Deliver Those You Cannot Heal!
(Germany descends into the abyss)
by Phillip Day

"I am sure it would be sensible to restrict as much as possible the work of these gentlemen [psychiatrists], who are capable of doing an immense amount of harm with what may very easily degenerate into charlatanry." - Winston Churchill, December 1942

"Since sterilisation is the only sure thing to prevent further transmission of mental illness and serious hereditary afflictions, it must therefore be viewed as an act of charity and precaution for the upcoming generation." - Prof. Ernst Rüdin, Director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Psychiatry, Munich, Germany, 1936

"We should make a law which helps nature have its way. Nature would let a creature which is not equipped starve to death. It would be more humane for us to give it a painless, mercy killing. This is the only option which is proper in such cases and it is a hundred times more noble, decent and humane than the cowardice that hides behind the idiocy of humanitarianism and which burdens both the creature with its own existence, and the family and the society with the burden of supporting it." - Das Schwarze Korps (The Black Corps), 18th March 1937

No more stark and frightening insight into the marriage of eugenics with Nazism can be provided than the above Black Corps declaration, which illustrates the deadly intent of Hitler's National Socialists to implement their policies to 'cleanse' Germany of its undesirables. And psychiatry is deemed the 'science' that has the expertise and will to determine who is undesirable in this Germany of the future. Thus it is psychiatry which must play the defining role in spearheading the selection of these undesirables for processing under the laws which will soon be drafted. Clearly, the measures that will follow - measures forever seared into the Post-War collective conscience of a horrified world citizenry - cannot, by any grotesque manipulation of the imagination, be categorised as 'a hundred times more noble, decent and humane'.

As we have already learned, the path to the gas chambers can be clearly traced back to the attitudes and bogus science propagated decades before. And it is through the process of gradualism that the 'sophisticated' public's perceptions of man and his place in the cosmos endure a quantum shift, to the point where the unthinkable eventually becomes thinkable.

NOT JUST NAZI GERMANY
Insanity initially was frowned upon and locked away from the general public where it was monitored by those in charge. Later, 'mental disorders', and those exhibiting the growing list of them, became Kraepelin's 'heavy burden for our nation'. The evolutionary beliefs of Darwin, Lyell and Galton formed the bedrock for the eugenics movement with its desire to 'perfect evolution' by breeding out 'undesirable traits', and 'feeble-mindedness' in different races. By 1914, mental illness was professionally regarded as 'hereditary', when the American Medico-Psychological Association (later the modern-day American Psychiatric Association) stated that "… a radical cure of the evils incident to the dependent mentally defective classes would be effected if every feeble-minded person, every imbecile, every habitual criminal, every manifestly weak-minded person, and every confirmed inebriate were sterilised."

It is important and fair to appreciate that these beliefs were not wholly restricted to those of the burgeoning German psychiatric community. They were also held by many 'forward-thinkers' elsewhere. Lewis M Terman, professor of psychology at Stanford University, USA, believed in 1916 that "…if we would preserve our state for a class of people worthy to possess it, we must prevent, as far as possible, the propagation [breeding] of mental degenerates."

Houston Stewart Chamberlain, born in Britain in 1855, married the daughter of composer Robert Wagner and became a German citizen in 1916. Chamberlain's works lionised Aryan world philosophy, denigrated Jewish influence as negative and inferior, and promoted German supremacy. Chamberlain's élitist views are clear when he remarks that "…moderate talent… is frequently the character of bastards; one can easily observe this daily in cities where, as in Vienna, the various peoples meet each other; at the same time one can also notice a particular laxity, a lack of character, in short, the moral degeneration of such people."

A young Adolf Hitler would echo these same sentiments in 1925: "…those who are physically and mentally unhealthy must not perpetuate their suffering in the body of their children." By 1933, after the Nazis come to power, Hitler is busying himself with the implementation of legislation entitled The Nazi Act for Averting Descendants Afflicted with Hereditary Diseases. Within six years, 375,000 forced sterilisations are carried out. Even the physically 'unfit' are not exempt.

