In Europe

to further inspection. In this way Bodelschwingh hoped to win time, but the arrangement also had something ambiguous to it: we have our problems of conscience and law, you handle the dirty work. What's more, they allowed themselves to be talked into yet another concession: the patients were to be preselected by the clinic's own physicians. This was done so proficiently that the euthanasiasts went along with almost all their recommendations, and so finished their work much more quickly than they had expected.
    There was, in other words, nothing like a director who almost literallythrew himself before the trucks to save his patients. On the contrary. The reports show that the euthanasiasts saw the entire expedition to Bethel as a festive outing. The very first afternoon they ate ‘quite sumptuously’ in the city's
Ratskeller
, as Dr Mennecke wrote in a letter to his ‘
liebe Putteli
’, and on Sunday the gentlemen took the bus together to visit the monument to the Germanic chieftain Hermann/Arminius in the Teutoburg forest. They made no attempt to disguise the real reason for their visit to Bielefeld. The personnel at the
Ratskeller
in particular overheard a great deal. ‘It spread through the countryside like wildfire,’ Bodeschwingh complained in a letter to Hitler's personal physician Karl Brandt, an acquaintance of his. ‘Within a day after the doctors arrived there were farmers who came up to our patients working the field and asked them: “Did you know that the murder committee has arrived in Bielefeld?”’ In light of the ensuing unrest, he then asked: ‘Can't you ask the Führer to let matters rest, at least until after the war, when there will be a clear legal foundation for all this?’
    After the euthanasiasts’ visit, plans were made to warn the families of the threatened patients. And in Bethel's archives there is indeed a draft letter from Bodelschwingh in which he points out the possibility that ‘in the near future, patients from Bethel may be transferred to other institutions’. In it, he emphasises that ‘for many of our patients it will no longer be possible to fulfill the duties agreed upon’. Stefan Kühl suspects, however, that this warning was never sent: there are no letters to be found with questions or replies from alarmed family members. And the draft letter also shows us something else: Bodelschwingh expected to have to call off his resistance within the foreseeable future.
    What am I now to conclude about the Bethel affair, after my day of research? The place of honour on Wiesenthal's map of resistance is undeserved, that much is clear. Under duress, Bodelschwingh tried to save his clinic, his conscience and his own skin. That is all quite human and understandable. It would be misleading, however, to elevate him after the fact to the status of a Protestant saint of the resistance. He was not one of those with that ‘rare capacity for resistance’. The unsung Paul Braune was probably such a man, and so were a few other clergymen and physicians. Were they not fit to be made heroes of the resistance? Or was there something else? Was it the Evangelical Church's elite whowere in particular need of a hero, in order to maintain their moral authority after the war?
    For years Bodelschwingh's successors stymied all attempts to use the clinic's archives for research into the history of ‘resistance’ at Bethel. As one of them explained most frankly in 1964, such research posed the danger of making public a ‘murky history of failure in many Christian circles’. He was right about that. Bodelschwingh was, as we say in the Netherlands, a typical ‘wartime mayor’. He was anything but principled, he was also no hero, and at Bethel these days that heroic commemoration is simply one more burden to bear. His greatest objection to the campaign had to do with its legal basis, not with its ethics. And he was not alone in that; there were even Nazis who felt that the euthanasia campaign required special legislation.
    Still, with all his weaving and dealing, this director-clergyman finally achieved his goal: he won time, and he was left alone. In Westphalia, in summer 1941, another twenty-seven hospital transports took 2,890 patients to the gas chambers at Hadamar. Bethel was spared. In late August, on Hitler's orders, the programme was stopped – for the time being. The protest from the churches, unrest such as that at Bethel, the Führer did not need that. In any case, the Nazis’