”He says the Gestapo is now systematically bumping off the mentally deficient people of the Reich,” Shirer wrote in his diary. “The Nazis call them ‘mercy deaths.’ He relates that Pastor Bodelschwingh, who runs a large hospital for various kinds of feeble-minded children at Bethel, was ordered arrested a few days ago because he refused to deliver up some of his more serious mental cases to the secret police… Must look into this story.”
The program X [an anonymous informant] knew of was an effort directed out of Hitler’s Chancellery to gas Germany’s mentally and physically disabled persons, including young children. It was run out of an office at Tiergartenstrasse 4 in Berlin – because of the address, it was known as the T-4 program. It began in the spring of 1939 and resulted in more than 70,000 murders. While it was happening, it was enough of an open secret in the country to be denounced by church leaders. X knew of it, but he also knew of the arrest several days before of Pastor Friedrich von Bodelschwingh.
While Shirer had heard reports of widespread murders in Poland after the 1939 invasion, now he was being told that the Nazis were also murdering the disabled, including children, perhaps on a large scale.
Source:
Wick, Steve. “Crowded Buses.” The Long Night: William L. Shirer and the Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. 204. Print.
Further Reading:
Friedrich von Bodelschwingh, Junior
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