Psychiatrist Ernst Rüdin is the catalyst and organiser of the operational phase of the Nazis' eugenics policy. With the scientific credibility of his professorship at Munich University to drape his acts with the requisite legitimacy, Rüdin is fêted for his fidelity and unswerving loyalty to the Reich. Upon his sixty-fifth birthday, the Munich psychiatrist is honoured for having "…just recently received the Goethe Medal for the Art and Science from the Führer 'in recognition of his achievements in the development of German Racial Hygiene'." Fellow racial hygiene advocate Dr Alfred Ploetz continues at the festivities to announce that "…the Reichminister of the Interior, Dr Frick, sent him [Rüdin] the following telegram: 'To the indefatigable champion of racial hygiene and meritorious pioneer of the racial hygiene measures of the Third Reich, I send my sincerest congratulations on his 65th birthday'."

EUTHANASIA
The concept of sterilisation is soon to have another sinister bedfellow: euthanasia. The murder of those whose lives are deemed Devoid of Human Value commences with a landmark episode in 1938. Dr Werner Catel, Professor of Neurology and Psychiatry at the University of Leipzig, advises the father of a deformed child that the latter write to the Führer seeking permission to end his own child's life. In response, Hitler sends his personal physician, Professor Karl Brandt, to discuss the matter with Catel. The significance of a father requesting a mercy death for his own son fascinates the public. The child is subsequently killed.

Such an event is to have major repercussions in the realm of public psychodrama now the state has sanctioned euthanasia:

"A group of physicians was called to the Reich Chancellory to form a Euthanasia Committee. Dr Herbert Linden, psychiatrist and ministerial advisor for health in the Reich Ministry, was appointed its director. Of the four other doctors on the committee, two were psychiatrists, including the influential Dr Werner Catel. Shortly, another seven psychiatrists were added.

In 1939, the following document was signed and released by Hitler: 'Reichleader [Philipp] Bouhler and Karl Brandt MD are charged with the responsibility of enlarging the authority of certain physicians to be designated by name in such a manner that persons who, according to human judgment, can upon most careful diagnosis of their condition of sickness, be accorded a mercy death."'

Journalist Joseph Harsch makes an important point in his analysis of the above ruling by Hitler:

"Those who proposed [the plan for euthanasia] are understood to have asked Hitler for a written edict or law which would officially authorise them to proceed with the 'mercy killings'. Hitler is represented as having hesitated for several weeks. Finally, doubting that Hitler would ever sign the official order, the proponents of the project drafted a letter for him to sign which merely expressed his, Hitler's general approval of the theory of euthanasia as a means of relieving incompetents of the burden of life. While this letter did not have the character of the law, it was adequate in Nazi Germany. The Führer had expressed approval of the practice. It went ahead."

EUROPE EXPLODES
Meanwhile, throughout the first seven months of 1939, the Nazi industrial dynamo was churning out weaponry, aircraft, submarines and warships. In spite of Hitler's assurances to Britain's Neville Chamberlain that England and Germany were not in danger of war, events inexorably built during the spring and summer. In the second week of August, Hitler ordered German troops to mass along the border with Poland. Late on the night of 31st August 1939, Hitler's government informed the world that Polish troops had stormed a German radio station in Upper Silesia and, after murdering the technicians there, had broadcast an appeal to the Polish people inciting them to war with Germany.

Historian Martin Gilbert reminds us of the tragic farce that followed: "No such Polish provocation had taken place. The Polish troops were Germans dressed up as Poles. The dead German - for there was indeed one - was a common criminal taken from a concentration camp and killed by his fellow Germans to give credence to the tale of a Polish attack. The incident was a crude fabrication, but in the early hours of 1st September, citing this bogus incident as the reason, Hitler ordered German troops to cross into Poland…. On 3rd September 1939, Britain and France declared war on Germany."

CLEANING UP THE HUMAN DETRITUS
By 1939, a telling documentary film is circulating Germany and its provinces, entitled 'Existence Without Life' ('Dasein ohne Leben'). Featured in the 1991 documentary 'Selling Murder', the German piece is designed to educate and influence public opinion in the controversial area of euthanasia. Wiseman states that all the latest film techniques are used to give the project every chance of success:

"The main character was a professor… used 'to add spurious scientific respectability' to the film. The documentary explains, 'The [film's] script demands that demonically mad faces arise like a spectre out of the scene.… Unedited film shows the techniques used such as sharp, underneath lighting to make the patients appear grotesque.… His [the professor's] lecture, scripted by psychiatrists.… first claims that care for the sick has become indiscriminate and too costly.'

