Action T4 - Opposition

Opposition

Hitler and his aides were aware from the start that a programme of killing large numbers of Germans with disabilities would be unpopular with the German public. Although Hitler had a fixed policy of not issuing written instructions for policies relating to what would later be classed as crimes against humanity, he made an exception when he provided Bouhler and Brack with written authority for the T4 programme in his confidential October 1939 letter. This was apparently to overcome opposition within the German state bureaucracy – the Justice Minister, Franz Gürtner, needed to be shown Hitler's letter in August 1940 to gain his cooperation.

Hitler told Bouhler at the outset that "the Führer's Chancellery must under no circumstances be seen to be active in this matter." There was a particular need for caution in Catholic areas, which after the annexations of Austria and the Sudetenland in 1938 included nearly half the population of Greater Germany, and where public opinion could be expected to be hostile. In March 1940 a confidential report from the SD in Austria warned that the killing programme must be implemented with stealth "in order to avoid a probable backlash of public opinion during the war".

Opposition persisted within the bureaucracy. A district judge and member of the Confessing Church, Lothar Kreyssig, wrote to Gürtner protesting that the T4 programme was illegal (since no law or formal decree from Hitler had authorised it); Gürtner replied, "If you cannot recognise the will of the Führer as a source of law, then you cannot remain a judge." and had Kreyssig dismissed.

The Catholic Church had agreed to withdraw from all political activity in the Concordat of 1933 between Germany and the Holy See, but the prospect of state-sanctioned mass killing of German citizens had not occurred to the Church in 1933, and such a challenge to fundamental Christian belief in the sanctity of human life posed a serious dilemma for German Catholics. In 1935 the Church had protested in a private memorandum against proposals to pass a law legalising euthanasia: this was one reason the law was not enacted.

In January 1939, however, Brack commissioned a paper from Dr Joseph Mayer, Professor of Moral Theology at the University of Paderborn, on the likely reactions of the churches in the event of a state euthanasia programme being instituted. Mayer – a longstanding euthanasia advocate – reported that the churches would not oppose such a programme if it was seen to be in the national interest. Brack showed this paper to Hitler in July, and it may have increased his confidence that the "euthanasia" programme would be acceptable to German public opinion. (When Gitta Sereny interviewed Mayer shortly before his death in 1967, he denied that he had approved of killing people with disabilities, but since no copies of this paper are known to survive, this cannot be determined.) This turned out not to be the case. In fact the T4 programme was the sole example of an action by the Nazi regime which provoked large-scale public protests.

It was impossible to keep the T4 programme secret, given that thousands of doctors, nurses and administrators were involved in it, and given that the majority of those killed had families who were actively concerned about their welfare. Despite the strictest orders to maintain secrecy, some of the staff at the killing centres talked about what was going on there. In some cases families could tell that the causes of death notified were false, e.g. when a patient was claimed to have died of appendicitis, even though his appendix had been surgically removed some years earlier. In other cases several families in the same town would receive death certificates on the same day. In the towns where the killing centres were located, many people saw the inmates arrive in buses, saw the smoke from the crematoria chimneys, noticed that no bus-loads of inmates ever left the killing centres, and drew the correct conclusion. In Hadamar ashes containing human hair rained down on the town. In May 1941 the Frankfurt County Court wrote to Gürtner describing scenes in Hadamar where children shouted in the streets that people were being taken away in buses to be gassed.

During 1940 rumours of what was taking place spread, and many Germans withdrew their relatives from asylums and sanatoria to care for them at home – often with great expense and difficulty. In some places doctors and psychiatrists co-operated with families to have patients discharged, or, if the families could afford it, had them transferred to private clinics where the reach of T4 did not extend. Other doctors agreed to "re-diagnose" some patients so that they no longer met the T4 criteria, although this ran the risk of exposure when the Nazi zealots from Berlin conducted inspections. In Kiel, Professor Hans Gerhard Creutzfeldt managed to save nearly all of his patients. For the most part, however, doctors co-operated with the programme, either out of ignorance as to its true nature or out of agreement with Nazi eugenicist policies.

During 1940 protest letters began to arrive at the Reich Chancellery and the Ministry of Justice, some of them from Nazi Party members. The first open protest against the removal of people from asylums took place at Absberg in Franconia in February 1941, and others followed. The SD report on the incident at Absberg noted that "the removal of residents from the Ottilien Home has caused a great deal of unpleasantness", and described large crowds of Catholic townspeople, among them Party members, protesting against the action. Opposition to the T4 policy sharpened after the German attack on the Soviet Union in June 1941, because the war in the east produced for the first time large-scale German casualties, and the hospitals and asylums began to fill up with maimed and disabled young German soldiers. Rumours began to circulate that these men would also be subject to "euthanasia", although in fact no such plans existed.

