History Book: The open secret

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NICK EICHER, HOST: Today is Monday, September 29th. Good morning! This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Nick Eicher.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: And I’m Mary Reichard. Up next, the WORLD History Book.

EICHER: Before we begin, a warning: this story contains disturbing details and may not be suitable for younger listeners.

REICHARD: We began last week with sterilization programs both in the U.S. and Germany. Today, the story darkens: how Nazi Germany moved from sterilization to killing its own disabled children and adults. Here’s Caleb Welde.

CALEB WELDE: It begins with a registry. Two weeks before Germany invades Poland, doctors, nurses, and midwives are told they must register all children under three. Then, the registration requirements expand.

GRIECH-POLELLE: Old age homes, asylums, sanitariums, hospitals, clinics…

Beth Griech-Polelle for the Midwest Center for Holocaust Education.

GRIECH-POLELLE: And the directors of these institutions are instructed you are to take a questionnaire and fill it out for every single individual in your care.

There’s no explanation given. Caregivers can see the forms are going to the “Reich Committee for the Scientific Registration of Severe Hereditary and Congenital Illnesses.”

GRIECH-POLELLE: And I will tell you that the bureaucrats are amazed at how easy they can find willing participants.

When people are interviewed, they’re told specifically what their job will be. Some are wary of the legal implications. There’s no law in Germany that allows the government to kill people they deem disabled. Hitler pens a short statement– the full text is one sentence long– saying “incurable” patients “may be granted a mercy death.”

KOMRAD: This was considered compassionate

Doctor Mark Komrad is a medical ethicist and teaches at Johns Hopkins. He’s served two terms on the Ethics Committee of the American Psychiatric Association.

KOMRAD: A moral pioneering effort to relieve people who were impaired and therefore suffering.

But according to the Nazi’s, not everyone deserves mercy.

KOMRAD: Jews were excluded because Jews were not considered worthy of compassionate relief of suffering.

Doctors begin reaching out to parents of children with “incurable” diseases and disabilities. They tell them about new, cutting-edge care facilities.

GRIECH-POLELLE: Of course they’re lying to the parents, because there isn’t going to be any care for those children.

As registrations pour in, doctors begin experimenting on the most effective way to kill them:

KOMRAD: So first they tried narcotics and barbiturate injections, and they didn't work very well. …They tried starvation and freezing, that was too slow. Then they tried firing squads, but that caused a problem, because the soldiers were getting PTSD.

Having just blitzkrieged through Poland, the Nazis begin experimenting with gas chambers using Polish patients. They bring what they learn back to Germany and begin gassing their own citizens. Families receive fake cause-of-death letters. But things aren’t adding up.

GRIECH-POLELLE: Well, now wait a minute. I had just been to visit my mother two days ago. How can she be dead?

It becomes an open secret.

GRIECH-POLELLE: Children sang songs about “hide when you see the gray bus.”

Patients are always taken away in grey buses with blacked out windows. 

On July 13th, 1941 a Catholic Bishop named von Galen has had enough. Von Galen is the Bishop of Munster a city of about a hundred thousand. He gets up in front of his congregation and says he’s changed the topic of today’s message. He begins to air his grievances – specifically calling out the Gestapo more than ten times. He knows there are Gestapo informants in the room.

When the next Sunday arrives. He preaches a second sermon against the Nazis, more stirring than the first. He quotes an 18th century dissident who put it like this: “My head is at your Majesty's disposal. But not my conscience.” A week later, Von Galen spends his entire third sermon talking about the open secret.

GRIECH-POLELLE: You do not need a law that it is wrong to murder. …He says that is engraved on the human heart.

Copies of the sermon quickly spread through Germany…and beyond.

GRIECH-POLELLE: The British Psychological Warfare division picks up the speech, and they translate excerpts of the speech into every major European language, and then they leaflet it from airplanes all over Europe.

Von Galen isn’t the only one speaking out. Fritz Bodelschwingh runs a large hospital for disabled kids. When he refuses to hand over kids, the hospital is bombed. The Nazis issue a warrant for his arrest. But then the regional Nazi manager refuses to actually arrest him sending it up the chain that Bodelschwingh is extremely popular in his province. Paul Braune directs the Hoffnungstal Institute for the handicappedHe sends a letter to Hitler personally also refusing to hand over kids. He sends copies of his letter to pastors across Germany.

Three weeks after von Galen gives his third “political sermon” Hitler officially cancels the Euthansia program. Though individuals had spoken out against the killingsthere were never large-scale protests.

GRIECH-POLELLE: Hitler really learned from that– if German people would not rise up and take to the streets to protest the murder of people they professed to love If you would not protest that, then are you really going to take to the streets to protest social outcasts and pariahs like the Jews?

The Nazi’s so-called “compassionate euthanasia” program killed more than 250,000 people. It laid the groundwork for the most well-known atrocities of the Third Reich. In 1942 alone, the year after the Hitler canceled the program, more than a million Jews are ushered into gas chambers. Zyklon B pellets fall from vents in the ceiling causing vomiting, convulsions, and foaming at the mouth as the chemical simultaneously attacked the heart, brain, and nervous system.

And the Nazi’s don’t forget those who stood up against their “hygiene program.” In 1943, they behead three priests and a protestant pastor who had circulated von Galen’s sermons. The Nazi’s then send the pastor’s wife bills for her husband’s court costs, prison costs, and execution costs.

For WORLD, I’m Caleb Welde

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