The professor closes the movie with a dramatic appeal to all: 'We call upon a merciful destiny to liberate these regrettable creatures from their existence without life.… Allow me to close with a few purely human and personal remarks and so extend the framework of this lecture. If I knew that I - and this could happen to anyone - would be struck down by the disaster of some incurable mental illness and that such an existence without life would lie before me, I would do anything for this not to happen. I would rather die. I am convinced all healthy people think like this. But I am also convinced that every incurable mental patient or idiot, if he could recognise his position, would prefer an end to such existence. No sensible human being could deny him the right to die. Is it not the duty of those [psychiatrists] who care for the incapable - and that means total idiots and the incurable mental patients - to help them exercise their rights? Is that not a sacred demand of charity? Deliver those you cannot heal!'

T4 AND THE 'MERCY KILLINGS'
The deliverings, or 'mercy killings', of mental patients are carried out under the organisation of the infamous T4 centre , so named for its Berlin address at Tiergartenstrasse 4. According to the Nuremburg Trial transcripts, some 275,000 mental patients are murdered between 1939 and the cessation of hostilities in 1945 under Operation Gnadentod ('Operation Mercy Killing'). Even before the killing centres have been properly set up and tested, psychiatrists are rounding up mentally sick patients from institutions in Meseritz, Pomerania (Poland) and shipping them into the forests. Here they are executed by SS firing squads and buried. Later in the war, these bodies, some 3,500 of them, are hastily exhumed and burned by the SS to prevent their discovery by the approaching Russian Army.

Two of the first killing facilities are set up at Castle Grafeneck and Brandenburg by T4, under control of 'politically reliable' psychiatrists, doctors, nurses and orderlies who oversee the murders. Psychiatrist Werner Heyde moves from Würzburg to Berlin to head up T4. Heyde's job is to oversee the Reich's euthanasia program and supervise its consulting staff of approximately 30 physicians, most of whom are psychiatrists. The T4 psychiatric team will 'evaluate' patients and decide on their fate. The Los Angeles Daily News agrees that the first medical killings of mental patients in Germany were to pave the way for mass murder in the years to follow:

"The systematic 'treatment' of Jews under T4 began in April 1940, with a proclamation from the Reich Interior Ministry that within three weeks all Jewish [mental] patients were to be registered. In June the first gassing of Jews took place: 200 men, women and children were killed in the Brandenburg facility; they had been transported to the killing centre in six buses from the Berlin-Buch mental institution."

The original method of murder is carbon monoxide gas. It is chosen for its obvious lethality and lack of smell. Specially constructed 'shower rooms' lure the unwary victims inside. The gas is then pumped in until all visible movement ceases. After the excess gas is extracted, the bodies are removed and taken to the nearby crematoria for incineration. Later, the appalling plumes of smoke cause many a local inhabitant to complain to the authorities. In time, the nefarious purpose of these facilities, first as rumours and then as truth, soon becomes known. By this time however, public complaints about the centres themselves become a cause for the arrest and deportation of 'troublemakers'.

Author and psychiatrist Dr Frederic Wertham describes a student tour of one of the mental facilities actively involved in the Nazis' Operation Mercy Killing: "In the fall of 1939, a group of psychology students were given a tour of the state psychiatric institution Eglfing Haar in Nazi Germany. Dr Hermann Pfannmüller, a psychiatrist and director of the institution, explained the 'euthanasia' or 'mercy killing' program that was being used on the inmates. In the children's ward, twenty-five children were being starved to death. They ranged in age from one to five years. Pfannmüller lifted up one emaciated child who was near death and told the students that food is withdrawn gradually, not all at once. 'With this child,' he said, 'it will take another two or three days.'"

Ludwig Lehner, one of the students attending that visit to Dr Pfannmüller's institution, commented in a sworn statement at Nuremburg: "I shall never forget the look of that fat, grinning fellow with the whimpering little skeleton in his fleshy hand, surrounded by the other starving children."

