Death
and Deliverance: 'Euthanasia' in Germany C. 1900-1945
by Michael Burleigh
ALL the world knows of Adolf Hitler and the
atrocities committed under his leadership during the Nazi era. But were
he and his small band of accomplices alone? Psychiatrists supplied the
flawed theories and ideas of eugenics and biochemistry which provided the
justification for wholesale slaughter of the "inferior". Timely reading
because modern psychiatry is treading down the same path once again - forgetting
about healing and concentrating instead on biology, genetics, and brain
chemistry.
Reviews
From Kirkus Reviews , October 15, 1994
A chilling documentation of what happened
in Germany when the Nazis seized power and put their ideas on eugenics
and euthanasia into action. Burleigh (International History/London School
of Economics; coauthor, The
Racial State, not reviewed) points out that the Nazi program began
with a humanitarian rationalization: Mentally and physically disabled children
were subject to "mercy killing" as a form of deliverance. Soon, however,
"mercy killing" evolved into the elimination of "life unworthy of life"
as the Nazi killing machine expanded to include more and more victims,
and as political, legal, moral, and religious opposition was quashed by
the fear of reprisals and totalitarian power. Burleigh demonstrates how
Nazi eugenics perverted German medicine and science: Scientists approved
the sterilization of some 400,000 people between 1934 and 1945 to eradicate
"degenerative heredity" in order to "improve the race." Doctors, particularly
psychiatrists, were encouraged to falsify medical records, give lethal
injections, starve patients, and use other creative means of murder while
ignoring the age-old dictum of the physician, "Do no harm." Burleigh also
details how asylum populations were decimated as managers, bureaucrats,
lawyers, doctors, nurses, and other professionals, corrupted by monetary
awards and promotions, played their parts in the Nazi murder industry.
Daily killings became routine as Nazi propagandists extolled social Darwinism.
Burleigh describes how victims were targeted, including Jews, foreigners,
enemies of the Reich, gypsies, and those who lacked "labor values." Occasional
accounts of humanity brighten the grim story, as medical Schindlers saved
patients from death by listing them as valuable workers who were badly
needed. After the war, some of the Nazi eugenicists, tried at Nuremberg
and in German courts, were executed, while others received light sentences.
Most
melted into the general population under new identities. A notable
contribution to the history of Nazi Germany - and a sobering reminder of
what can happen when the claims of science, bureaucracy, and expertise
go unchallenged.
Book Description
Between 1939 and 1945 the Nazis systematically
murdered as many as 200,000 mentally ill or physically disabled people.
This first full-scale English study of "euthanasia" in modern Europe traces
its development from the concept of "negative human worth" to its chilling
emergence in Dachau and Auschwitz.
Customer Comments
A reader, July 19, 1997
Remembering the forgotten victims
An extraordinary and deeply moving book.
Burleigh documents in meticulous and scholarly detail the mass murder of
psychiatric patients, and exposés the obscene justification of this
as "mercy killing" (incidentally providing a fascinating and horrifying
survey of the way in which the Nazi "euthanasia" program helped create
the bureaucratic machinery later used to run the concentration camps).
Instead of allowing the sheer weight of numbers to render the victims anonymous,
he uses haunting photographs and details of some of the murdered adults
and children to "bring them to life" and make vivid the humanity which
the Nazis were unable to see.
Anyone interested in the rights of the mentally
handicapped and mentally ill should read this book.
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