by Diana Castro-Vazquez

Every year, Greensboro College presents the Schleunes Lecture on the Holocaust and Genocide, this year being the 16th. Dr. Patricia Heberer Rice was the guest speaker for this year’s lecture on March 27, in the Finch Chapel. Her lecture was titled “Nameless Victims, Silenced Voices: A Profile of Victims of the Nazi ‘Euthanasia’ Program.” The Schleunes Lecture is presented through the generosity of Richard and Jane Levy of Greensboro in honor of the late Holocaust scholar Dr. Karl Schleunes.

Rice is the Senior Historian and Director of the Office of the Senior Historian in the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. She provides content support for the museum and offers quality control to ensure maximum accuracy and context in the content to be published. She also handles inquiries and questions from the public and ensures the Holocaust Encyclopedia remains a reliable source.

When people think about World War II, they think about the Holocaust – the mass murder of European Jews – but this was not the only horror going on at the time. The Nazis had started a clandestine operation, the Euthanasia Program. To understand the purpose of the Euthanasia Program, one has to understand eugenics. Eugenics is the belief that humans can be bred to improve their genetic quality, even being referred to as scientific racism. According to eugenics, people are more nature than nurture, and specific characteristics can be eliminated from humans. The Nazis started the Euthanasia Program to cleanse the German population Whereas the Holocaust was meant to eliminate the Jews, the Euthanasia Program was made to cleanse their own “race.” While we know now that being German is a nationality or ethnicity, Germans during the 1930s thought differently and believed they were a race. According to the Holocaust Encyclopedia, “The program aimed to eliminate what eugenicists and their supporters considered life unworthy of life: those individuals who, because of severe psychiatric, neurological, or physical disabilities, represented both a genetic and a financial burden on German society and the state.”

We still do not have a complete picture of the victims of the Euthanasia Program many decades later. While the Euthanasia Program was being led by Philipp Bouhler, the director of Hitler’s private chancellery, and Karl Brandt, Hitler’s attending physician, many medical staff and administrators were also involved. Something to understand is that the medical staff recruited to participate in the Euthanasia Program had a choice to say yes or no without being killed. There might be consequences, like losing your job, but individuals were sworn to secrecy before the program was revealed. There was a chance that an individual would have to refuse after, but refusal was an option because there was always someone to replace them in the program.

Why do we not have a complete picture of the victims? The answer is German policy. The victims of the Euthanasia Program were individuals with disabilities who stayed in mental institutions. Many of these institutions still operate today and they are not allowed to publicize health records even after the death of the patients. The only person with the power to disclose the records is the institution’s current medical director. In Germany, it is very stigmatized to release these records and they believe they are protecting the victims and their families. Rice disagrees with this and thinks they should be acknowledged and not kept as faceless and nameless victims.

The Euthanasia Program was hosted in secret. Nobody but the people involved had confirmation that this program took place. Government agencies were not briefed and the victims’ families only knew something was wrong. In 1939, children were being killed in mental institutions where parents were forced to give up their children. According to the Holocaust Encyclopedia, “Beginning in October 1939, public health authorities began to encourage parents of children with disabilities to admit their young children to one of a number of specially designated pediatric clinics throughout Germany and Austria. In reality, the clinics were children killing wards. There, specially recruited medical staff murdered their young charges by lethal overdoses of medication or by starvation.” After some time, children up to the age of 17 were included; this is known as the Child Euthanasia Program. 

Later on, the Euthanasia Program was expanded to adults. In late 1939, Adolf Hitler signed a secret authorization that protected all medical staff and administration from prosecution for participating in the program. This program would be referred to as the Tiergartenstrasse 4 or T4. T4 operatives established six gas chambers where victims perished. Similar to the Child Euthanasia Program, they sent out questionnaires to all public health officials, public and private hospitals, mental institutions and nursing homes for the chronically ill and aged. It was meant to look like a survey to avoid raising suspicion. The categories of the patients were those suffering from schizophrenia, epilepsy, dementia, encephalitis and other chronic psychiatric or neurological disorders; patients that are not German or related blood; those deemed mentally insane by courts; and those confined to institutions involved. After they got the survey information, they would be removed from their institutions and soon perish in a gas chamber.

The files of the victims were falsified to cover up the tracks of the Euthanasia Program, often to show the cause of death to be natural. The Euthanasia Program was a rehearsal to what Nazis were going to do to the Jews in the Holocaust. The “Final Solution” is a shortened version of the Nazi term, “the Final Solution of the Jewish Question,” which refers to the systematic mass destruction of Europe’s Jew. Planners of the Final Solution used some of the same gas chambers as the Euthanasia Program and T4 members who did a good job were also recruited.

Rice did a good job in explaining the Euthanasia Program in a way that you could understand the gravity of what happened. I encourage everyone to go to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum website and read about the horrors that occurred. Rice states that democracy is fragile and people need civil courage to speak up when horrors occur. If you have any questions about this Schleunes Lecture or any future ones, contact Dr. Jason Stroud, assistant professor of History at Greensboro College, at jason.stroud@greensboro.edu.