An exhaustively researched account of the "opening act of Nazi
genocide": the murder of approximately 70,000 physically and
mentally handicapped German citizens. Friedlander (History/Brooklyn
College; coeditor of the 26-volume Archives of the Holocaust
series) notes how Nazi political leaders, bureaucrats, physicians,
and scientists believed in and brutally practiced eugenic beliefs
and extended them to the conviction that there is "life unworthy of
life." He spells out how the so-called "euthanasia" program first
initiated in 1939 evolved from forced sterilization of the disabled
to the establishment of killing centers disguised as hospitals. As
news of the program leaked out and protests mounted, Hitler ordered
a halt to the program, code-named T4, in August 1941; by then, it
also encompassed Jews, Gypsies, Poles, and others. However, T4
continued and served as a model for the Holocaust, in which many T4
personnel participated. Friedlander's book is particularly valuable
in noting the methodology of T4 and its strong parallels with that
of the "Final Solution": the use of secrecy and deception,
including sinister euphemisms (those murdered were referred to as
"decontaminated"), meticulous record-keeping by a vast bureaucracy,
the technology of gas chambers, and the plunder of the victims and
their families. The whole grisly story generally is told well,
although Friedlander nearly buries the reader under a mountain of
detail, particularly in writing about the bureaucracy of murder and
in providing countless mini-profiles of the killers. However, the
latter do demonstrate how the doctors active in T4 tended to be
younger than their uninvolved colleagues and were motivated by "a
mixture of ideology, careerism and greed." This somewhat daunting
work at times makes for very tough reading but as the one of first
English book-length studies of the "euthanasia" program to date, it
unquestionably is a most valuable contribution to the history of
Nazism and of the Holocaust. (Kirkus Reviews)
Tracing the rise of racist and eugenic ideologies, Henry
Friedlander explores how the Nazi programme of secretly
exterminating the handicapped and disabled evolved into the
systematic destruction of Jews and Gypsies. He describes how the
so-called euthanasia of the handicapped provided a practical model
for the later mass murder, thereby initiating the Holocaust. The
Nazi regime pursued the extermination of Jews, Gypsies and the
handicapped based on a belief in the biological, and thus absolute,
inferiority of those groups. To document the connection between the
assault on the handicapped and the Final Solution, Friedlander
shows how the legal restrictions and exclusionary policies of the
1930s, including mass sterilization, led to mass murder during the
war. He also makes clear that the killing centres where the
handicapped were gassed and cremated served as the models for the
extermination camps. Based on extensive archival research, the book
also analyzes the involvement of the German bureaucracy and
judiciary, the participation of physicians and scientists, and the
nature of popular opposition.
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