Hitler

release from terminal illness.
    According to the comments of his doctor, Karl Brandt, in his post-war trial, Hitler was known to favour involuntary euthanasia at the latest from 1933 onwards. His position was indicated in his reply in 1935 to the Reich Doctors’ Leader Gerhard Wagner. Evidently, Wagner was pressing for radical measures to bring about the ‘destruction of life not worth living’. Hitler reportedly told him that he would ‘take up and carry out the questions of euthanasia’ in the event of a war. He was ‘of the opinion that such a problem could be more smoothly and easilycarried out in war’, and that resistance, as was to be expected from the Churches, would then have less of an impact than in peacetime. He intended, therefore, ‘in the event of a war radically to solve the problem of the mental asylums’.
    For the next three years, Hitler had little involvement with the ‘euthanasia’ issue. Others were more active. Evidently encouraged by Hitler’s remarks that he did intend, once the opportunity presented itself through the war for which the regime was preparing, to introduce a ‘euthanasia programme’, Reich Doctors’ Leader Wagner pushed forward discussions on how the population should be prepared for such action. Calculations were published on the cost of upkeep of the mentally sick and hereditarily ill, instilling the impression of what could be done for the good of the people with vast resouces now being ‘wasted’ on ‘useless’ lives. Cameras were sent into the asylums to produce scenes to horrify the German public and convince them of the need to eliminate those portrayed as the dregs of society for the good of the whole population. The National Socialist Racial and Political Office produced five silent films of this kind between 1935 and 1937.
    Meanwhile, the ‘Chancellery of the Führer of the NSDAP’, the agency which would come to run the ‘euthanasia action’ from 1939 onwards, was doing all it could to expand its own power-base in the political jungle of the Third Reich. Despite its impressive name, the Führer Chancellery had little actual power. Hitler had set it up at the end of 1934 to deal with correspondence from party members directed to himself as head of the NSDAP. It was officially meant to serve as the agency to keep the Führer in direct touch with the concerns of his people. Much of the correspondence was a matter of trivial complaints, petty grievances, and minor personal squabbles of party members. But a vast number of letters to Hitler did pour in after 1933 – around quarter of a million a year in the later 1930s. And, to preserve the fiction of the Führer listening to the cares of his people, many of them needed attention.
    Hitler put the Führer Chancellery under the control of Philipp Bouhler – a member of the Party’s
Reichsleitung
(Reich Leadership) since 1933, a quiet, bureaucratic type but intensely loyal and deferential, and ideologically fanatical. Exploiting his direct connections with Hitler, the vagueness of his remit, and the randomness of the business that came the way of the organization he headed, he was now able to expand his own little empire. Of the various departments, the most important wasDepartment (
Amt
) II (from 1939 Main Department –
Hauptamt
) headed by Bouhler’s deputy, Viktor Brack. This Department itself covered a wide range of heterogeneous business but, in its section ‘IIb’, under Hans Hefelmann, was responsible for handling petitions relating to the Reich Ministry of the Interior, including sensitive issues touching on the competence of the health department of the Ministry. Brack, five years younger than Bouhler, was, if anything, even more ambitious than his boss, and was ideologically attuned to what was wanted. He was ready to grasp an opportunity when he saw one.
    This came some time in the first months of 1939. Around that time the father of a severely handicapped child – born blind, with no left forearm and a deformed leg – in Pomßen, near Leipzig, sent in a petition to Hitler, asking for the child to be released through mercy-killing. The petition arrived in Hefelmann’s office in the Führer Chancellery. Hefelmann did not consider involving either the Reich Ministry of the Interior or the Reich Ministry of Justice. He thought it should be taken to Hitler himself, to see how the Führer thought it should be handled. This was probably in May or June 1939. Hitler sent his doctor, Karl