Euthanasia

On the day Germany’s armed forces invaded Poland, Hitler signed an order permitting the “mercy killing” of severely mentally disabled persons in what is called Germany’s Euthanasia Program. In charge of the program was Viktor Brack, a high official in the Reich’s Chancellery. The program was also called Aktion T4, an acronym for the Berlin address of Brack’s office, Tiergartenstrasse 4. In the course of this program, some 100,000 mental patients are said to have been killed in various euthanasia centers throughout Germany. Technically, it is said to have been implemented by gassing inmates in small gas chambers using bottled carbon monoxide. However, no document survived the war substantiating these claims. Due to public protests, Hitler ordered the termination of the euthanasia program in late August 1941.

The program was extended in 1940 to encompass inmates in concentration camps. Within the bureaucracy of Germany’s Department of Homeland Security (Reichssicherheits­hauptamt), the program was called “Special Treatment 14 f 13.” This department had developed a code system for all kinds of events. 14 f referred to any kind of death cases, while the figure attached behind it identified the type of death. For example, 14 f 14 were executions, while 14 f 13 referred to euthanasia.

There are several documents giving instructions on how to implement “Special Treatment 14 f 13,” none of which single out Jewish inmates or deportees. Inmates subjected to the program had to be permanently unfit for labor. They underwent a preliminary selection by camp doctors, and afterwards another selection by doctors of the Euthanasia Program. If selected, the inmates were then killed in institutions of the Euthanasia Program. This implies, of course, that none of the camps involved had any means of killing such inmates in their “own” gas chambers.

Due to the Third Reich’s increasingly desperate manpower situation, Himmler amended the prere­qui­sites for inmates subject to euthanasia by stipulating on 27 April 1943 that

“in the future, only mentally ill prisoners may be processed by the medical boards created for Program 14 f 13. All other prisoners unfit for work (tuberculars, bedridden, crippled, etc.) are in principle exempt from this program. Bedridden prisoners should be assigned work that they can perform in bed.”

The rich documentation preserved from the Auschwitz Camps shows that neither mentally ill inmates nor those irrecoverably or permanently unfit for work were killed, let alone inmates merely temporarily sick. It seems that Program 14 f 13 shifted over time from a program of special treatment by euthanasia to one of special treatment by special care.

After the general Euthanasia Program had been discontinued by Hitler in the summer of 1941, most SS staff members involved in it were eventually reassigned to the camps of “Aktion Reinhardt,” as these became operational over time. The orthodoxy concludes from this continuity of staff a continuity of purpose. If the Euthanasia Program consisted of mass murder in gas chambers using carbon monoxide, then the same must have happened in the camps of the Aktion Reinhardt (Belzec, Sobibór, Treblinka).

However, we need to consider the assignments which the staff of the (former) Euthanasia Program received after this program had ended. First, during the winter of 1941/42, a large detachment of former personnel was sent to the eastern front as physicians and nurses to help wounded soldiers. This is the opposite of a killing program. Then, after most camps of Aktion Reinhardt had been closed in late 1943, a major part of their SS staff was transferred to the Adriatic coast of northern Italy, where they were mainly engaged in fighting partisans, but to a minor degree also in arresting and deporting Jews to labor camps. This means that continuity of staff did not prove a continuity of purpose.

Furthermore, if there really was a mass-murderous system involved in the camps of Aktion Reinhardt and the other claimed extermination camps (Chełmno, Majdanek, Auschwitz), then why was the development of the alleged gassing facilities so disparate for all these camps? At Auschwitz, Zyklon B as a murder weapon was discovered “accidentally,” gas vans – also “accidentally” discovered by Arthur Nebe – were used at Chełmno, whereas the Belzec, Sobibór and Treblinka camps are said to have used engine exhaust. However, these are all merely unsubstantiated claims by today’s orthodoxy, which fly in the face of the actual evidence exhibiting far more disparate claims by alleged witnesses. In addition, none of this is supported by documental, material or forensic evidence. (For more details, see the entries on all these camps.)

To make matters even more inconsistent, consider the fate of the chemist Helmut Kallmeyer. During the “Medical Case” of the Nuremberg Military Tribunals, he was singled out as “the technical expert on operation of the gas chambers in the euthanasia stations.” Therefore, when the extermination camps are said to have been planned, he should have been the most important expert to be assigned to them, to advise on how best to build and operate homicidal gas chambers. However, he never got involved in any of this in any way. Instead, at every camp, the local SS units were fending for themselves, having to reinvent the wheel every time.

(For more details, see Graf/Kues/Mattogno 2020, pp. 270-281; Mattogno 2016a, pp. 87-91.)