On August 24, 1941, Hitler quietly ordered Brandt to “end” Aktion T4.
It came 146 days too late for Ruth.
There is much speculation about why Hitler ended Aktion T4. Some researchers believe the outspoken protest sermon by the Catholic Archbishop of Münster, Bishop August Graf von Galen, in early August, 1941, played a major role. Under the Nazi Regime, any kind of public protest had the risk of imprisonment or worse. Indeed, during the implementation of the Sterilization Law of July 14, 1933, there was little, if any, protest by the public or churches.
“[T]he ‘law for the prevention of hereditarily diseased offspring,’ provided for the compulsory sterilization of all people afflicted with a wide range of diseases or disabilities, such as deafness, feeble-mindedness, alcoholism, and schizophrenia. It sparked considerable discussion in Christian – particularly Catholic – circles, but German Christians remained silent.”
Bergen, Doris L. Twisted Cross: The German Christian Movement in the Third Reich, The University of North Carolina Press, Charlottesville, NC, 1996, page 40.
Despite this, on Sunday, August 3, 1941, in a sermon at the Münster cathedral, Bishop von Galen “forcefully attacked the authorities for the systematic murder of the mentally ill and handicapped.” Bishop von Galen was one of the first to make a public protest. Other voices joined in, such as Bishop Wurm of Württemberg but Bishop von Galen was one the most well-known and most influential of church officials to publicly speak out.
Bishop August Graf von Galen
The German episcopate had a pastoral letter read from every pulpit in the country denouncing the taking of ‘innocent lives’ four weeks before von Galen’s sermon. Thousands of copies of the sermon were then printed and “passed hand to hand, all over Germany, even to the soldiers fighting on the Russian front.” It is interesting to wonder if one of these pamphlets made its way to Heinz, fighting in the Wehrmacht, and what he must have thought if he did hear the rumors.
Ruth’s family must have heard the rumors; generations later, my grandmother told me that the Nazis killed Ruth.
Scattered protests by patients’ families and friends also began happening which “aroused the local villagers, the churches, and ultimately a large part of society in a manner unique in the history of Nazi Germany.” Even the patients themselves had suspicions, even if they were unable to voice or communicate their concerns to the outside world.
“The institutionalized patients were aware and concerned about the fate of their colleagues, who were shipped away on the gray patient-transport buses [Gekrat], only to be followed a week or so later by a flurry of simultaneous death notices. It was no secret. There are enough extant letters of appeal or farewell written by institution inmates, desperate letters written to the authorities by the families of patients, to make it evident that patients were aware of what was happening.”
Gallagher, Hugh Gregory. By Trust Betrayed: Patients, Physicians, and the License to Kill in the Third Reich. Vandermeer Press, 1995, p. 10.
But perhaps the most indisputable, public evidence of the killings was the widely viewed smoke from the euthanasia centers crematoriums. “The dreadful and sickening smell of burning bodies that permeated the neighborhood of Hadamar served as a keen reminder, should anyone forget.” This impossible to deny or explain away evidence may have played a part in the cessation of the program.
Smoke spews from the crematorium at the Hadamar Euthanasia Center. Photo from United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
Additionally, Hitler did not want to publicly battle a powerful church official on this issue. “The Nazi leader decided not to retaliate against Galen at this crucial state of the war. Accounts with the church would be settled later, he declared.” It was to be the only time “in the history of the Third Reich that prominent representatives of the Christian churches in Germany voiced public condemnation of the crimes committed by the regime.” Hitler and his advisors also appear to have been startled by the domestic unrest. All of this occurred in the midst of the Russian campaign which was supposed to have been an easy victory but was proving much more costly and prolonged. Hitler wanted no disruptions or weakening of support on the home front which may have been enough to end Aktion T4.
Other researchers believe the ending of Aktion T4 was simply due to Hitler reaching his goal.
The original target goal of Aktion T4 was calculated by the formula: 1000:10:5:1. (Read this blog's post from Dec. 15, 2023 for detailed description of this number.)
By August 24, 1941, the target of 70,000 patients had been exceeded by 273. Gotz Aly wrote, “When Hitler halted …T4 on 24 August 1941, he did so for a number of different reasons.”
The Aktion T4 program may have ended but the killings did not. By the time Hitler quietly ordered a suspension of the gassing program, valuable lessons in mass murder had been learned.
All the experience gained from the Aktion T4 in the euthanasia killing centers would go on to be used in concentration camps, first on Soviet prisoners of war (POW) and then on the Jewish people in Hitler’s ‘Final Solution’.
There were even mobile killing vehicles invented and supplied by the Gaubschat Fahrzeugwerke GmBH. ‘Nazi Gas Vans’ using carbon monoxide or gas canisters in a specially designed chamber allowed killings to be taken ‘on the road’ to Pomerania, Eastern Prussia, and Poland.
The lessons learned had deadly effects:
“Even after Hitler ordered a stop to the T4 euthanasia program in 1941… the killing accelerated and encompassed an ever-wider spectrum of persons deemed chronically sick and unproductive. While the gas chambers were largely dismantled, and repurposed for the killing of Jews, persons with disabilities were murdered through starvation, neglect, and deadly or debilitating injections.”
Rosenblum, Warren. Review of Gӧtz Aly’s Die Belasteten. http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=41610
It is this “wild” phase of the euthanasia, along with the purposeful destruction of records, that makes finalizing the final definitive number of victims of the various euthanasia programs so abstruse and enigmatic. Twenty years ago, the number of victims was calculated at approximately 200,000; once former East German databases became accessible and research continued, the number of victims rose to the current calculation of over 300,000 victims.
It seems likely that there was no single motivation for the ‘stop order’ but simply a combination of all the factors mentioned. In reality, Aktion T4 only ended, as Historian Robert Proctor noted, when "the drawn guns of the Americans put an end to the 'destruction of useless eaters.'"
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