Into That Darkness: An Examination of Conscience

Euthanasia was widely discussed in Germany in 1933 due to changes to the criminal code. The German Catholic Church opposed euthanasia as antithetical to Christian morality but by 1935, the Nazis enacted laws mandating the compulsory sterilization of people with hereditary diseases. They also legalized abortions of fetuses suspected to inherit diseases.

Hitler understood the power of the Catholic Church, especially in Austria, and undertook steps to quash its opposition to the Nazi Party. Editors of Catholic publications were covertly replaced with Party members who then published Nazi ideology under the guise of Catholic doctrine. Such machinations tricked the populace into thinking the Church was in total agreement with Nazi policies. Worried that he’d face strong opposition from the Church, Hitler waited to enact his euthanasia program until he instigated World War II, knowing the war would distract from the program. The Nazis probed members of the Church to gauge how much opposition to expect. Hitler, certain that the Church would not unanimously oppose the T4 program, officially started the program in 1939.

Though some members of the German Catholic Church protested, these protests were isolated and the Church did nothing to actively oppose the program. It wasn’t until 1943 that Pope Pius XII denounced the euthanasia program after the Nazis had already killed 60,000-80,000 people as planned, While it had long been assumed that pressure from the public and the Church prompted Hitler to stop the program, Hitler only did so because the program had served its purpose. After the program officially ended, it continued covertly under the codename “14 f 13.” In this program, thousands of political prisoners, criminals, and Jews were designated as “incurable” and gassed. All the former T4 personnel Sereny interviews condemn 14 f 13 but claim they knew nothing about it at the time.

Stangl claims he was unaware that from November 1941 to his reassignment in February 1942, both Hartheim and Bernburg (another euthanasia institute, which he was tasked with closing) were used to gas healthy people in the 14 f 13 program. Sereny suspects Stangl is lying; however, Sereny allows that he may have distanced himself from the victims as he later did at Treblinka. In avoiding direct contact, he wouldn’t have seen that those designated as “invalids” on the forms he doubtlessly reviewed were completely healthy.

Sereny believes Stangl successfully hid the gassings at Hartheim from his wife. She suspects he did this not only out of obedience to secrecy he was bound to but out of fear that she would think less of him if she found out. After he finished closing Bernburg in February 1942, Stangl chose a vague, supposedly anti-partisan assignment in Lublin over returning to Linz and his hated boss, Prohaska.

The T4 euthanasia program was a forerunner to the extermination camps the Nazis established in Poland under Aktion Reinhardt—the plan to exterminate Polish Jews. The SS personnel who worked on the T4 euthanasia program became calloused to systematic murder, and as a result, were later transferred to the five extermination camps in Poland.

To better understand how people came to work in the T4 euthanasia program, Sereny talks to Dieter Allers, a lawyer who helped conceal the program’s true nature, and his wife, who worked as a secretary in the program. Both are unrepentant about their roles, still seeing the program as an endeavor to “improve the health of the nation” (212). Allers maintains that everyone who worked in the program—excluding the soldiers assigned to the crematoria—voluntarily applied for their positions. The program was desirable because it paid well and meant avoiding the dangerous front.

Sereny investigates Nazi hunter and Holocaust survivor Simon Wiesenthal's claim that the euthanasia institutes were formal schools that trained people for later work in the “Final Solution.” She finds that while they were not formal schools of murder, as he argued, the personnel there became accustomed to murder, such that when they arrived at the extermination camps, they were already inured to the horrors they were tasked with executing.

Following the official end of the T4 program, Wirth was reassigned to construct the extermination camp Chelmno-Kulmhof, which was originally designed as another euthanasia institute. Most medical personnel from T4 were not transferred to extermination camps but rather sent to Russia, working as medics behind the front lines. The plan was to employ these medical personnel in the euthanasia program designed for the rest of Europe after the war. Only 96 of the 400 SS men who had worked in the T4 program were assigned to the Aktion Reinhardt extermination camps.