The Illustrated History of the Nazis by Paul Roland

Author:Paul Roland
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Arcturus Digital Limited

Scrubbing up with the best of them: Lebensborn was a weird experiment in selective breeding

EUTHANASIA

In 1933 the Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring made sterilization compulsory for the physically disabled, the blind, the deaf and anyone suffering from epilepsy or depression. Even chronic alcoholics were included.

Then in 1935 the Law for the Protection of the Hereditary Health of the German People was passed which forbade people with hereditary or infectious diseases from marrying and producing ‘sick and asocial offspring’ which would become a ‘burden on the community’.

Within four years 200,000 compulsory sterilizations had been performed and a parallel programme for euthanasia was being planned with chilling German efficiency. Gerda Bernhardt’s mentally disabled brother Manfred was one of 5,000 children whose lives were taken by Nazi physicians in the early years of the regime.

Gerda remembers, ‘Manfred was a lovely boy, but he could only say “Mama” and “Papa”… He only learnt to walk very late too. He always liked to be busy. If my mother said, “Bring some coal up from the cellar,” he wanted to do it over and over again.

‘My father was in favour of putting him in some sort of children’s hospital and then Aplerbeck came up as they had a big farm there and the boy might be kept occupied.’

Aplerbeck had been designated a ‘Special Children’s Unit’, where the staff decided which patients should live and which would be too much trouble to care for and so should be put to death by lethal injection.

Gerda recalls the last time she saw her brother alive. ‘They brought the boy into the waiting room. There was an orderly there when I was leaving. The boy stood at the window and I waved and waved and he waved too. That was the last time I saw him.’

At the time there was no official policy of euthanasia and no law authorizing it, only a Führerstaat (directive). Doctors were simply acting on instructions from their superiors who knew that Hitler had casually sanctioned the practice in a letter to his personal physician. That was enough to seal the fate of thousands who were deemed ‘undesirable’ or unworthy of life. Patients such as Manfred Bernhardt were given overdoses of luminal or morphine and their deaths were ascribed to common ailments in order that the suspicions of the families were not raised (prior to this the method had been starvation). The records of the institution at Aplerbeck show that Manfred Bernhardt died of measles. In the same week 11 other healthy children passed away prematurely.

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