Asking the right questions: euthanasia

-personal physician to Adolf Hitler, Karl Brandt, director of the Euthanasia Program. August 27, 1942

-Friederich Menneke, Nazi euthanasia program physician

-Holocaust Encyclopedia

Aktion T4 – Nazi euthanasia program


Child “Euthanasia” Program





Extending the “Euthanasia” Program

-Hitler’s authorization


The Führer Chancellery was compact and separate from state, government, or Nazi Party apparatuses. For these reasons, Hitler chose it to serve as the engine for the “euthanasia” campaign. The program’s functionaries called their secret enterprise “T4.” This code-name came from the street address of the program’s coordinating office in Berlin: Tiergartenstrasse 4.

According to Hitler’s directive, Führer Chancellery director Phillip Bouhler and physician Karl Brandt led the killing operation. Under their leadership, T4 operatives established six gassing installations for adults as part of the “euthanasia” action. These were:

  • Brandenburg, on the Havel River near Berlin
  • Grafeneck, in southwestern Germany
  • Bernburg, in Saxony
  • Sonnenstein, also in Saxony
  • Hartheim, near Linz on the Danube in Austria
  • Hadamar, in Hessen

Euthanasia Program

Using a practice developed for the child “euthanasia” program, in the autumn of 1939 T4 planners began to distribute carefully formulated questionnaires to all public health officials, public and private hospitals, mental institutions, and nursing homes for the chronically ill and aged. The limited space and wording on the forms, as well as the instructions in the accompanying cover letter, combined to give the impression that the survey was intended simply to gather statistical data.

The form’s sinister purpose was suggested only by the emphasis placed upon the patient’s capacity to work and by the categories of patients which the inquiry required health authorities to identify. The categories of patients were those suffering from:

and other chronic psychiatric or neurological disorders
those not of German or “related” blood
the criminally insane or those committed on criminal grounds

Secretly recruited “medical experts,” physicians—many of them of significant reputation—worked in teams of three to evaluate the forms. On the basis of their decisions beginning in January 1940, T4 functionaries began to remove patients selected for the “euthanasia” program from their home institutions. The patients were transported by bus or by rail to one of the central gassing installations for killing.


Because the program was secret, T-4 planners and functionaries took elaborate measures to conceal its deadly designs. Even though physicians and institutional administrators falsified official records in every case to indicate that the victims died of natural causes, the “euthanasia” program quickly become an open secret. There was widespread public knowledge of the measure. Private and public protests concerning the killings took place, especially from members of the German clergy. Among these clergy was the bishop of Münster, Clemens August Count von Galen. He protested the T-4 killings in a sermon August 13, 1941. In light of the widespread public knowledge and the public and private protests, Hitler ordered a halt to the euthanasia program in late August 1941.


Second Phase




People with Disabilities in the German-Occupied East

Persons with disabilities also fell victim to German violence in the German-occupied east. The Germans confined the Euthanasia Program, which began as a racial hygiene measure, to the Reich proper—that is, to Germany and to the annexed territories of Austria, Alsace-Lorraine, the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, and the Warthegau in former Poland. However, the Nazi ideological conviction which labeled these persons “life unworthy of life” also made institutionalized patients the targets of shooting actions in Poland and the Soviet Union. There, the killings of disabled patients were the work of SS and police forces, not of the physicians, caretakers, and T4 administrators who implemented the Euthanasia Program itself.




The Significance of the Euthanasia Program

The Euthanasia Program represented in many ways a rehearsal for Nazi Germany’s subsequent genocidal policies. The Nazi leadership extended the ideological justification conceived by medical perpetrators for the destruction of the “unfit” to other categories of perceived biological enemies, most notably to Jews and Roma (Gypsies).



-by Trent Horn

“On February 25, 1990, twenty-six-year-old Terri Schiavo collapsed at home and suffered oxygen deprivation. Paramedics rushed her to the hospital but, while they were able to save her life, Schiavo was left in a persistent vegetative state (PVS) until she died from having her feeding tube removed in 2005.

No one would deny that Terri was a person prior to her collapse, but did she lose her personhood once she became brain damaged?

