Aktion T4, What is true and what is not?

[fireofice]

I came across this film that was produced by Hermann Schwenninger on euthanasia called "Existence without life". It wasn't officially released. The film was apparently lost but a reconstruction of it was made.

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dasein_ohne_Leben

[Stubble]

A video regarding t4 and 14f13.

[Otium]

My view for a while has been that the political position on euthanasia in the Third Reich has been distorted in the sweep of everything under Hitler's regime being framed as cruel and criminal, rather than legitimately political. Some things, after all, aren't supposed to be sinister even if you disagree with the policy surrounding a particular issue. Like abortion for example. It is a political issue, but it's also a moral issue, and regardless of where you stand people see the ethical and moral logic underlying both sides - even if one side believes itself to be most morally correct, it doesn't pretend like the issue isn't a matter of legitimate politics, and there are, of course, positions across the spectrum.

I think the position the German state took at that time on the issue of euthanasia - whether you agree with it or not - was of much the same character as taking a hard line on abortion (think of this 'hard line' terms of either Left or Right, it doesn't matter which); they simply took what is largely considered a hard line on the issue. It's only in recent decades that asylums for the mentally disturbed and insane has gone out of style, and in the rest of the world, it's not as if those institutions have a spotless track record.

The point is that I think T4 was markedly different in character and intention than the typical list of dirty laundry we're all expected to imbibe about the Third Reich.

The following excerpt from the beginning of Johann Chapoutot's book 'The Law of Blood' has stuck in my mind regarding this issue, the moral, cultural, historical, and philosophical quagmire around this issue in particular:

In 1945, eighteen physicians from Hamburg, all of them on the staff of the Rothenburgsort Pediatric Hospital, were brought before the German criminal justice system at the behest of the British Occupying Forces. All eighteen were charged with murdering, or acting as accessories to the murder of, fifty-six children who had been diagnosed as permanently unfit between 1939 and 1945, by means of lethal injection. In 1949, the Landgericht (regional court) of Hamburg dismissed the charges. Yes, “it has been objectively verified” that “at least fifty-six children were killed at the Rothenburgsort Pediatric Hospital.” Yes, these acts were “against the law.” The judges argued, however, that “all of the defendants . . . deny their guilt . . . and contest the charge that they committed any acts in objective violation of the law, explaining that they believed their actions to be permitted under the law.”1

The physicians’ arguments were in fact sound. In his exchanges with the British investigators, the hospital’s director, Dr. Wilhelm Bayer, objected strenuously to the charge of a “crime against humanity.” “Such a crime,” he asserted, “can only be committed against people, whereas the living creatures that we were required to treat could not be qualified as ‘human beings.’”2 Dr. Bayer, with great sincerity, kept reiterating that doctors and legal experts had for decades been advising modern governments to shed the weight of useless mouths, burdens that hampered their military and economic performance. These beings were barely human, they asserted; they were corrupted biological elements, and their defects and pathologies risked being passed on if they reproduced. The doctor’s words reflect the recent discovery of the laws of heredity, as well as lingering fear from the panics that swept European society at the close of the nineteenth century and in the aftermath of the First World War. On July 14, 1933, the Nazi government had responded to these concerns by passing a “law for the prevention of hereditary disease,” which required the sterilization of individuals identified as diseased by a “hereditary health court.” The law remained in effect until October 1939, when Hitler issued an executive order that these individuals be put to death instead.

In 1949, the Hamburg judges found nothing in the physicians’ arguments worthy of objection. Four years after the war’s end, they ruled that their colleagues in the medical profession were not guilty. The court accepted even the most peculiar of their arguments: “The elimination of lives not fit to be lived was the norm in Classical Antiquity. One would not venture to claim that the ethics of Plato or Seneca, both of whom defended these views, are any less elevated than those of Christianity.”3 The humanities, vague recollections from high school lessons trotted out regularly by these doctors to justify what might appear to be shocking acts, were also the intellectual heritage of the judges before whom they appeared. They shared both a culture and a point of view: “biology” was their only law. Endorsed by the Ancients, they stood against the norms adopted in subsequent eras, which they regarded as hostile to life itself.