At first, it is the 'mental defectives' who are killed. As these 'mercy killings' proceed however, criteria for selection are steadily widened. That psychiatrists themselves are only following orders and are not actually instigators of the brutal killings is roundly refuted by surviving documentation. Psychiatrist Dr Wertham:

"It has been stated that psychiatrists were merely following a law or were being forced to obey an order. Again and again we read - as if it were historical fact - of Hitler's secret order to exterminate those suffering from severe mental defect or disease.… There was no law and no such order. The tragedy is that the psychiatrists did not have to have an order. They acted on their own. They were not carrying out a death sentence pronounced by someone else, they were the legislators who laid down the rules for deciding who was to die; they were the administrators who worked out the procedures, provided the patients and the places, and decided the methods of killing; they pronounced a sentence of life or death in every individual case; they were the executioners who carried the sentences out, or - without being coerced to do so - surrendered their patients to be killed in other institutions; they supervised and often watched the slow deaths."

By the middle of 1941, the killing of the mentally ill was well underway throughout the Reich and its conquered lands. T4 expanded the definition of those deemed 'unworthy of life' and a full training program was instigated to coach those in the skills of mass extermination. An accomplished authority on the mental health system of Nazi Germany, Dr Wertham further states:

"The 'material' for all this training was mental hospital patients. On them the methods were tried out and tested before they were later applied to Jewish and other civilian populations of the occupied countries. Technical experience first gained with killing psychiatric patients was utilised later for the destruction of millions.

Towards the end of 1941, the gas chambers in the death institutions were dismantled, transported to the east, and then freshly erected for their new tasks in concentration camps.… Some were the same psychiatrists who selected patients in hospitals, went to concentration camps and selected death candidates there. Heinrich Himmler had the idea of having the inmates of these camps examined to 'comb out' those to be eliminated. He needed suitable physicians, so the central bureau of the 'euthanasia' program [T4] supplied him with 'experienced psychiatrists'…. In 1941, a commission of five went to the concentration camp at Dachau to select prisoners to be transferred to Mauthausen to be killed. All five men were psychiatrists, and their chief was a professor of psychiatry at the University of Berlin."

BRANCHING OUT THE PROGRAM
The success of the euthanasia program, inasmuch as the public remains largely unaware of what is occurring, spurs more imaginative ways to dispose of the mentally ill. New facilities are opened in occupied Poland, equipped with 'shower rooms' and machine guns. Specialised gassing trucks are constructed and painted to look like 'Kaiser's Coffee' delivery vehicles. Carbon monoxide gas is fed from steel canisters into the interior of the vehicles while the latter drive to the disposal sites to off-load the bodies for cremation.

There is money in the killing. Questionnaires are sent in to T4 from the mental institutions for each patient to be evaluated. Psychiatric consultants, under the guidance of T4 chief Heyde, go over the questionnaires and, on the basis of the information learned, place a red mark on the form for those to be killed and blue for those to be spared. By October 1940, a psychiatrist working as a euthanasia consultant is receiving 100 marks per patient evaluation up to a total of 500 questionnaires. Bonuses are also being earned: 200 marks per evaluation up to 2,000 questionnaires, 300 marks up to 3,000 and 400 marks for all questionnaires above that.

Records show that the above-mentioned Dr Hermann Pfannmüller, for instance, completed 2,000 registration forms in only three weeks, while another, Dr Schreck, 'very conscientiously' completed 15,000 in nine months, according to his own testimony. One witness, states researcher Ernst Klee, "even worked while drinking wine in a public restaurant."

And then a strange thing happens. On 24th August 1941, Hitler calls a halt to the T4 euthanasia killings. Some say that Hitler has become politically uncomfortable as the public learns of the truth. A psychiatrist named Menneckes, involved in the euthanasia killings in the Rhenish Eichberg Institute, later, in an open session of the Eichberg proceedings on 3rd December 1946, declared:

"One day when Hitler was travelling on his special train from Munich to Berlin, it had to make a stop at a station at Hog. To find out why, he went to the window and was spotted by a crowd standing outside that had been witnessing the shipment of mentally ill patients. When the crowd saw Hitler at the window, they became irate, as they knew what would happen with the patients. This demonstration of dissatisfaction against Hitler prompted him to call off what had been going on until then."

