BOOK
The Origins of
Nazi Genocide: From Euthanasia to the
Final Solution
Friedlander, Henry. The Origins of Nazi Genocide: From Euthanasia to the Final Solution. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 1995. 302 Pages (384 including notes). ISBN: 0807846759.
REVIEW
From the preface:
This book is an attempt to explain how Nazi genocide developed. From the first, the regime excluded members of the three targeted groups from the national community. During the 1930’s, the regime consistently escalated persecution, embracing ever more radical exclusionary policies, including compulsory sterilization for the handicapped, incarceration for Gypsies, and forced emigration for Jews. Eventually, the regime decided to implement a program for mass murder to eradicate these three targeted groups.
The chronology of Nazi mass murder unambiguously shows that the killing of the handicapped preceded the systematic murder of Jews and Gypsies. The record shows that Hitler made the decision and that government and party bureaucrats implemented it in January 1940. They devised a method to select the victims, created killing centers using gas, a unique German invention, and developed a technique that processed human beings on an assembly line through these centers (page xiii).
Dr. Henry Friedlander’s seminal work on the T4 program and its results for the handicapped of Germany, as well as its historical place in the events of the broader Holocaust stands as an academic marvel – exhaustively researched and accessibly written. While the layman might find it somewhat cumbersome in comparison to other works on the subject, this is an important book that should be required reading for teachers who wish to discuss the subject. Students will benefit greatly from learning about the scope of the T4 program, major players, why it was started, and that despite the fact that at one point it was stopped by order of Hitler himself, the killing continued at the hands of doctors and nurses who were so morally twisted by the ideals of the master race and the extinction of “life unworthy of life” that they allowed patients to starve, or on their own volition gave phenol injections, etc.
A survey of the table of contents provides the prospective reader an enticement to pursue this text:
1. The Setting
2. Excluding the Handicapped
3. Killing Handicapped Children
4. Killing Handicapped Adults
5. The Killing Centers
6. Toward the Killing Pause
7. The Expanded Killing Program
8. The Continued Killing Program
9. The Handicapped Victims
10. Managers and Supervisors
11. Physicians and Other Killers
12. Excluding Gypsies
13. The Final Solution
In spite of my former reference to the amount of detail in this book, it is quite a quick-reading text. Friedlander has a familiar style that flows, urging his readers to hurry to the next page. It is an historical narrative, and I found it easy to complete in a relatively short amount of time. As evidenced by the table of contents, the story builds through stages, with surprises here and there. The reader is carried along, always alarmed at what comes next despite the experience of the previous pages. Again, as I’ve said in a previous review of Horst Biesold’s Crying Hands, the reader should be impressed with the magnitude of the number of people involved at various levels of the killing and sterilization operations. In the public’s consciousness of the Holocaust, we tend to focus on those with decision-making power at the “Nazi” level; but make no mistake, there were countless minor players from the educational, judicial, and healthcare fields who were indispensable to the “success” of the T4 program. This was no ship-shod operation – it was coordinated, disseminated, perpetrated, and evaluated with the precision we have unfortunately come to expect from Hitler’s minions.
Friedlander’s concluding discussion brings us to this sad awareness: the Nazis perfected the killing that would claim six million Jewish lives in a dress rehearsal on their own people, as the world watched. With the invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941…
…the Nazi regime embarked on its second, and far more ambitious, killing operation. Mobile operational units of the SS, the Einsatzgruppen of the Sipo and SD, crossed the Soviet border immediately after the battle troops. In the occupied territory of the Soviet Union, these units shot large numbers of civilians in mass executions. Their primary task was the murder of all Jews on Soviet soil. They also murdered Gypsies and, wherever possible, the handicapped. The quartermaster of the German army, General Eduard Wagner, thus recorded in September 1941: “Russians consider the feebleminded holy. Nevertheless, killing necessary.” (284).
With killing already tolerated by the perpetrators and not too morally distasteful for the masses, the evolution from euthanasia to gas vans to shooting to mass production of death in the killing centers and other camps was inevitable. Friedlander, as he aptly states in his subtitle, walks us through the stages on that path to destruction.
