The German Genius

most ghoulish, and important in its wider significance, was that which showed the Nazi leadership that mass murder would not be “significantly detrimental” to public morale. 60 This began, according to Aly and Heim, in a project by a Professor Karl Astel, head of the Thüringischen Landesamtes für Rassewesen (Thuringian Regional Office of Racial Affairs). As part of this project, an epidemiological study of the mentally ill was carried out, which came up with a figure of 65,000–70,000 mentally ill people who were to be eliminated on economic grounds. A list was drawn up and a program known as Aktion T4, after the address of its offices at Tiergartenstrasse 4 in Berlin, established. Aktion T4 calculations were designed to show how much money the Reich would save by not having to support mentally ill individuals. As part of this, in 1939 Hitler’s personal doctor, Theo Morell, prepared a document in which he quoted from a survey of parents of severely handicapped children, carried out in the 1920s, in which they had been asked “purely hypothetical” questions as to whether they would consent to a painless procedure to cut short the life of their handicapped offspring. The vast majority had answered “yes,” a minority adding that although they did not want to decide the fate of their own children, they would be quite prepared for the doctors to make the decision. Some had even suggested that the doctors do it and then tell the parents their child had died of an illness. On this basis, say Aly and Heim, the decision was made by the Nazi leadership to carry out the murder of German mental patients (and Hitler certainly knew about it). 61 It was done in secret, but the secret was allowed to leak out to see what the reaction of the patients’ relatives would be. On April 23, 1941, an official report concluded that “in 80 percent of cases, relatives are in agreement, 10 percent speak out against, and 10 percent are indifferent.” Nor was there any opposition from within the bureaucracy. “This was a lesson of fundamental importance for the organizers of the ‘final solution of the Jewish question,’” say Aly and Heim. “It convinced them that cover names would not be questioned, but would on the contrary be gratefully accepted, indeed expected, as an invitation to denial and moral indifference.”
     
     
    The eagerness with which so many scholars embraced National Socialism and their ideas is still shocking after all this time. It cannot be explained simply by the fact that so many junior figures were given early promotion after the Jewish seniors had been dismissed, exiled, or deported. Many senior colleagues—Martin Heidegger, Philipp Lenard, Ernst Krieck, Paul Schmitthenner—were equally enthusiastic supporters of the National Socialists. This amounts to yet another “Traihison des Clercs” but on a much bloodthirstier scale than ever before.

The Twilight of the Theologians
     
    W hen he was a boy of six, Adolf Hitler was for a short time a choirboy at the Benedictine monastery at Lambach in Austria. What he loved most, he said later, was “the solemn splendour of church festivals.” By the time he reached Munich in 1919, as a thirty-year-old ex-soldier, such religious feelings as he still had were a long way from Catholicism. By now Hitler was caught up with a völkisch sentiment, shaped by such people as Paul de Lagarde, whose version of Christianity was described earlier, in Chapter 22, a bastardization of faith in which it was asserted that Catholicism and Protestantism were “distortions” of the Bible, brought about mainly by St. Paul, who, Lagarde insisted, had “Judaised” Christianity. 1
    Many crude books circulated in the Vienna of Hitler’s day, one with the title Forward to Christ! Away with Paul! German Religion! Here too the argument was that the “poisoner Paul and his Volk” were the “arch-enemies of Jesus” who “had to be removed from the entrance to the kingdom of God” before “a true German church can open its doors.” The difficulty of Jesus’ being Jewish was circumvented in various ways, either by making him “Aryan” or, in the case of Theodor Fritsch, by arguing that Galileans were in fact Gauls, who in turn were German. (He claimed to have demonstrated this philologically.) All this became a central element in Hitler’s own view of Christianity, but on top of that he claimed to see in Jesus a mirror image of himself, “a brave and persecuted