Other surviving documents demonstrate that Hitler's policy of distancing himself from the carnage is being recognised at the bureaucratic level. One physician, giving testimony after the war, states:

"The discontinuation of the extermination program was skilfully exploited, according to a physician of the Weissengau Institute, by spreading a whisper campaign that it had happened because of Adolf Hitler, who prior to that had not been aware of the killing."

But researchers Röder, Kubillus and Burwell surmise another, perhaps more prosaic explanation for Hitler's order to cease the euthanasia killings. In their Secret Activities of the Third Reich, the authors demonstrate with research that by August 1941, T4 has actually reached its quota of 70,000 persons euthanised. In fact, it has actually exceeded its target by exactly 273 persons. The original program has accomplished its preset targets and is now being shut down. Are the Nazis merely calling in a breathing space while those in charge decide what to do next?

REINHARD HEYDRICH
By the beginning of 1942, the concept of expanding the slaughter of the mentally ill into the conquered territories to an even wider criteria of 'inferior citizens', such as Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, habitual criminals and political undesirables, is being contemplated and sanctioned by the Nazi High Command. On 20th January, Himmler's deputy, Reinhard Heydrich, convenes a meeting of 15 senior Nazi officials at a villa at the beautiful lakeside retreat of Wannsee, ostensibly to examine the options of ridding Europe of 'parasitic Jewry'.

Heydrich is Hitler's Wunderkind - an operations genius who has just been appointed 'Reich Protector' of Bohemia and Moravia in September 1941. Heydrich's career with the Nazis has been spectacular and meteoric. Having organised the entire Nazi secret police and intelligence services (SS and SD) even before his party gained power, Heydrich was trusted by the Nazis for his incredible capacity for organisation on a large scale. It was Heydrich who had removed Nazi opponents quietly and effectively to Dachau, near Munich. It was Heydrich who, by 1934, had all the political police of the Reich under his iron control. It was Heydrich who had organised four special task forces to follow Operation Barbarossa, Hitler's invasion of Russia, liquidating all Communist officials, saboteurs, agitators and Jews as the Nazis advanced. By the time the Wannsee meeting is convened, wholesale murder of the Jews in Russia has become routine. Historian Martin Gilbert tells us:

"From the first days of the German invasion of the Soviet Union, the SS Special Task Forces took Jews out of their homes to the nearest wood or ravine, and shot them down. Tens of thousands of Jews were murdered in the first few weeks; hundreds of thousands in the months ahead; as many as a million by the end of the year. As the executions spread from town to town and village to village, babies and small children were thrown into the deep pits in which their parents had been shot."

In spite of the brutality of his command, there is compelling evidence that Heydrich, born in Prussian Saxony the son of a music director and minor composer, is secretly disgusted with the scale of the worst tasks he is called upon to perform. That Heydrich is not just the simple Nazi monster he is often painted to be is evident when one studies the amazing social reforms the SS-General is able to introduce into Czech society through his own initiatives. Heydrich understands that the carrot and the stick are both of use in maximising the productivity of conquered people brought under the heel of the Reich. Heydrich discovers that Czech farmers have been holding out on the true number of cattle they have registered. He orders all surplus animals to be slaughtered and the meat added to the rations of the factory workers. On Labour Day 1942, Heydrich distributes thousands of free cinema, theatre and football tickets to the working population to reward them for their hard endeavours. New national insurance cover, pension rights, new wage levels and holiday entitlements are agreed with the Czech trade unions. Ignoring the safety risks, Heydrich often tours the factories of his protectorate, telling the dumbfounded workers to their faces what an inspiration they all are - even to the Nazis.

WANNSEE - MURDER OVER CIGARS AND COGNAC
It is this complex Heydrich, part monster, part operations genius, that sits down at the conference table at the villa at Wannsee in January 1942 to discuss what is to be done permanently with the inferiors, mental degenerates, habitual criminals and the Jews across the German empire. Heydrich's mind has no moral conflict with what it has to do. The minutes of this meeting have survived and from them we can piece together a chilling montage of what was agreed and understood between the various parties attending.

