Abstract
Only once in his life did Hitler ever sign a document authorizing murder. Usually when he wanted to bypass legal niceties to crush his political opponents or destroy his racial enemies, he merely issued verbal directions to his loyal minions. In October 1939, however, he signed a brief memo to Philipp Bouhler, head of the Chancellery of the Führer, and to his personal physician, Karl Brandt. The entire memo stated:
Reichsleiter Bouhler and Dr. Brandt are commissioned to extend the authority of those physicians they designate, so that mercy killing may be administered to those who according to human judgment are incurably sick, after diagnosis of the condition of their illness, [signed] A. Hitler1
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Notes
Bettina Winter, ed., “Verlegt nach Hadamar”: Die Geschichte einer NS-“Euthanasie”-Anstalt (Kassel: Lande swolfahr tsverb and Hessen, 1991), 69.
Joseph Goebbels, May 1, 1940, Die Tagebücher von Joseph Goebbels, ed. Elke Fröhlich (Munich: K. G. Saur, 1987ff)
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See Richard Weikart, From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics, and Racism in Germany (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004)
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Friedlander, Origins of Nazi Genocide, xi-xii, 64, 81, argues that economic considerations were subsidiary to ideology; Robert Proctor, Racial Hygiene: Medicine under the Nazis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 183–184
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For extended discussion of this point among eugenicists in the Nazi period, see Stefan Kühl, “The Relationship between Eugenics and the So-Called ‘Euthanasia Action’ in Nazi Germany: A Eu genically Motivated Peace Policy and the Killing of the Mentally Handicapped during the Second World War,” in Science and the Third Reich, ed. Margit Szöllösi-Janze (Oxford: Berg, 2001), 185–210.
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Edward Ross Dickinson, The Politics of German Child Welfare from the Empire to the Federal Republic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 233.
Friedlander, Origins of Nazi Genocide, 39–40; Ulf Schmidt, Medical Films, Ethics and Euthanasia in Nazi Germany: The History of the Medical Research and Teaching Films of the Reich Office for Educational Films/Reich Institute for Films in Science and Education, 1933–1945 (Husum: Matthiesen Verlag, 2002), 242–243.
Andreas Frewer, Medizin und Moral in Weimarer Republik und Nationalsozialismus: Die Zeitschrift “Ethik” unter Emil Abderhalden (Frankfurt: Campus Verlag, 2000), 97
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Christopher Hutton, Race and the Third Reich: Linguistics, Racial Anthropology and Genetics in the Dialectic of Yolk (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2005), 212.
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© 2009 Richard Weikart
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Weikart, R. (2009). Justifying Murder and Genocide. In: Hitler’s Ethic. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230623989_10
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