Bayer was dismissed from his position as director of the Rothenburgsort Hospital, but he was allowed to keep his medical license. His license was renewed by the Hamburg Medical Board in 1961, which had undertaken to review his case following the publication of a series of articles on the doctor by the weekly newspaper Der Spiegel in 1960. A few years later, in 1964, Werner Catel, a professor of pediatrics, gave a long interview to this same newspaper. He had acted as a medical consultant to the Third Reich for its Aktion T4 program, the Nazis’ involuntary euthanasia project. In this role, he had been responsible for the murder of sick children, a responsibility he acknowledged openly, dismissing all disapproval or rebuke. Indeed, he persisted in proposing that mixed panels of doctors, mothers, lawyers, and theologians be assembled to rule on the elimination of terminally ill children—a chilling echo of the health courts established by the 1933 law. When the journalist conducting the interview reminded him that the death penalty had been abolished in West Germany, Catel demurred:

Don’t you see that when a jury makes a decision it is always judging human beings, even if they are criminals? We are not talking abouthumans here, but rather beings that were merely procreated by humans and that will never themselves become humans endowed with reason or a soul.4

The physician and the state must therefore intervene out of pure “humanity,” in order to avoid needless suffering on the part of patients, families, and the community.5 Neither Dr. Bayer nor Dr. Catel could understand how they could be guilty of anything: contemporary culture, their own humanity, and the state had all led them to act as they did. These arguments still carried enough weight after the war’s end to be accepted by the court and reprinted in the columns of a respectable daily newspaper. These men were—and remained—obstinately committed to this line of reasoning.

Johann Chapoutot, The Law of Blood: Thinking and Acting as a Nazi (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press, 2018), pp. 1-3.

The most obvious thing to point out is that question of 'legality' is wholly dependant on one's temporal condition, since according to the legal positivist view what these doctors did was legal; and it was even morally correct in their time and place, both from a historical standpoint, but also a scientific one.

Chapoutot tries perching himself on the ledge or moral superiority because of his own subjective moral view which he tries to give some 'objective' credence by invoking 'illegality', but since this too is subjective - unless he's a proponent of natural law (in the legal context) - then this isn't a convincing position against the acquittal of these doctors, or an indictment of their explanations for their actions (even if they weren't acquitted).

The line of most significance to me (which I underlined for particular emphasis above): "Neither Dr. Bayer nor Dr. Catel could understand how they could be guilty of anything", is what really made me think about this whole issue differently; because the issue of euthanasia, and whether what these doctors did was 'right' or 'wrong', is not nearly as clean cut as haphazard mass killing out of some mixed emotional frenzy to eliminate real/imagined opponents. This is a case where medical professionals, operating under a completely different moral ontology were acting in accordance with that ontology to achieve the ideal outcome for society. The 'Holocaust', on the other hand, is not the same thing as this.

Putting aside the Holocaust debate for a second, if you take the position that the orthodox view is correct, nobody, not even the accused would be capable of defending mass murder and genocide from the same ontological perspective; and nobody ever has, because these things aren't the same thing. That's what makes this particular issue so interesting and uncomfortable, because the issues that arise over morality, ethics, and all the rest of it, can only be decided by relative cultural and political understandings of the world, and what would contribute to a better one.

Clearly it was the view of these doctors and the regime at the time that the hereditarily ill were unfit for life because their quality of life was deemed to be poor, on top (if not because) of their ability to function being hampered by their disease making them unable to contribute and partake in life to any meaningful degree. So, the most obvious medical solution was to put an end to such a life that seemingly had no value, or contributable prospects. One can see how the logic in this would work, even if one doesn't agree with it. I for one think this kind of involuntary decision is going too far, but that's potentially more of an issue concerning one's ability to make decisions without state intervention than it is a position on the morality of euthanasia itself, though the two questions are obviously related depending on the state's position on the latter. One could draw a comparison here with how various Western governments acted during the Covid years, regardless of what side you're on, whether you think the government forcibly vaccinating people and denying access to dying loved one's (whether from Covid or the vaccine, whatever one's view is on that is not the point), was moral or not in light of the 'real' or invented 'risks', I think this is a fairly similar political comparison which is capable of helping people understand this particular historical question.