Lawyer and author Wesley J. Smith and bioethicist Bill Allen debated this on Court TV Online. At one point Smith asked, “[D]o you think Terri is a person?” to which Allen responded, “No, I do not. I think having awareness is an essential criterion for personhood. Even minimal awareness would support some criterion of personhood, but I don’t think complete absence of awareness does.”

Many people share Allen’s view, believing that humans in persistent vegetative states are not persons anymore—and so they can be deprived of basic necessities like food or water in order to end their lives. But here are three questions you should ask those who defend euthanizing disabled people in these conditions:

1. Would you bury a breathing body?

When a person stops existing, we say that person has died. Normally, when a person has died, what remains is a corpse. However, if personhood is not an essential property of human beings, then there can be cases where a person has died but the “remains” left behind is a living, breathing human body.

A corpse should not be desecrated, but there is no obligation to treat it like a human being. It is not a human being but the remains of a human being. So why not treat someone in an irreversible coma like a corpse and load him into an incinerator? Why not bury him in a grave as their chest rises and falls until the dirt that covers his body causes his breathing to stop?

A person who did this might try to take solace in the assumption the person can’t feel anything, but to watch the spasms that living body would undergo as the lungs failed would probably sicken most people. They would see that this is not a corpse that is being buried, but a a disabled person who is being killed by asphyxiation.

Consider the case of Schiavo in particular. Over the fifteen years after her collapse, she did not require the use of a ventilator (except for immediately following the collapse) and was able to breathe on her own. In a sense, she simply required the care a baby would require—food, clothing, shelter, and someone to oversee the administration of this care. To deprive her of food and water just because she was disabled was to bring about her death not by some underlying disease but by depriving her of that which all humans require; it was to bring about her death by dehydration, a fate no human should have to endure.

2. Which disabled people deserve to be protected?

To those who support euthanizing people in persistent vegetative states, you could pose this question: “Should we help all disabled people no matter what disability they have? If not, on what basis do we decide who’s worth helping and who’s worth killing? Wouldn’t that result in us making a judgment call on the value of another’s life?”

Most people, being committed to justice and fairness, won’t say there are some disabled people we shouldn’t help. You can then ask, “What does it mean to be disabled or have a disability?” Most people, when comparing paraplegia, blindness, deafness, or mobility impairments would say that a disability is “something that keeps you from functioning like the majority of people.”

These could be physical disabilities that keep someone from acting a certain way or mental disabilities that keep someone from thinking a certain way. Normally, when someone has a disability we are compassionate towards him and try to accommodate his inability to function. For example, we make handicapped parking accessible or we put up signs in braille that the blind can read. Keeping this in mind, when someone is in a coma he is like individuals with other handicaps—he cannot function as the majority can. Shouldn’t we show such individuals compassion and make accommodations in their condition rather than say they aren’t persons?

3. How do you know they won’t wake up?

In 1989, a stampede at the Hillsborough Soccer Stadium in Sheffield England left ninety-six people dead and hundreds injured. One of the injured was Tony Bland, who went into a PVS and was later killed through the removal of nutrition. But one year later, Andrew Devine, another injured fan who also ended up in a PVS, began to show signs of awareness. In 2014 he was healthy enough to attend the 30th anniversary of the Hillsborough disaster.

Two years prior to Terri Schiavo collapsing, a twelve-year-old boy in South Africa, Martin Pistorius, became became so ill that he lived in a “virtual coma” for over a decade, incapable of communicating to others that he was aware inside. But one day, in 2001, the tender compassion of a caregiver interacting with Pistorius would lead the woman to think her patient was indeed aware and could communicate if creative ways were developed to do so.

Today Pistorius is happily married and has authored a book about his journey. Although for a time his need for basic care was similar to Schiavo’s, his outcome was very different than hers. But if we valued all humans as persons, regardless of current or perceived future abilities, then perhaps their endings would have been more alike.

In a radio interview about his ordeal, Pistorius reflected, “I think being seen and having another person validate your existence is incredibly important.” Powerful words for us and for anyone who thinks that disabilities can erase a person’s basic human worth.”


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