Clear is the fact that Hitler himself will issue no such order sanctioning the murder of eleven million Jews, although clearly the mass exterminations which follow can never go ahead without the Führer's approval. Hitler's quandary and subsequent refusal to issue a written order for the exterminations, according to researcher Ernst Klee, appears to be centred on the fact that it is actually still illegal at this time in Nazi Germany to murder people:

"Everyone involved knows that Hitler rejects a legal ruling for political reasons."

Heydrich himself makes this expressly clear at Wannsee when some of the incredulous attendees, after hearing of Heydrich's proposal for the extermination of the Jews, timidly request the whereabouts of an official written order from the Führer. Heydrich once again pointedly reminds his audience of the need to purge Germany of undesirables. He is counting on their unanimous support to overcome the logistic problems of ceasing the propagation of 'inferior stock'.

In his book, The Villa, The Lake, The Meeting: Wannsee and the Final Solution, British scholar Mark Roseman uses the minutes from the infamous meeting to paint an almost unbelievable portrait of cultured men gathering in a stately, picturesque location, eating superb food, smoking cigars and sipping cognac, discussing the fate of such 'mental degenerates' as remain, along with the removal of up to 11 million Jews from European society. The meeting, conducted in cultured tones, begins with the question of deportation of undesirables. References are made to the success of the previous T4 euthanasia program.

Although the question of sterilisation is openly discussed in connection with the desire to prevent 'inferior races' from propagating, it is quite evident from the minutes that Heydrich is dissatisfied with the costs and manpower associated with extending this kind of operation. At Wannsee, we see the indomitable Heydrich presenting the top brass at Wannsee with a fait accompli with his Endlösung, his Final Solution for the Jews - a package of measures already thoroughly planned, costed down to the last detail, and bearing the Heydrich stamp of approval.

SETTING UP THE FINAL SOLUTION
There are historians who attempt to minimise Hitler's involvement in, and cogniscence of Heydrich, Eichmann and Himmler's Final Solution. But clearly, from documentation and later testimony at Nuremburg, Hitler is in the loop and always in overall command. Roseman agrees and reports that, within weeks of the meeting at Wannsee, the random massacres of 'degenerates' throughout the empire, including thousands of Russian prisoners of war falling into German hands as a result of Operation Barbarossa, give way to highly organised and documented industrial extermination.

Psychological propaganda is all-important in breaking the will of the Soviets, contemptuously regarded by leading Nazis as sub-human animals. But some Wehrmacht commanders are shocked at the savagery that has by now overtaken the soldiers under their command. On 26th June 1941, four days after the launch of the German invasion of the Soviet Union, General Lemelsen, commander of the 47th Panzer Corps, is protesting to his subordinates about the 'senseless shootings of both prisoners-of-war and civilians'. Yet the savagery on both sides continues unchecked both within the beleaguered Soviet Union as well as across occupied Europe. The world now witnesses something it has not seen before. A war between millions, not of conquest, but of annihilation.

At dinner with Himmler and Heydrich on 25th October 1941, Hitler had reminded his guests of his 'prophecy' in 1939 that a world war would result in the complete destruction of European Jewry. He added: "Let no one say to me, we cannot send them into the swamp.… It is good if our advance is preceded with fear that we will exterminate Jewry."

This is one of many examples illustrating that Hitler is sanctioning the continued murder program and aware that the SS are drowning Jewish women and children in the Pripet marshes. Just ten days after the Wannsee meeting, while Hitler is celebrating the ninth anniversary of his coming to power, he reminds a huge crowd in Berlin: "The war will not end as the Jews imagine it will, namely with the uprooting of the Aryans, but the result of this war will be the complete annihilation of the Jews."

THE WAR WIDENS
Worsening relations with America and a deteriorating war with Russia had long since caused the Nazis to abandon their original idea of sending European Jews on 'luxury ships' to any nation who would have them. And then the Japanese attack the US Pacific Fleet in Pearl Harbor on 7th December 1941 and pound US airfields in the Philippines. On 11th December, believing with elation that the Japanese will score a quick and easy victory over the United States, Hitler declares war on America. The Führer is relieved to receive this Japanese boost to his endeavours. Operation Barbarossa has bogged down in Russia with the record shocking winter, temperatures falling as low as -35oC. Stalingrad is the turning point in the war. Yet it is one of the overriding and tragic ironies of World War 2 that, at precisely the time when it is dawning on the more prescient of Hitler's staff that the war may already be lost, Hitler embarks upon his full-scale war on the Jews.

