Here I am, subject of the most frightful charges, as if I had not only been a doctor, but also a man without heart or conscience. Do you think that it was a pleasure to me to receive the order to permit euthanasia? For 15 years I had toiled at the sickbed and every patient was to me like a brother. I worried about every sick child as if it had been my own. My personal lot was a heavy one. Is that guilt?
Was it not my first thought to limit the scope of euthanasia? Did I not, the moment I was included, try to find a limit and demand a most searching report on the incurables? Were not the appointed professors of the universities there? Who could there be who was better qualified? But I do not want to speak of these questions and of their execution. I am defending myself against the charge of inhuman conduct and base intentions. In the face of these charges I fight for my right to humane treatment! I know how complicated this problem is. With the utmost fervor I have tortured myself again and again, but no philosophy or other wisdom helped me here. There was the decree and on it there was my name. It is no good saying that I could have feigned sickness. I do not live this life of mine in order to evade fate if I meet it. And thus I assented to euthanasia. I fully realize the problem; it is as old as mankind, but it is not a crime against man nor against humanity. It is pity for the incurable, literally. Here I cannot believe like a clergyman or think as a jurist. I am a doctor and I see the law of nature as being the law of reason. In my heart there is love of mankind, and so it is in my conscience. That is why I am a doctor!
When I talked at the time to Pastor Bodelschwingh, the only serious admonisher I knew personally, it seemed at first as if our thoughts were far apart; but the longer we talked and the more we came into the open, the closer and the greater became our mutual understanding. At that time we were not concerned with words. It was a struggle and a search far beyond the human sphere. When the old Pastor Bodelschwingh left me after many hours and we shook hands, his last words were: “That was the hardest struggle of my life.” For him as well as for me that struggle remained; and the problem remained too.
If I were to say today that I wish this problem had never come upon me with its convulsive drama, that would be nothing but superficiality in order to make me feel more comfortable in myself. But I am living in these times and I see that they are full of antitheses. Somewhere we all must make a stand. I am fully conscious that when I said “Yes” to euthanasia I did so with the deepest conviction, just as it is my conviction today, that it was right. Death can mean deliverance. Death is life—just as much as birth. It was never meant to be murder. I bear a burden, but it is not the burden of crime. I bear this burden of mine, though with a heavy heart, as my responsibility. I stand before it, and before my conscience, as a man and as a doctor.
B. Final Statement of Defendant Handloser[[34]]
During my first interrogations here in Nuernberg, in August 1946, the interrogator declared to me:
First, you have been the Chief of the Army Medical Service. Whether or not you knew of inadmissible experiments does not matter here. As the Chief, you are responsible for everything.
Secondly, do not make the excuse that among other nations the same or similar things have happened. We are not concerned with that here. The Germans are under indictment, not the others.
Thirdly, do not appeal to your witnesses. They, of course, will testify in your favor. We have our witnesses, and we rely upon them.
Those were the guiding principles of the prosecution up to the last day of these proceedings. They have remained incomprehensible to me, because I always believed a criminal to be a man who did wrong, and because I was of the opinion that even the prosecution endeavored to be objective, at least after the end of the presentation of evidence. The final plea by the prosecution, however, has shown me that I made a mistake. The speech by the prosecution did not take into account the material submitted in evidence, but it was a summarized repetition of one-sided statements by the prosecution without taking into account that which was submitted in the course of the presentation of evidence in my case.