Hitler

sufficed for the children’s ‘euthanasia’ up to then. This is what prompted Hitler’s almost casual written authorization some weeks later, backdated (as we noted) to 1 September. This formless empowering, and the way the Führer Chancellery had been able, without the ministries of state even being informed, to expropriate control over a programme calculated to bring the deaths of tens of thousands in an action lacking any basis in law, is the clearest indication of how far internal structures of government had been deformed and superseded by executive agencies devoted to implementing what they saw as the will of the Führer. The cloak-and-dagger secrecy – some leading figures, including Brack, even worked with false names – highlighted the illegality of what was taking place. The regime had taken the step into outright criminality.
    The medical staff of the asylums selected their own patients for inclusion in the ‘euthanasia action’. They, too, were ‘working towards the Führer’, whether or not this was their overt motivation. Patients included had their names marked with a red cross. Those to be spared had a blue ‘minus’ sign against their names. The killing, mostly by carbon monoxide gas administered by doctors under no compulsion to participate, was carried out in selected asylums, the most notorious of which were Grafeneck, Hadamar, Bernburg, Brandenburg, Hartheim, and Sonnenstein.
    Alongside the T4 ‘action’, the Gauleiter of Pomerania, Franz Schwede-Coburg, rapidly alerted to the new possibilities, worked closely with the SS in October 1939 to ‘clear’ the asylums near the coastal towns of Stralsund, Swinemünde, and Stettin to make space for ethnic Germans from the Baltic region (and for an SS barracks at Stralsund). Patients were removed from the asylums, transported to Neustadt, not far from Danzig, and shot by squads of SS men. Gauleiter Erich Koch was quick to follow suit, arranging to pay for the costs of ‘evacuating’ 1,558patients from asylums in his Gau of East Prussia, liquidated by an SS squad provided by Wilhelm Koppe, newly-appointed Police Chief in Reichsgau Posen. This was the ‘Sonderkommando Lange’, which was soon put to use deploying prototype mobile gas-vans to kill the mentally sick in this part of annexed Poland. By mid-1940, these regional ‘actions’ had claimed the lives of an estimated 10,000 victims.
    By the time ‘Aktion-T4’ was halted – as secretly as it had begun – in August 1941, the target-figure laid down by the doctors in the late summer had been surpassed. In the T4 ‘action’ alone by this date, between 70,000 and 90,000 patients are reckoned to have fallen victim to Hitler’s ‘euthanasia programme’. Since the killings were neither confined to the T4 ‘action’, nor ended with the halt to that ‘action’ in 1941, the total number of victims of Nazism’s drive to liquidate the mentally ill may have been close on double that number.
    IV
    Was there the will to halt the already advanced rupture of civilization and descent into modern barbarism that had so swiftly broken new ground since the start of the war? And even if there were the will, could anything be done?
    Given Hitler’s outright dominance and unassailable position within the regime, significant change could by this time, autumn 1939, be brought about only through his deposition or assassination. This basic truth had been finally grasped the previous summer, during the Sudeten crisis, by those individuals in high-ranking places in the military, Foreign Ministry, and elsewhere close to the levers of power who had tentatively felt their way towards radical opposition to the regime. For long, even some of these individuals had tended to exempt Hitler from the criticism they levelled at others, especially Himmler, Heydrich, and the Gestapo. But by now they were aware that without change at the very top, there would be no change at all. This realization started to forge tighter links between the disparate individuals and groups concerned. Colonel Hans Oster, Chief of Staff at the Abwehr, backed by his boss, the enigmatic Admiral Canaris, was the driving-force in making the Abwehr the centre of an oppositional network, building on the contacts made and relationships forged the previous summer. Oster placed his most trustedassociate, implacably opposed to Hitler, Lieutenant-Colonel Helmuth Groscurth, as liaison with Chief of Staff Halder at the headquarters of the Army