Free Into That Darkness: From Mercy Killing to Mass Murder by Gitta Sereny Page B

had met. The protests of various Protestant and Catholic bishops in 1940 and 1941 reached a climax in the Galen sermon on August 3, 1941, at the St Lambert Church in Münster.
    It was during that summer too that Hitler, in the course of a trip through Hof, near Nuremberg, where his train was held up when some mental patients were loaded on to trucks, is said to have had the novel experience of being jeered at by an outraged crowd. Whatever the reason, on August 24, 1941, Dr Karl Brandt (as he was to testify later) received verbal instructions from Hitler at his HQ to stop the Euthanasia Programme. There is no written record of the order. Brandt transmitted it to Philip Bouhler by telephone.
* Philip Bouhler, Reichsleiter NSDAP, head of the Führer Chancellery, died, believed suicide, in prison camp at Emmerich, Bavaria, between May 18 and 21, 1945 (according to death certificate).
   Viktor Brack, SS Oberfhürer, Chief of Section II of the Fhürer Chancellery, executed at Landsberg, June 2, 1948.
   Werner Blankenburg, SA Oberfhürer, Brack’s second-in-command; escaped prosecution by changing his name to Bielecke; died in Stuttgart in November 1957.

* Although the “medical commission” did travel to some institutions, such careful medical examinations were by no means the rule. Most decisions of life or death were much more routinely made at T4, purely on the basis of a questionnaire which had been sent out by “Amt IVg” – subsection for institutional care – of the Ministry of the Interior to all mental institutions, asking for details on all patients who were senile, retarded or suffering a variety of other mental debilities: criminally insane, under care for five years or more, of foreign or racially impure extraction, incapable of work or capable of only routine mechanical tasks such as peeling vegetables. This was sent out on the pretext of gathering information to assist in economic planning (and apparently only two men in the Ministry were informed of the real purpose) but photocopies were then turned over to T4 “medical staff”, who marked each case with a plus or minus sign: Life or Death.

* Killed by partisans in Trieste in 1944.

§ See this page – this page for additional history of the camps in Poland and 111 for Stangl’s description, which contradicts the August date in the documents.

* Excused from euthanasia trial because of ill health; now living in the Black Forest.

† Committed suicide.

‡ “Child-euthanasia” was, on the whole, a separate programme, which began earlier and ended long after the general euthanasia Aktion .
   It was claimed by various defendants in euthanasia trials – and Dieter Allers repeated this to me – that “parents were asked to authorize ‘mercy-death’ ” for their children. What actually happened was that parents were informed that Kinderfachabteilungen – Special Sections for children – were being established all over the country. They were asked to sign an authorization for their severely disabled children to be transferred to these wards and were told that, as these were in fact intensive-care units where highly advanced experiments would be carried out, this represented a unique chance for their children’s possible recovery. This was how the Nazis obtained authorizing signatures – which were subsequently paraded in the trials. Eleven Special Sections were involved; each of them had between twenty and thirty beds. What is true, however, is that unlike the adults – children were kept in these wards for a period of observation lasting between four to eight weeks. But none of my informants was able to recall any case of a child who was returned to an ordinary hospital, or to its parents, once it had been taken to a “Special Section”. The children were “put to sleep” with injections and, from all accounts, were not aware of their fate.

* Werner was sent to a concentration camp, the legal record shows, not for asking to