At Wannsee, Heydrich is speaking with the voice of Hitler. Adolf Eichmann, Heydrich's operations chief, records in his memoirs and later 1961 trial in Israel that Heydrich's proposal for genocide of the Jewish people is enthusiastically and unanimously endorsed by all attendees at Wannsee. The Wannsee protocol is specific in its evolutionary stance: any Jews surviving the attempt to work them to death for the benefit of the Reich "…will have to be dealt with appropriately, because otherwise, by natural selection, they would form the germ cell of a new Jewish revival."

THE DEATH CAMPS
Meanwhile the psychiatrists at T4 are experimenting with new, more efficient forms of annihilation. Decrying the increased costs of firing-squad ammunition and the shipping of carbon monoxide to the extermination facilities in Poland, arrangements are made for the off-the-shelf pesticide gas, Zyklon B, to be manufactured on-site by chemical giant I G Farben's subsidiary DEGESCH, an acronym for the German Corporation for Pest Control. In the purpose-built extermination facilities in Poland, the gassing of Russian prisoners of war, together with the continuous stream of victims provided by T4 psychiatrists from the KZs (concentration camps) across the empire, proceeds apace. The Polish death centres of Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka, according to reliable estimates, carry out the murders of over 1.7 million souls alone. Approximately 100 T4 psychiatrists are transferred from the Berlin headquarters to the Polish extermination sites to supervise and implement Heydrich's Final Solution. The original gas chambers are built to contain 500 people at a time. At the height of the extermination program, up to 1,500 people are herded into the rooms to prepare for what some camp guards refer to sarcastically as 'the peaceful sleep'.

Nazi psychiatrist Ernst Rüdin's racial hygiene program reaches its appalling denouement between 1942 and 1945 as further extermination facilities spring up like evil blooms across occupied Europe. Numerous eyewitness accounts testify to the brutality of Heydrich's hated SS, who preside over the genocide with ruthless efficiency:

"After the arrivals were taken to the location next to the crematorium, they had to undress entirely because they were told they would have a shower. They were then chased - often with beatings - by the SS into the so-called bath, which in reality was a gas chamber…."

" [in the dressing room of the crematorium], people's blood-stained and battered heads and faces proved that there was scarcely anyone who had been able to dodge the truncheon blows of the yard. Their faces were ashen with fear and grief.… Hope and illusions had vanished. What was left was disappointment, despair and anger.

They began to bid each other farewell. Husbands embraced their wives and children. Everybody was in tears. Mothers turned to their children and caressed them tenderly. The little ones… wept with their mothers and held on to them….

After a while, I heard the sound of piercing screams, banging against the door, and also moaning and wailing. People began to cough. Their coughing grew worse from minute to minute, a sign that the gas had started to act. Then the clamour began to subside and to change to a many-voiced dull rattle, drowned out now and then by coughing.…"

The killing continues up until the end of the war - and even beyond. On 8th May 1945, the war ends in Germany. In the camps however, the killing continues, masked by the uncontrolled chaos of a German empire in ruins. The mental institutions also appear to be functioning as before. Röder el al report:

"In the extermination institutes, they either kept on killing, or let the patients starve to death. As late as 29th May 1945, a four-year-old feeble-minded boy was murdered in Kaufbeuren, and on 7th July, a Munich newspaper made a horrifying discovery which proved that the loss of World War 2 had had no effect on the overall intentions of those who still operated the human slaughterhouses.

On 2nd July 1945, Robert E Abrahams walked into the district hospital of Kaufbeuren to find the warm, swinging body of a physician who was junior only to the director. He had hanged himself. Twelve hours earlier, the last adult had died. In Irsee, soldiers found the bodies of men and women who had died just hours earlier, most of them through starvation."

THE FINAL HOURS
As often in the tragedy of war, a retrospective look at the eventual outcome of World War 2, this most destructive conflict in human history, yields a million tragic tales of callousness, brutality, personal courage and fatal heroism. The relentless march of the Allies across Europe and the eventual fall of Berlin to the Soviets eventually end the mass killings, the aerial bombings, the artillery and tanks battles, the firing squads in the woods and forests, as well as the emotional torment of the populations previously yolked under Nazi rule. The smoke of a thousands fires, from Dresden to Hamburg, from Warsaw to Normandy, show the world the funeral pyre of German National Socialism.

