What were Nazi plans for their own soldiers who were disabled or mentally handicapped from war?

by misyo

Were the Nazis prepared to exterminate their own soldiers who fought for their country to carry out their ideology?

commiespaceinvader

The problem with questions like this is that there is no such thing as the Nazi master plan for what will happen after the war. Unfortunately nobody wrote all the things down that the Nazis were planning to do after the war.

If the Euthanasia program the Nazis ran is any indication then the answer is most likely that they didn't plan to kill their own wounded. World War I veterans were technically exempt from the Euthanasia program, especially if they had been awarded medals, had been wounded, or had performed with special valor at the front. There are a couple of cases though where World War I veterans were killed. Henry Friedländer cites the case of 58 year-old Karl Rueff, a lieutenant in the reserves who had been awarded an Iron Cross First Class. He was institutionalized in south Germany due to a head wound he had suffered in the First World War. His disability pension paid for his institutional care, and he was relatively healthy, suffering only from occasional epileptic seizures. Nevertheless, in 1940 he was transferred to Grafeneck and gassed.

Friedländer also cites a similar case is known from Vienna. A veteran who had become a severe alcoholic was brought to Am Steinhof in 1942. He wasn't killed though because his attorney appealed and he was released. Public Health Officials argued in this second case that he might have been released but that he was to be considered "asocial" due to his alcoholism and his communist leanings. While no such things is known about Rueff, it is not unlikely that similar considerations governed the decision in his case. It is not a broad enough source basis to make a judgment but as an educated guess, the planned treatment of veterans might have been influenced by such considerations, as in if they would behave in a manner the Nazi state condoned. (Henry Friedländer in The Origins of Nazi Genocide: From Euthanasia to the Final Solution. Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1995, p. 74)

To go into the question /u/Rittermeister raised below, we also need to talk about the Wehrmacht Euthanasia program.

I have written about this here previously but to reiterate, there is some indirect evidence that points to the Nazis killing German wounded German soldiers on the eastern front but it is unknown on what scale, how institutionalized this was, if it was official policy, and even if it happened at all.

Viktor Brack who had been charged with the centralized Euthanasia program, according to its provisions was in charge of deciding who of the injured Wehrmacht soldiers was to be killed based on their combat records. If he did this, is unknown. When the centralized euthanasia program was stopped and the decentralized euthanasia began, there might have been cases similar to the one in Vienna cited by Freidländer above, where doctors decided to kill veterans with mental problems but since that program was decentralized and the issue of killing veterans would have been a public relations disaster for the Nazis, very little is known (Wolfgang Petter: "Zur nationalsozialistischen 'Euthanasie': Ansatz und Entgrenzung," in Der Zweite Weltkrieg: Analysen, Grundzuege, Forschungsbilanz, edited by Wolfgang Michalka. Muenchen and Zuerich: Piper Verlag, 1989, pp. 819-820)

Similarly, Michael Burleigh in Death and Deliverance: "Euthanasia" in Germany c. 1900-1945. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994, pp. 231-232 and again Friedländer, pp. 296-297 both mention a mission Brack and 30 of the people who worked for him undertook a secret mission to the Eastern frontlines in the winter of 41/42. Disguised as members of the Organisation Todt, they worked in military hospitals in Minsk. The exact nature of their assignment remains unknown (part of it seems to have had to do with the gas van) but both Burleigh and Friedländer use post-war testimony by people from the military hospitals to suggest they were there to kill wounded soldiers of the Wehrmacht.

Again, we do not know what Brack's mission entailed and if they killed Wehrmacht soldiers while they were there but even if they did, it is a reasonable conclusion that no larger scale program of such kind existed. If they planned one for after the war, we can not say but given how much of an outrage that would have been to the German populace and how careful the Nazis were in placating the German populace, it seems very unlikely.

Edited to add: I just took a look at Ernst Klee's History of Euthanasia program in the Third Reich and he mentions another interesting tid-bit. It seems as though, we know of at least 36 former Wehrmacht soldiers who had been discharged from the Wehrmacht because of mental illnesses and subsequently killed at the Hadamar facility in 1943. This is not the case for all soldiers with mental problems since many were also transferred to so-called "Neurotikerlazarette" but it seems as though in the case of these 36, they did have a previous history of disciplinary problems in the army. This points to the same thing as with the cases Freidländer cites above that even the status as a veteran might no protect you if you did behave in a way the Nazi state deemed undesirable. But again, there is very little evidence and it is really hard to estabish if this was a mass phenomenon or if these 36 cases were the responsibility of one person or generally a one-off thing.

Rittermeister

If you will allow a closely related follow-up question? I watched a recording of a lecture given by the distinguished professor Gerhard Weinberg some months back, and in that lecture he claimed not only that disabled WWI veterans, but disabled WWII veterans were euthanized by the German state. Is this correct?

jlund19

The Nazi's euthanasia program didn't apply to soldiers who were wounded (both physically and mentally) from war. (Get you leg blown off in WWI? Nope, you're fine.) It also didn't apply to people who suffered accidents. (Was there an explosion in the factory you worked in and you lost your hearing? Nope, you're fine. No need to euthanize you). These people were exempt from forced sterilization and eventually euthanasia because they were "hereditarily healthy". They posed no risk of passing on their missing limb or blindness to their offspring.

The euthanasia program (started off as the T4 program) designed to eliminate people born with this handicaps - to eliminate inherited traits. Here's the "Sterilization Law" that outlined who was to be sterilized (which eventually moved to euthanasia) -

  • "Since the National Revolution public opinion has become increasingly preoccupied with questions of demographic policy and the continuing decline in the birthrate. However, it is not only the decline in population which is a cause for serious concern but equally the increasingly evident genetic composition of our people. Whereas the hereditarily healthy families have for the most part adopted a policy of having only one or two children, countless numbers of inferiors and those suffering from hereditary conditions are reproducing unrestrainedly while their sick and asocial offspring burden the community." (US Holocaust Museum)

Basically, the condition had to be inherited for the person to fall under this law.

 

Edit: Sources

Hitler and Nazi Germany by Jackson J. Spielvogel

Edit 2: As /u/commiespaceinvader pointed out, my post only refers to the original design of the T4 program and doesn't apply to post August 1942 when the decision on who would be killed or not was left up to the patient's doctors.

[deleted]

There are some really fantastic answers here, but you may be interested in the documentary Television Under The Swastika. Toward the end of the war, pedestrian and broadly appealing programming transitioned to entertainment and informative programming for the military. Included was a program that showed amputees hopping and crawling through an obstacle course in order to make them "fit for service again". There was no personnel waste at the end of the war if the military could help it.

BerenBarDown

I recently read Wendy Lower's book called 'Hitler's Furies'. It details the role of women in the holocaust, specifically in areas of eastern Europe such as Ukraine.

One of the people detailed in the book is a doctor who preformed euthanasia on the elderly but eventually this was extended in some areas to German soldiers who had PTSD or serious but non life threatening injuries. This was mainly because it sapped resources and they were seen as no longer useful to the regime. The whole thing was kept really quiet because news of this would cause unrest among soldiers and civilians. I hope this helps.