Citizens of modern democracies often find it difficult to understand how Germans could possibly embrace their so-called Final Solution, the extermination of all Jews. It seems incomprehensible that any country would willingly follow such an inhumane course of action. Yet their choices were not the result of spontaneous insanity or mass psychosis. Rather, the Final Solution appears in hindsight to have been the logical conclusion of a chain of events that began with the popular acceptance of eugenics theories, continued with the next logical step of mass sterilization of the mentally defective, was followed by euthanasia in incremental stages of ethnic-German undesirables, and finally culminated in the killings of over eleven million people arrogantly deemed "unworthy of life".
To our modern sensibilities, possibly the most disturbing phase would be how this process actually began. We would like to think that such evil required a conscious choice to step across a clear line of demarcation. However, the first step taken in Germany seemed at the time relatively innocuous. Eugenics then had a wide appeal, not just in Germany, but abroad. In America, a strong movement toward human genetic improvement was supported by John D. Rockefeller, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and even Theodore Roosevelt (Peter Quinn, Race Cleansing in America 34). Eugenics programs were also well advanced elsewhere across Europe, particularly in Scandinavia, and were increasingly popular in Australia and New Zealand. Today, however, such ideas are often viewed as lunacy. Hugh Gregory Gallagher writes in By Trust Betrayed that "...it was the madness of the Germany of the twenties and thirties which found its expression in Hitler" (4). But Gallagher's remarks do not really ring true. During much of this period German eugenicists actually worried, and correctly so, that they were being outstripped by the United States.
Germany seemed especially receptive to eugenics theories. As early as 1922, "racial hygiene and eugenics united [in Germany] in a national and professional discourse that defined values, perceptions, and the approach to racial characteristics" (Glass, Life Unworthy of Life 31). But initially, eugenicists were unable to get desirable plans implemented. This caused much concern among those Germans who feared their country might never recover from the devastation of World War I without firm and decisive measures to improve the genetic stock. They looked with envy upon the United States, a country which had already gone much further than mere discourse. "By the late 1920s, 15,000 individuals had been sterilized in the US [...]" (Proctor, "Nazi Biomedical Policies" 30). But the prayers of the German eugenics movement were answered when the Nationalist Socialist Party gained power in 1933.
The new Nazi government embraced many aims of the eugenics movement and soon enacted laws allowing for forcible sterilization of the mentally defective. In 1934, the first full year of the operation of the Nazi program, 62,400 people were sterilized, a number that steadily increased in subsequent years (Black, IBM and the Holocaust 96). In all, some 400,000 people were eventually sterilized in Germany, most of them ethnic Germans. Quantitatively, this was further than any other country had gone, though qualitatively there was little difference. Germans evidenced few qualms about this endeavor. Moreover, by the mid-thirties medical orthodoxy had firmly embraced eugenics, even to the extent that abortions for healthy German women were considered treasonous and punishable by death (Proctor 32). It was now accepted that potential lives deemed at risk of congenital illness or mental retardation should be curtailed by sterilization of both sexes thought to harbor undesirable genes.
Before long, any boundary between "potential" and "actual" that might at first have existed began to blur with the start of the euthanasia programs. The first euthanasia program was an outgrowth of the Nazi sterilization program and was initially targeted at deformed or retarded infants. The justification was similar to that which had been used for the sterilization program. In effect, these killings were seen as something akin to postnatal abortions. At first, only children younger than three were targeted, but the program was soon extended to all minors, including teenagers (Wyszynski, "Men with White Coats and SS Boots" 298).
Considering later events, it seems odd that victims of the initial euthanasia programs were almost entirely ethnic Germans. Indeed, for years the euthanasia programs explicitly denied the doubtful mercies of euthanasia to Jewish children (Wyszynski 298). This underlines the idea that the killings were for the good of the patient and/or the family. But as the killings continued, attitudes shifted.
World War II started with the German invasion of Poland; the burdens of war put a huge strain on the German economy. As is common, measures that would not have been tolerated during peacetime were passed with almost no comment during war. The children's euthanasia program was quietly extended to include adults. Between 1939 and 1941, some 70,000 Germans patients at mental hospitals were killed. However, this program was one which proved to be controversial - so much so that the adult euthanasia program (known as T-4) was officially concluded. However, the children's euthanasia program was retained and was in fact widely accepted. Proctor writes that "hospital archives are filled with letters from parents writing to health authorities requesting their children be granted euthanasia" (36).
Although the T-4 program had been officially shut down, killings did continue. So did the program's focus on the health of society, rather than on the well-being of the patients or their families. Once humanitarian trappings were removed, anti-Semitism provided its own compelling logic. The war-inspired patriotic fervor fanned the flames. The Ministry of the Interior ordered the gassing of all Jews in German hospitals for fear that the Jews might infect German patients. Glass writes that "the gassing of Jewish patients recovering in hospitals proved to be an acceptable and popular solution to this perceived threat" (64). To conduct the killings, prototype gas chambers were constructed in the hospitals, many of which were later shipped to, and reassembled at, concentration camps. In retrospect, these killings were a clear foreshadowing of the Holocaust soon to come.
By late 1941, the euthanasia operations were drawing to a close. Germany's mentally ill had already been eradicated, as had the crippled and anyone judged "incurable." So, too, had small groups of Jews, Gypsies, and in at least one case, the entire population of a home for the elderly (Proctor 35). The success of these operations suggested expansion, and the "Jewish Question," long debated, was finally solved.
This Final Solution was announced at the Wannsee conference, which took place in early 1942. While many different solutions had been debated, including simply deporting all the Jews from German territory, in the end it was decided that the optimal solution was just to kill them. It is widely assumed that the Final Solution would never have been hit upon were it not for preceding events. The T-4 program had left Germany with the physical infrastructure to accomplish genocide. Further, after that program had been shut down, the killings had continued in a more decentralized fashion, meaning that both the bureaucratic systems and the societal attitudes to accept such a massive undertaking were already in place. Ordinary Germans who might initially have recoiled in revulsion were primed to accept Jewish extermination as another incremental, logical, gene-cleansing, society-benefiting step. After all, they were already killing thousands upon thousands for the good of Germany. Once that was accepted, increasing the kill rate seemed only natural, particularly under the stresses of a World War.
Seeing Germany's slow, yet seemingly inevitable slide into madness, we have to wonder if it could happen again. We may look around at the societies in which we find ourselves and reassure each other that such could never, ever happen. Yet many Germans may have thought the same in the twenties and thirties. The first step is small, but the slope is steep. The spirit of patriotism which is enflamed in war; the acceptance of war's unavoidable deaths; the pressures on government medical programs to care for the old, the deformed, and the retarded; the financial burden on the taxpayer; and the moral acceptance of abortion, assisted suicide, and forced sterilization may all have an additive effect that one day will accelerate a slide into a humanitarian abyss. Even though many of these steps in isolation are harmless, or even in the proper context positive, we must wonder exactly how far it is a society may go before they reach the cliff. Perhaps no society will ever take that fall again, but we can best ensure this by understanding the signposts that heralded Germany's collapse into the void.