Obviously not everyone is going to agree with this, especially depending on how one estimates 'life' and its meaning and value - people are going to be arguing about that until the end of time - but the point is that it was not out of some callous and irrational hatred or murderous ideological fixation to kill the disabled that motivated Aktion T4.

A couple years ago Travis LeBlanc at Counter-Currents published a two part review of the German pro-euthanasia film 'Ich Klage an' ('I Accuse') [1941] which uses the setting of a trial to hash-out the arguments both for and against euthanasia. The film, while obviously advocating the perspective of the regime, is interesting because it's a sincere example of this cultural expression concerning this issue, in the same way some films are today sincere in their promulgation of what are typically Leftist causes framed in ways congenial to the status quo. Anyway, it shows you that this issue is about more than mere wickedness, but an actual explication of what the German NS regime thought was a humanitarian policy! Whether you agree with that assessment or not, I don't think you could accuse them of acting intentionally and knowingly wicked or in bad faith.

Ich Klage an Pro-Genocide Nazi Propaganda or Humanitarian Masterpiece? Part 1
https://counter-currents.com/2023/12/ic ... an-part-1/

Ich Klage an Pro-Genocide Nazi Propaganda or Humanitarian Masterpiece? Part 2
https://counter-currents.com/2023/12/ic ... an-part-2/

And this interesting essay:

Comparing Film: The Matrix & Ich Klage An: Red-Pilled or Wised-Up?
https://counter-currents.com/2024/08/co ... -klage-an/

It's an interesting perspective worth considering.

Thinking about this question should at least provide an avenue for more nuanced judgement.

Some historical issues aren't merely problems in terms of fact, but epistemology and perspective. Whether what's said and claimed about Aktion T4 is 'true' or not is only part of the issue since actual concrete facts can only tell you so much, and they likely cannot tell you what you should think. If you make a claim like, "The Nazis killed disabled people because they're hateful, demented, and evil!", this has little to nothing to do with the empirical facts. The only empirical part of a statement like that is the claim of being 'hateful', since this is a claim about motive, which can be investigated using facts.

[Archie]

...
Putting aside the Holocaust debate for a second, if you take the position that the orthodox view is correct, nobody, not even the accused would be capable of defending mass murder and genocide from the same ontological perspective; and nobody ever has, because these things aren't the same thing. That's what makes this particular issue so interesting and uncomfortable, because the issues that arise over morality, ethics, and all the rest of it, can only be decided by relative cultural and political understandings of the world, and what would contribute to a better one.
...

In particular, I think you can end up with very different ethics depending on whether you have a more collectivist or a more individualist focus. Modern people in the Anglosphere tend to be highly individualistic with great emphasis on individual liberty and choice, but this mindset is an anomaly, historically speaking. Traditional societies tend to assign much more importance to the overall health of the community with individual desires being subordinate. From the perspective of modern liberal individualism, involuntary euthanasia greatly offends the ideals of individual choice and right to life, but under collectivist premises, such matters would be viewed more in terms of communal resources and the overall health of the super-organism. For what it's worth, when things get really bad, liberal ideals more often than not get discarded or abridged since ultimately an abstract ideal will almost always lose out to more basic concerns like survival.

Even in the most liberal societies, it is not possible to ignore collectivist concerns entirely. For instance, the US government estimates the "statistical value of life" of a human being at $7.5 million. The idea behind this is that things like cleaning up air and water always have a cost. If you are more lax on safety and environmental matters this will translate, statistically speaking, into some number of excess deaths. The state is not killing people directly, but they are in a sort of roundabout way in the sense of passively allowing more excess deaths, if preventing them would be "too expensive." And the rationale for this is that if resources are finite, spending too much to save a life is thought to be counterproductive since you might end up killing even more lives via general poverty than the few lives you are saving. For example, if you spend $1 billion to save one (statistical) life, you are $1 billion poorer which would (statistically) cause some excess deaths.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_of_life

The same tensions and tradeoffs can be seen in many issues. Military conscription, for example. Forcing people to serve in the military is somewhat "fascist" in the sense that the individual is coerced to serve on behalf of the society. And note that often this requires the person to die for sake of the whole.