Jan Grue in Boston Review:
At the Nuremberg Medical Trials, Karl Brandt, Hitler’s personal physician, testified about his involvement in what he referred to as “the Leipzig case.” The parents of a child born with several disabilities wanted to have it killed. Since the director of their local hospital had rebuffed them, they had petitioned the Führer’s chancellery directly. As it happened, the Führer wanted a solution to the so-called euthanasia question, and so Brandt was directed to review the case and make it an exemplar. He found, as he put it, no reason to let the child live.
The child, eventually identified as a boy named Gerhard Kretschmar, became the first known victim of the T4 program, which killed nearly 300,000 disabled people between 1939 and 1945. While public protests led to an official suspension of the program in 1941, T4 continued its practices unofficially, the “wild” phase of its “euthanasia” lasting until the end of the war. Even in the postwar years, there was a “crushing breadth of popular support for the perpetrators, and ongoing shaming of the victims and their families,” writes historian Dagmar Herzog in The Question of Unworthy Life. Beyond Brandt, who was convicted of crimes against humanity at Nuremberg and executed in 1948, very few physicians were held accountable, while people with disabilities kept being marginalized, confined to underfunded and short-staffed institutions. Not infrequently, ex-Nazi employees were “hired back as nurses and wardens.” Disabled people “were not viewed by their fellow citizens as fully human,” writes Herzog, “and their lives, bodies, and souls were not treated as of equal value.”
More here.
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