“Therefore, I think it necessary to explain all those points of view to the Fuehrer before undertaking the program, as, in my opinion he is the only one able to view the entire complex and to come to a decision.”
The prosecution will introduce evidence to show that the program was in fact carried out at the end of 1942 and the beginning of 1943, and that as a result of the suggestions made by Blome and Greiser, many Poles were ruthlessly exterminated and that others were taken to isolated camps, utterly lacking in medical facilities, where thousands of them died.
EUTHANASIA
On 1 September 1939, the very day of the German attack on Poland, and after a great deal of discussion between Dr. Karl Brandt, Dr. Leonardo Conti, Philipp Bouhler, the Chief of the Chancellery of the Fuehrer, and others, Hitler issued the following authority to the defendant Karl Brandt (630-PS):
“Reichsleiter Bouhler and Dr. Brandt, M. D., are charged with the responsibility of enlarging the authority of certain physicians to be designated by name in such a manner that persons who, according to human judgment, are incurable can, upon a most careful diagnosis of their condition of sickness, be accorded a mercy death.
[Signed] Adolf Hitler”
After the receipt of this order, an organization was set up to execute this program, Karl Brandt headed the medical section and Philipp Bouhler, the administrative section. The defendant Hoven, as chief surgeon of the Buchenwald concentration camp, took part in the program and personally ordered the transfer of at least 300 to 400 Jewish inmates of different nationalities, mostly non-German, to their death in the euthanasia station at Bernburg. The defendants Brack and Blome participated in their capacities as assistants to Bouhler and Conti.
Questionnaires were forwarded to the Ministry of the Interior from the various institutes and were then submitted to Karl Brandt and his staff for an expert opinion in order to determine the status of each patient. Then each of those experts indicated his opinion as to the eventual disposition of the patient; that is, whether or not the patient should be transferred to a killing station. The questionnaires were supposedly returned to the Ministry of the Interior, which, in turn, sent lists of the doomed patients to the different insane asylums, ordering the directors of the asylums to hand over the patients to a thing called the General Sick Transport Corporation for transfer to the particular stations where the killings took place. This Transport Corporation was not a real organization, but one of the code names used to disguise the true nature of the activities. The patients were then transferred to the station where they were immediately killed. This entire procedure took place without the consent of the relatives, but the relatives did receive a death certificate on which the cause of death was falsified.
The Euthanasia Program was an open secret in top Nazi circles. However, every possible effort had been made to keep it from the public in order to avoid intervention by the churches. In spite of all these precautions, it became commonly known in Germany as early as the summer of 1940 that these killings were going on and church authorities, as well as various legal officials, tried in vain to stop the killings.