During 1940 and 1941 some Protestant churchmen protested privately against T4, but none made any public comment. Bishop Theophil Wurm, presiding the Evangelical-Lutheran Church in Württemberg, wrote a strong letter to Interior Minister Frick in March 1940. On 4 December 1940 Reinhold Sautter, Supreme Church Councillor of Württemberg's State Church, reproached the Nazi Ministerial Councillor Eugen Stähle for the murders in Grafeneck Castle, the latter then confronted him with the Nazi government opinion, that "The fifth commandment: Thou shalt not kill, is no commandment of God but a Jewish invention" and cannot claim any validity any more.

Others who privately protested were the Lutheran theologian Friedrich von Bodelschwingh, who was director of the Bethel Institution for epileptics at Bielefeld, and Pastor Paul-Gerhard Braune, director of the Hoffnungstal Institution near Berlin. Both used their connections with the regime to negotiate exemptions for their institutions: Bodelschwingh negotiated directly with Brandt and indirectly with Hermann Göring, whose cousin was a prominent psychiatrist. Braune had meetings with Justice Minister Gürtner, who was always dubious about the legality of the programme, and later wrote a strongly worded letter to Hitler protesting against it: Hitler did not read it, but was told about it by Lammers. In general, however, the Protestant church was more enmeshed with the Nazi regime than was the case for the Catholics and was unwilling to criticise its actions.

The Catholic Church, which since 1933 had pursued a policy of avoiding confrontation with the Nazi regime in the hope of preserving its core institutions intact, became increasingly unable to keep silent in the face of mounting evidence about the killing of inmates of hospitals and asylums. Leading Catholic churchmen, led by Cardinal Michael von Faulhaber of Munich, wrote privately to the government protesting against the policy. In July 1941 the Church broke its silence when a pastoral letter from the bishops was read out in all churches, declaring that it was wrong to kill (except in self-defence or in a morally justified war). This emboldened Catholics to make more outspoken protests.

A few weeks after the pastoral letter was read out, the Catholic Bishop of Münster in Westphalia, Clemens August Graf von Galen, publicly denounced the T4 programme in a sermon, and telegrammed his text to Hitler, calling on "the Führer to defend the people against the Gestapo". "It is a terrible, unjust and catastrophic thing when man opposes his will to the will of God", Galen said. "We are talking about men and women, our compatriots, our brothers and sisters. Poor unproductive people if you wish, but does this mean that they have lost their right to live?" Robert Lifton says of this sermon: "This powerful, populist sermon was immediately reproduced and distributed throughout Germany — indeed, it was dropped among German troops by British Royal Air Force pilots. Galen's sermon probably had a greater impact than any other statement in consolidating anti-'euthanasia' sentiment." Another Bishop, Franz Bornewasser of Trier, also sent protests to Hitler, though not in public. In August Galen was even more outspoken, broadening his attack to include the Nazi persecution of religious orders and the closing of Catholic institutions. He attributed the heavy allied bombing of Westphalian towns to the wrath of God against Germany for breaking His laws. Galen's sermons were not reported in the German press, but were widely circulated in the form of illegally printed leaflets. Local Nazis asked for Galen to be arrested, but Goebbels told Hitler that if this happened there would be an open revolt in Westphalia.

By August the protests had spread to Bavaria. According to Gitta Sereny, Hitler himself was jeered by an angry crowd at Hof – the only time he was opposed in public during his 12 years of rule. Despite his private fury, Hitler knew that he could not afford a confrontation with the Church at a time when Germany was engaged in a life-and-death war, a belief which was reinforced by the advice of Goebbels, Martin Bormann, head of the Party Chancellery, and Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS. Robert Lifton writes: "Nazi leaders faced the prospect of either having to imprison prominent, highly admired clergymen and other protesters — a course with consequences in terms of adverse public reaction they greatly feared — or else end the programme." Himmler said: "If operation T4 had been entrusted to the SS, things would have happened differently", because "when the Führer entrusts us with a job, we know how to deal with it correctly, without causing useless uproar among the people."

On 24 August 1941 Hitler ordered the cancellation of the T4 programme, and also issued strict instructions to the Gauleiters that there were to be no further provocations of the churches for the duration of the war. The invasion of the Soviet Union in June had opened up new opportunities for the T4 personnel, who were soon transferred to the east to begin work on a vastly greater programme of killing: the "final solution of the Jewish question". But the winding up of the T4 programme did not bring the killing of people with disabilities to an end, although from the end of 1941 the killing became less systematic. Lifton documents that the killing of both adults and children continued to the end of the war, on the local initiative of institute directors and party leaders. The methods reverted to those employed before the gas chambers were employed: lethal injection, or simple starvation. Kershaw estimates that by the end of 1941 75,000 to 100,000 people had been killed as a result of the programme, but that further tens of thousands of concentration camp inmates, and people judged incapable of work, were killed in Germany between 1942 and 1945 (this figure does not include the Jews who were deported to their deaths in 1942 and 1943). Hartheim, for example, continued to kill people sent to it from all over Germany until 1945.