Euthanasia

Abstract

Taylor’s opening address added euthanasia to the chilling catalogue of atrocities and murder of ‘hundreds of thousands of human beings’. This programme involved ‘the execution of the aged, insane, incurably ill, or deformed children and other persons by gas, lethal injections … in nursing homes, hospitals and asylums.’ Such persons were condemned as ‘useless eaters, as burdens to the German war machine’ (the defendants constantly denied using these expressions). The deaths encompassed children’s euthanasia between October 1939 and April 1945 with approximately 5,000 child deaths, the T-4 programme of special killing centres between early 1940 and August 1941 when 70,273 adults and juveniles were killed, and the programme code-named 14-f-13 from April 1941 to 1944 with an estimated 50,000 concentration camp prisoners killed. The prosecution cited the Aktion Globocnik in the killing of Jews. The killings of POWs and forced workers from the East were identified as a distinct phase of euthanasia.¹ The historian Suess suggests that there is no basis for associating the Aktion Brandt to clear hospital beds from August 1943 to the end of 1944 with euthanasia; however, killings continued throughout the war.²