Hitler kills himself with a pistol in his Berlin bunker on 30th April 1945. His mistress, Eva Braun, whom he has just married, takes poison. Hitler's propaganda and psychology chief Josef Goebbels arranges for his six children to be given a lethal injection by an SS doctor. He then has himself and his wife Madga shot by an SS orderly. The Allies frantically try to account for all the major human rights violators in the complete chaos that is Europe at the end of the Second World War.

A SPRING DAY IN PRAGUE
But SS-General Reinhard Heydrich survives only a few months after Wannsee. On 27th May 1942, the SS chief is assassinated in Prague by two British-trained Czech agents, Kubis and Gabcik, as he takes the beautiful drive from his villa at Panenske Brezany to his headquarters in the capital. As his Mercedes slows to negotiate a hairpin bend in the Prague suburbs, Kubis and Gabcik attack the vehicle with a Sten gun that jams, and a specially prepared fragmentation grenade that doesn't. Heydrich is mortally wounded, his spleen and diaphragm pierced by shrapnel as well as cloth and leather fragments from the vehicle's upholstery. Nine days later, on 4th June, Heydrich dies in agony from his wounds.

WAGNER AND PAGEANTRY
Heydrich is buried with all Nazi honours in the Veteran's Cemetery in Germany's capital. The Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra plays Wagner's funeral march. Heydrich's state funeral, designed to be broadcast to the world as a great show of Nazi solidarity and power, features all the Nazi leadership and literally thousands of black-uniformed SS guarding the awesome pageantry of the procession. Hitler gives an emotional eulogy of the dead man. Himmler praises Heydrich as a "…gentleman of breeding and bearing" who had been "feared by lower racial types and sub-humans, hated and defamed by Jews and criminals."

As Heydrich's coffin, draped in the swastika, is drawn by four jet-black horses in procession towards the Veteran's Cemetery, the retaliation hundreds of miles to the south in Czechoslovakia has already begun. The Führer is beside himself with rage. Hundreds of Czechs of doubtful political allegiance are rounded up and shot. The entire village of Lidice, thought to have sheltered Heydrich's assassins at some point during their five-month preparation, has its entire male population machine-gunned and its women and children driven away to concentration camps.

The assassins are eventually tracked down to an Orthodox Church in Ressel Street, Prague. Hundreds of SS surround the building while their officers puzzle out how to finish the stand-off. Finally the pride of Heydrich's officer corps orders the Prague fire department to pump water from the River Vltava into the crypt to drown 'the vermin'. Later the bodies of the priests, assassins and collaborators are recovered. All are found to have died either fighting or having committed suicide with the last of their bullets before the water could reach them.

JUSTICE FOR ALL?
Adolf Eichmann is later tracked down by the Israeli Mossad and in 1961 is kidnapped from his hideout in South America and returned to Israel for trial. Eichmann gives his account professionally and unemotionally before the world's cameras. He is found guilty and hanged. Nazi psychiatrist Professor Paul Nitsche is sent to the guillotine on 25th March 1948 in Dresden. T4 doctor Carl Schneider, recruited by the Nazis to carry out pathology work on the brains of children gassed in the extermination institutions, is found guilty at Nuremburg and hanged. Dr Leonardo Conti, the Reich's Minister for Health from 1939 to 1945, commits suicide. Fleeing from Allied authorities, psychiatrist Dr Max de Crinis, one of the leaders of the T4 euthanasia program, practises murder even in his final hour. The Austrian physician poisons his wife and children with potassium cyanide before taking his own life in the same manner.

POSTSCRIPT
Were the war-time psychiatric abuses only attributable to the Nazis? Dr W H Kay, reviewing his military service during World War 2, later reported that he had found an American psychiatrist up to his old tricks: "Electroshock was indicated to help in the management of insane soldiers, who would become quite meek and manageable after a session with the 'thing….'"
© Copyright 2003 Phillip Day
Extracted from The Mind Game

Further Resources:
The Mind Game by Phillip Day
The ABC's of Disease by Phillip Day

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