"The perpetrators were scholars, doctors, nurses, justice officials, the police and the health and workers’ administration.
'Life Unworthy of Life'
The victims were poor, desperate, rebellious or in need of help. They came from psychiatric clinics and childrens hospitals, from old age homes and welfare institutions, from military hospitals and internment camps."
Commemorative Tablet at Tiergartenstraße 4, Berlin
“Evil when we are in its power is not felt as evil, but as a necessity, or even a duty. Sin is not a distance, it is a turning of our gaze in the wrong direction.
Human beings are so made that the ones who do the crushing feel nothing; it is the person crushed who feels what is happening. Unless one has placed oneself on the side of the oppressed, to feel with them, one cannot understand.
Power is as pitiless to the man who possesses it, or thinks he does, as it is to its victims; the latter it crushes, the former it intoxicates. The truth is, no one really possesses it."
Simone Weil
"As everything in what used to be called creation becomes a commodity, human beings begin to look at one another, and at themselves, in a funny way, and they see price tags. There was a time when people spoke, at least occasionally, of 'inherent worth'— if not of things, then at least of persons.
It is sometimes said that since everything is for sale under the rule of The Market, nothing is sacred. Does anyone doubt that if the True Cross were ever really discovered, it would eventually find its way to Sotheby's? The Market is not omnipotent— yet. But the process is under way and it is gaining momentum."
Harvey Cox, The Market as God
"The stronger must dominate and not mate with the weaker, which would signify the sacrifice of its own higher nature. Only the born weakling can look upon this principle as cruel, and if he does so it is merely because he is of a feebler nature and narrower mind; for if such a law did not direct the process of evolution then the higher development of organic life would not be conceivable at all.
The struggle for the daily livelihood leaves behind in the ruck everything that is weak or diseased or wavering; while the fight of the male to possess the female gives to the strongest the right, or at least, the possibility to propagate its kind. And this struggle is a means of furthering the health and powers of resistance in the species. Thus it is one of the causes underlying the process of development towards a higher quality of being.
Since the inferior always outnumber the superior, the former would always increase more rapidly if they possessed the same capacities for survival and for the procreation of their kind; and the final consequence would be that the best in quality would be forced to recede into the background. Therefore a corrective measure in favour of the better quality must intervene. Nature supplies this by establishing rigorous conditions of life to which the weaker will have to submit and will thereby be numerically restricted; but even that portion which survives cannot indiscriminately multiply, for here a new and rigorous selection takes place, according to strength and health."
Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf
"Those who are at present so eager to be reconciled with the world at any price must take care not to be reconciled with it under this particular aspect: as the nest of The Unspeakable. This is what too few are willing to see."
Thomas Merton
“Religion used to be the opium of the people. To those suffering humiliation, pain, illness, and serfdom, religion promised the reward of an after life.
But now we are witnessing a transformation: a true opium of the people is the belief in nothingness after death, the huge solace, the huge comfort of thinking that for our betrayals, our greed, our cowardice, our murders, that we are not going to be judged.”
Czeslaw Milosz, The Discreet Charm of Nihilism
Most people are unaware or simply overlook the actions of the German government that began in 1939, in which the State, with the active cooperation of the medical and legal professions, began the systematic murder of people who were physically and mentally inferior, undesirable and a drain on resources better used by the superior ones, at least according to the harsh but necessary judgement of the State.
It was this decision, and its willing acceptance by the thought leaders and intellectuals of the day, along with the sociopaths of all classes, in defining who had the right to live based on their ability to serve the State according to its needs, that laid the groundwork for the death of compassion, and the murder of over ten million people.
Once the State has the power to say who is or is not a worthy human being, no one is safe. The mentally and physically disabled, the depressed, the vagrants, the elderly, those of mixed races, homosexuals, and those who irritate the powerful.
We do not often hear about Aktion T4, the euthanasia program, because the weakest have little or no constituency, and are sometimes overlooked because others think that their own causes, or their own pain, is more significant than the least of these.
It was the professional class, the doctors and the lawyers, who willingly sanctioned the murder of the innocents in Germany. And for that great crime against God and Man, which almost no one protested against, the country was brought low and laid to ruin. It is a terrible trap to think that we today are so different, so exceptional, that we are not capable of permitting the same thing to happen all over again. After all, we are only doing what is necessary, what is required by The Market, backed up by made up statistics and clever propaganda designed to make the reasonably successful feel superior to the unfortunate.
And to make the unfortunate, the different, and the others appear to be vermin to be controlled and then exterminated, as an unjust economic drain on the nation.
They sanctify the rich, no matter how they made their fortunes, and demonize the unfornate, no matter what the cause of their poverty, which is the law of the god of the darkness of this world.
And this is how the madness begins. Look, don't turn away. See what you are becoming.
In their desire to escape the pain and complexity of being human, men can make themselves into beasts, one step at a time. And then there is hell on earth.
Aktion T4 was the name used after World War II for Germany's "Euthanasia programme" during which physicians killed thousands of people who were "judged incurably sick, by critical medical examination".
The programme officially ran from September 1939 until August 1941, but continued unofficially until the end of the Nazi regime in 1945.
During the official stage of Action T4, 70,273 people were killed, but the Nuremberg Trials found evidence that German and Austrian physicians continued the murder of patients after October 1941 and that about 275,000 people were killed under T4.
More recent research based on files recovered after 1990 gives a figure of at least 200,000 physically or mentally handicapped people killed by medication, starvation, or in the gas chambers between 1939 and 1945.
The name T4 was an abbreviation of "Tiergartenstraße 4", the address of a villa in the Berlin borough of Tiergarten which was the headquarters of the Gemeinnützige Stiftung für Heil- und Anstaltspflege, bearing the euphemistic name literally translating into English as Charitable Foundation for Curative and Institutional Care.
This body operated under the direction of Reichsleiter Philipp Bouhler, the head of Hitler's private chancellery, and Dr. Karl Brandt, Hitler's personal physician. This villa no longer exists, but a plaque set in the pavement on Tiergartenstraße marks its location.
This dialogue is taken from the transcripts of Sophie Scholl's interrogation, before she was tried and executed for her dissent and act of conscience in 1943 in Munich.
"The inability to identify with others was unquestionably the most important psychological condition for the fact that something like Auschwitz could have occurred in the midst of more or less civilized and innocent people.
What is called 'fellow traveling' (collaboration) was primarily business interest: one pursues one’s own advantage before all else and, simply not to endanger oneself, does not talk too much. That is a general law of the status quo."
Theodor Adorno
