In Europe

to the positions of the
rassenreinen Zigeuner
and the
Mischlinge
. ‘Lives unworthy of being lived’, they suggested, were better off being terminated.
    Starting in summer 1939, the Nazis introduced a special euthanasia programme for the mentally and physically handicapped. The operation had the code name T-4 (the programme's head offices were at Tiergarten Strasse 4, a stately villa that has since disappeared) and was led by a steering committee of physicians, professors and top government officials. At the start of the campaign, it was estimated that 70,000 candidates were eligible for this ‘merciful death’: one out of every five psychiatric patients. But, the T-4 officials realised, it would take far too much time to dispose of such a large group by means of individual injections: the use of gas chambers would be more in keeping with their planning. In the end, six institutions around the country were designated as locations for gassing, and eleven ‘special hospitals’ were set up to put children ‘to sleep’.
    Before long, the euthanasia campaign had become a poorly guarded secret. The newspapers began filling with death notices for handicapped persons, all of whom had unexpectedly died of ‘heart failure’. Some families removed their relatives from the hospitals, but the general reaction to this silent mass murder was one of resignation. Typical was the request one potential victim's mother sent to the administrators of the Eckardsheim clinic at the Bethel nursing home: ‘If my son is to be withheld further life, please see to it that he is put to sleep during a seizure in [his ward] Tannenwald, please give him something to that end. I know then that he will have been in the most dedicated of hands until he drew his final breath. How else can I ever be happy again for the rest of my days?’
    The killing became a part of the ‘great unspoken’. Doctors and nurses – hundreds, if not thousands, of medical people must have been involved in this operation – participated obediently. Protests did come, however, from the churches. Clergy presiding at the funerals of some of the victims spoke openly about how they had died. In a packed St Lambertus Church in August 1941, the Bishop of Münster, Clemens August von Galen, railedagainst the use of euthanasia. In the Bavarian town of Absberg, in early 1941, residents reportedly stopped the buses that were taking away doomed patients. But the centre of resistance often named is that of the Bethel nursing home.
    Today Bethel is an enormous care complex at the edge of town, a place I would never have visited if Simon Wiesenthal's big war map had not showed it as one of the few locations of German resistance to the Nazis. The reason for its inclusion was the principled refusal of its director, Pastor Friedrich von Bodelschwingh, to admit even a single euthanasiast to the grounds. When the police vans arrived to round up ‘his patients’, he stood in the gateway himself, spread his arms and shouted: ‘You will only enter this house over my dead body.’ This was what I had been told. After the war the German churches lauded him as ‘a great shepherd of Christianity’, ‘the man with the clearest vision within the churches’ and a model of ‘unbending resistance, with no regard for his own person’.
    I receive a warm welcome to the hospital archives. When the archivist hears my story, he smiles shyly. ‘Well, I'm afraid we must be honest.’ The older people probably needed a story about heroes, but the younger generation is interested only in the truth. ‘It was all investigated carefully, about ten years ago. But have a look for yourself.’
    He hands me a thick report, written by Stefan Kühl and published by the student association of the University of Bielefeld. The study is part of a series dealing with National Socialism in the region, and everything about it shows that Kühl left no stone unturned while researching the archives. I start reading. The story of Bethel is indeed one about courage, but also about the want of courage. It is about knowing, consciously knowing. And it is about saying nothing – above all, about saying nothing.
    ‘An inhuman regime spreads and extends its inhumanity in all directions, also and especially downwards,’ the Italian concentration camp prisoner Primo Levi wrote. And it undermines our ability to judge. ‘The generally accepted realisation that one does not submit to violence, but resists it, is from