Would the Nazis have killed disabled veterans?

by JeeEyeElElEeTeeTeeEe

Disabled people were one of the minorities targeted by the Nazis for “extermination,” whether through murder or forced sterilization.

Of course many German soldiers would have come home disabled, losing limbs, confined to a wheelchair, etc.

Would the Nazis have targeted them in a pogrom? Would they have been spared because their “defects” were not due to genetics? Would they have been celebrated for being veterans, or shuffled away in favor of veterans not permanently injured?

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The answer to this question is unclear. They certainly wouldn't have gone for a pogrom since pogroms, as in steered outbreaks of mass violence inflicted by the population on a discriminated group, were not the preferred method of persecution by the Nazis after 1938.

The sources available to us offer barely a hint of Wehrmacht soldiers being killed as part of the Nazi "euthanasia" (a fundamental misnomer for a program desinged to kill the disabled and mentally but one that has been established culturally and so I'm sticking with it for the purpose of this post). The reason for this is very likely, on the one hand that no extensive such program was ever planned. The other potential reason for this is the political ramifications. The Nazi leadership had to deal with massive political problems in 1941 when more and more details of the centralized killing program of the disabled surfaced in Germany. For all propapganda, killing German citizens in plain view was something the German population was not willing to tolerate. So the program moved underground. And it became clear that mass killing of Wehrmacht soldiers would have even worse and further reaching consequences for the regime.

In the centralized T4 program 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)

In addition to these cases, 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.

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.