Doctor Hungerland And The ‘Euthanasia’ Programme

Doctor Hungerland’s ideas weren’t unique to Germany. From at least the late nineteenth century onwards many thinkers expressed concern that advances in medical science were keeping people alive who’d have died out previously without producing children. These people would then breed and the ‘bad stock’ they produced would cause the population to become ‘degenerate’, ie full of genetic disorders and abnormalities.

In the USA this led to a programme of sterilisation of people who were considered to be degenerate. Many of these people came from the poorest classes. People were sterilised less because of severe genetically-based disease, but for social reasons, for example because there were criminals in the family or because their behaviour was unconventional. Some of them were never told what had been done to them until they went to the doctor later on to find out why they couldn’t have children.

The ‘euthanasia’ programme in Germany began in 1939 after Hitler received a letter from a man called Knauer who wanted his child ‘put to sleep.’ Hitler sent his personal physician Doctor Brandt to see it. The child was supposed to have been born blind, ‘appeared to be an idiot’, and was also lacking a leg and part of an arm. Doctor Brandt’s brief was to see if this report was true and, if it was, he was to authorise the doctors to kill the child.

After the death of the Knauer child, more children were killed. Midwives were told to report birth defects including Downs syndrome, hydrocephalus, spina bifida, absence of limbs, and cerebral palsy - which was little Hans Rupf’s problem. On the basis of the forms that the midwives had filled out, three paediatricians (who never saw the children) decided if they were to live or die.

There were about thirty special ‘paediatric clinics’ throughout the Reich. Doctor Hungerland’s methods of execution were used in at least one of them. One of the factors that had to be taken into account was ‘do not possess German nationality – or are not of German or related blood’. Jewish or Roma blood would make a child more likely to be killed. The parents were told that their children had died of pneumonia.

Parents were often tricked or bullied into giving their children up – for example the mother could be conscripted for labour service, and her child would have to go to an asylum because she couldn’t look after it. Some of the children were already in asylums because of learning difficulties or epilepsy.

There was also a programme of ‘euthanasia’ for adults, who were executed using prototype gas chambers. Some people were killed just because they were blind, or mentally ill, which was why my mother was frightened about my grandmother when she was taken to mental hospital. People knew about it. There were heartrending scenes when the patients themselves began to realise what it meant when ‘the buses came.’ It was recorded that old people were afraid of going to hospital in case they were killed.

The programme was justified on the basis that the victims had been consuming German money without contributing anything. The executioners were told how many houses could be built for the money that was being used to take care of the mentally ill, or how many orphans or deprived children could be cared for. Some school textbooks carried the same message.

In an earlier version of Kummersdorf, I wrote some of Doctor Hungerland’s history. His ‘conversion experience’ had come when he’d been working in a hospital and had a child on his wards who was suffering from an extreme form of brittle bone disease. This is a horrific condition, the bones can be so fragile that they can break literally at a touch. The child is in constant pain. Doctor Hungerland killed the child in order to bring its suffering to a close. One can understand such an impulse, but after this he began to feel that it was legitimate for a doctor to end life. It was after this that he spent some time in America and was impressed by the sterilisation programme. (Professor Baines is an invented character.)

When Hitler came to power, Hungerland was eager to get involved in the programme. He was drawn on by a mixture of ambition and vanity, but he really did try to ensure that the children didn’t suffer. The Doctor Pfannmüller he mentions had a clinic in Bavaria where he starved children to death. I read an account by a visitor which is heartbreaking.

Pfannmüller didn’t cut off the children’s food, but gradually reduced their portions. ‘Nature then takes care of the rest.’ The visitor describes him as a ‘gross, fat man.’ There’s a grotesque irony about his name. Pfanne is the German for cooking pot, so Pfannmüller means ‘cooking pot miller’. I found the name Hungerland in a list of German police officers in my grandfather’s file (along with Otto). It seemed to fit, somehow.

Several doctors refused to be part of these killings, and resigned their posts. There were rumblings from the churches and occasional public protests. Then Cardinal Galen, Bishop of Münster, preached against the practice in August 1941. He mobilised a wave of protest and soon afterwards Hitler ordered the killings to stop. But ‘wild’ killings continued on wards. And then the focus of killing moved to the concentration camps and the Jews.

One wonders, though, what would have happened if Cardinal Galen had extended his civil courage to preach against the maltreatment of Jews? In 1943 4,700 wives of Jewish men in Berlin protested publicly against their husbands’ deportation, and got them set free. So who knows?