What Is It with That Nazi Euthanasia?

Gizmo was our faithful family dog for eighteen years before we “put him down” a few years ago. Our neighbors and friends were suitably sympathetic, and their reaction was entirely appropriate; we were rather broken up about it for several days. It was worst for our children, who had literally grown up with Gizmo.

“It was the best thing for Gizzie,” people who knew us—and him—would opine, again with considerable evidence as well as reason on their side. We agreed, noting that he had been put out of his misery. Of course, bills for his care at the veterinarian had been mounting, and our savings from their discontinuance are appreciated even if not positively needed for our own sustenance.

Rewind to 1945, to Hadamar, (American-) Occupied Germany, where unreconstructed Nazis are being ratted out and shipped to Dachau and other prison camps for sorting and punishment as appropriate. Hadamar is a small town in the western German state of Hesse, and it had long been the location of a government psychiatric hospital where it was reported that the National Socialist government had devised and launched a program for killing persons with disabilities that the government felt had no prospect of living fruitful lives. This practice, allegedly instituted a few years after the assumption of power by the National Socialists, was said to have experienced “mission creep” during World War II such that the putative killing facilities at Hadamar were repurposed to the killing of prisoners of war and other wards of the beleaguered state whose maintenance it wished to be relieved of, in a general way like my family and our beloved Gizmo.

Staffers of the institution were rounded up and put on trial by the occupying US Army under the direction of a Judge Advocate General’s Corps officer named Leon Jaworski, whose name became a household word in the 1970s as the special prosecutor in the Watergate trials. The tribunal he led found every one of the accused guilty of crimes under international law, sentencing three of them to death.

Fast forward to 2014, to Berlin, host to three memorials to Holocaust victims, one each for Jews, for Roma and Sinti, and for gays. Just when it might seem that there couldn’t be yet another category of victims of the Nazis for which to erect a memorial, along comes, 73 years after the fact (the euthanasia program was halted in 1941), the memorial to a supposed 300,000 victims of the National Socialists’ “T4” euthanasia program, reported in the New York Times of September 3: http://tinyurl.com/nplbj3k.

Actually, there never was anything as blessed as silence on the subject; the noise has been sustained at least since 1945 when Colonel Jaworski opened the first of a series of war-crimes “trials” that have continued to the present day and will no doubt continue well past the lifetimes of anyone who might read the present report. And now, just as for every other conceivable permutation of Nazi war crimes the human mind can invent, there is even a memorial to the victims of these crimes as well, at the former bus stop at 4 Tiergartenstrasse in Berlin, where you already couldn’t swing a dead cat around your head without hitting such a memorial with it.

What, then, is with all this interminable hoopla about the T4 euthanasia program that ended over seventy years ago? It seems fairly obvious, on reflection. The one holy cause so widely and deeply revered and worshipped (and enforced by law) that it has been dubbed the Juggernaut of Conscience is, and surely will long remain, the Holocaust, the shield of the Jewish people and the sword of their country, Israel. The German euthanasia program of 1939-1940, whatever its extent and nature in truth, is neither more nor less than a tributary in the vast watershed that drains blood and treasure from the United States and Germany in torrents that swell ever greater with each passing year.

It is the beneficiary of a mendacious symbiosis with its big brother, the Nazi Holocaust of the Jews, in two ways.

First, it demonizes the National Socialists and the Germans, the people who permitted or assisted this monster to gain control over their country. Demonizing these groups is essential to putting over the most-improbable, indeed sensational, thesis that this group of notionally civilized people would assign themselves the task of physically eradicating—exterminating—a group of people living in their very midst, in many cases occupying positions in government, the media, the academy and professions that are distinguished and influential. What “the Germans” actually did to the Jews during World War II is indeed reprehensible, but the Holocaust meme as it has grown and transmogrified since the times of the actual events absolutely requires the understanding that the Germans were in fact brutal, soulless monsters bent on imposing National Socialism on the entire world, and rendering that world entirely judenfrei, as the goal of extermination of all Jews is rendered in their language. Emphasizing and magnifying the size and methods of the T4 euthanasia program serves this goal most admirably. They’re killing their own people, for shame!

Second, it offers a precious “seed crystal” on which to erect a pseudo-factual basis for the Gas Libel on the German People. The technological horrors of the Gas Chamber are such as to raise the hairs on the backs of the necks of people susceptible to dystopian science fiction, and among this gullible population, to raise the moral hackles of those either whose sympathies are motivated by the exotic method of the crime and/or who wish to be seen by their fellows as sympathizing with the helpless innocent who suffer such an unimaginable fate at the hands of such despicable torturers. In just such fertile muck does the seed of the “industrialized death machine” take root and eventually unfold its ugly flower in the light of public wonderment.

The T4 euthanasia program has been promoted as the test bed in which were invented no less than two methods of killing unwilling or unknowing victims with gas: the gas van and the stationary gas chamber, the latter being disguised as, or even doing double duty as, a shower room. Quite aside from the toll it is said to have taken at at least six locations around Germany, it is also averred by those historians who have hitched their wagons to this dark star that the satanic technologies developed in the euthanasia program were explicitly exported to the purported “extermination camps” of Aktion Reinhardt and other conspiracies hatched by Nazis bent on world domination. Diligent operatives from the euthanasia program were seconded by the SS to those camps as they were being designed and erected, and placed in charge of the installation of the killing apparatuses that eventually claimed, it is said, the lives of as many as six million innocent Jews, along with five million “other ranks.” That is, indeed, quite a lot of gas, once one thinks about it. All this is to lend much-needed credibility to the phantasmagoric tales of the genocidal gas chambers invented and deployed by the Nazis.

Like most of the victims of the Nazi empire of death, our poor Gizmo was incinerated (the term “cremated” is reserved for human beings exclusively, Jews and the disabled included), and we requested—at extra cost—that his ashes be returned to us. But we erected no memorial to him, not at a bus stop downtown, nor even in a cemetery such as the ones at the T4 sites.

We spread his ashes around a sapling in the back yard that we had recently planted, which today towers over our back porch providing welcome shade that we enjoy every sunny day that comes along.

One of the things we enjoy about the shade under Gizmo’s Tree is its silence. It has made absolutely no sound since we spread his nourishing ashes that sad day so many years ago. Would that the deaths of others could be so gently honored.