Here's how the Holocaust started... And, yes it can happen again!




Named: the baby boy who was Nazis' first euthanasia victim
By Irene Zoech in Berlin
(Filed: 12/10/2003)


German historians have identified the family whose request to Adolf
Hitler that their disabled son be "put to sleep" was the catalyst for
the Nazi euthanasia programme.

The five-month-old boy, who was given a lethal drug after Hitler sent
his own doctor to examine him, has been named as Gerhard Kretschmar,
the son of a farm hand.

The case was to provide the rationale for a secret Nazi decree that
led to "mercy killings" of almost 300,000 mentally and physically
handicapped people. The Kretschmars wanted their son dead but most of
the other children were forcibly taken from their parents to be
killed.

A few days after Gerhard died in 1939, 15 psychiatrists were summoned
to Hitler's Chancellery and told that a secret euthanasia programme -
dreamed of by Hitler for more than a decade - was to be put into
effect.

Until this month, the boy was referred to only as "Case K", the term
used by Nazi doctors when the programme was launched and at the
subsequent Nuremberg war-crimes trials.

Now, Gerhard's name heads the first comprehensive list of victims of
the euthanasia killings, unveiled in Berlin this month as a permanent
and chilling reminder of one of Hitler's lesser-known extermination
programmes.

It was compiled over three years after painstaking research by German
government archivists into 740 previously unknown files relating to
the euthanasia programme.

The files, originally taken from Hitler's Chancellery, were uncovered
in archives of the Stasi, the East German secret police.

It was during his trial at Nuremberg that Karl Brandt, Hitler's
personal doctor, revealed that an unnamed infant had provided the
Nazis with the excuse to embark on creating a master race.

The baby's father, Richard Kretschmar, from the small Saxony town of
Pomssen, near Leipzig, had written to Hitler's office in early 1939
asking for permission to kill his blind and deformed son.

In his testimony, Dr Brandt said: "The father of a deformed child
wrote to the Fuhrer with a request to be allowed to take the life of
this child or this creature. Hitler ordered me to take care of this
case. The child had been born blind, seemed to be idiotic, and a leg
and parts of the arm were missing."

The boy is believed to have been given luminal in the form of a
dissolving tablet, causing unconsciousness and death after three to
five days. The drug was later used on other victims of the euthanasia
programme.

Only a month after the baby's killing, in August 1939, Hitler's
Interior Ministry issued the decree ordering the systematic
annihilation of mentally and physically disabled children.

The new report contains the most comprehensive analysis yet of Nazi
records, including the hundreds of hospitals and clinics that took
part in the Third Reich's programme to wipe out the lives of people
considered "unworthy of living". It contains names and case details
of 200,000 of the programme's estimated 275,000 victims.

Germany's Culture Minister, Christina Weiss, said that the report had
been drawn up to confront the truth and "restore some dignity to the
victims".

As was the case with many other victims, Gerhard Kretschmar's cause
of death was recorded not as euthanasia but as "heart failure",
according to documents at the church where he was buried.

The euthanasia programme was code-named T4, after its street address
in Berlin, and was responsible for the deaths of up to 8,000
children. By the beginning of 1940, six hospitals had been devoted
to "processing" cases.

However, the newly discovered records show that it eventually
extended to 296 medical facilities in Germany, Austria, the Czech
Republic and Poland, in which children and adults were drugged,
gassed or starved.

Ms Weiss said: "We know that these crimes were meant to be kept
secret. The relatives received fake letters of condolence. The
doctors in charge worked under false names. This list is an attempt
to admit what happened and put the record straight."



9 October 2003: Holocaust trust maps lost graves of victims
27 September 2003: Mussolini asked Pope to excommunicate Hitler
16 August 2003: Germany starts laying the Holocaust to rest



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