NOTE: The teacher or student of this material might also find it helpful to consult the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s online exhibit, Deadly Medicine, accessible at http://www.ushmm.org/museum/exhibit/online/deadlymedicine/.
PASSAGE/QUOTE FOR CLASSROOM USAGE
From page 208 (see below for an assignment based on this material):
As police and SS officers, these men were, of course, members of a hierarchical organization operating along military lines, and they were thus used to following orders. Although this undoubtedly played a role, Stangl’s departure from Linz over his conflict with Porhaska and Lozschuh’s departure from Bernburg due to disagreements with Heyde do indicate that they were at times able to put their own interests ahead of the organization.
These police officers were also Nazis and, like the T4 managers, adhered to the ideology of the movement, including absolute obedience to the will of the Fuhrer. As police and SS officers, they undoubtedly also shared the hostility toward “unworthy life.” One can therefore assume that they agreed in principle with the goals of the euthanasia killing operation and thereafter with those of the final solution. Still, agreement in principle does not imply willingness to kill; something else was needed. They had to be “hard,” a valued condition among Nazis. All seem to have possessed this vaunted masculine virtue. All proved this a second time by accepting new postings to the killing centers in the East. Only Woger, who was injured in a traffic accident in 1940, did not go east; Hozschuh also avoided posting to the killing centers, but his job with the Sipo in Kiev proved his Nazi “masculinity.”
Finally, the supervisors believed, as did the managers, that they were making history, that they were participants at the center of momentous events. They were proud to be a part of the march of history. A good example is Hans-Heinz Schutt, a thirty-eight –year-old white-collar worker who had held various office jobs in the party and the SS and who served in the administration of Grafeneck and later in the Lublin camps. In a letter to his stepbrother on the occasion of the boy’s confirmation, Schutt told him that they were living in “an age…never previously experienced by a German,” pointing out that “there is only one victor, and this victor will determine the future of Europe, even the entire world. And this victor is Adolf Hitler.” Schutt concluded with congratulations and the following addendum: “God’s blessings, which accompanied the achievements of the Fuhrer, have proved the truth of our ideology. We enter a great, new Germany with the blessings of God but without the prayers of the priests.”
RATIONALE FOR USAGE/UNIT RELEVANCE
Dr. Friedlander’s landmark work is a must for your lessons on the T4 program. Major themes covered include not only what was done to the mentally and physically handicapped, but also how those persons largely had no advocates once the Nazi program began to head toward its zenith. That so many collaborated in the crimes, and more importantly that many became perpetrators even on those occasions when the official policy was one of pulling back from the sterilizations/murders, should be a tremendous point of emphasis.
In addition, some of his chapters have points of focus on the role of the German churches (both Lutheran and Catholic) in protesting the euthanasia program. Students of the role of the Vatican as being in large part a bystander during the time the Shoah was perpetrated may take interest in its support of the German parishes that spoke out against Hitler’s hospital-killing operation.
CLASSROOM METHOD OF USAGE
I incorporate material from this book in my discussion of T4, as well as during our discussions on the complicity and cooperation of the German people in the events of the Shoah. What follows ties into our introductory discussion of the events and myths of the Holocaust, based on a lecture given by Dr. Elliott Lefkovitz of Spertus College in Chicago.
STUDY QUESTIONS/DISCUSSION GUIDE
The following serves as a partial outline to an introductory unit on the Holocaust. Within this unit, you may incorporate the reading cited above, from page 208 of Dr. Friedlander’s book.
DEFINITION – Holocaust: the deliberate, intentional murder of 2/3 of European Jewry by the Nazis and their collaborators in and before WWII.
Every genocide has certain characteristics that define it; in that way each genocide is unique. The Holocaust has the following characteristics:
Upon conclusion of the presentation of this material, assign students the reading from The Origins of Nazi Genocide. They may read alone or with a partner. After, have them answer the following questions.