On September 21, 1940, war correspondent William Shirer recorded in his "Berlin Diary" (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1941) that "X" had told him "a weird story." He had said that the Gestapo was "systematically bumping off" the mentally deficient people of the Reich and that the Nazis were calling them “mercy deaths.” According to X, Pastor Bodelschwingh, the head of a large hospital for different kinds of feeble-minded children in Bethel, had been arrested because he had refused to turn over some of his more serious mental cases to the secret police. Not long afterwards, his hospital was bombed by the “British" (p. 512). On November 25, 1940, Shirer wrote that it seemed that after having refused to turn over his patients to the authorities, Bodelschwingh had protested through a surgeon friend to Hitler, who said that nothing could be done. Then the two men contacted the Minister of Justice, who agreed to complain to Hitler about the matter. When Bodelschwingh returned to Bethel, the Gauleiter ordered him to deliver certain of his patients. He refused once again. Berlin therefore ordered his arrest. However, the Gauleiter refused to arrest him, arguing that he was the most popular man in his province and that to arrest him would cause a great deal of unnecessary trouble in time of war. The Bethel asylum was bombed shortly thereafter (pp. 569–70).