 1949 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine. Alexander served as a consultant to the Secretary of War during the Nuremberg trials.
According to Alexander, the shift that took place among doctors was subtle. It began with the view that there is such a thing as a life not worthy to be lived. “Gradually,” said Alexander, “it led to killing the socially unproductive, the ideologically unwanted, the racially unwanted, and finally all non-Germans.”
Robert Jay Lifton writing in The Nazi Doctors describes the Nazi euthanasia program and its eventual use against the Jews.
The philosophy of the Nazi doctors lives on today in the minds of federal judges and pro-euthanasia organizations as well as Michael Schiavo and his New Age attorney George Felos.
http://www.traditionalvalues.org/modules.php?sid=2196