and sworn to secrecy. He worked – inter alia as crematorium worker – in the gassing centers Grafeneck, Hadamar and Bernburg, and came to Sobibor in April 1942.42
We could extend this list of T4 recruiting examples without much difficulty, but it should be clear by now that Scheffler accurately described the recruitment policies of the killing organization as being largely governed by coincidence. Indeed, if Allers’ mother had not bumped into Werner Blankenburg during her daily shopping round in Berlin, it is highly unlikely that her son would ever have come into contact with the mass extermination business. And if they would have granted August Miete his farm, had accepted Willi Mentz with the police force and had allowed Karl Frenzel his return to the military, the first would have continued his peasant existence, whereas Mentz and Frenzel would have worn the police uniform and the field gray of the Wehrmacht, respectively. None of these four men had actively sought a career in the killing profession and with respect to ←38 | 39→Miete, Mentz and Frenzel one could say that it was not even their ‘first choice.’ Their entry into Hitler’s annihilation machinery then was not the outcome of careful deliberation on the pros and cons of employment in the extermination business, but the result of a chance meeting between fate and opportunity. And for their colleagues this was little different.
Prior to their enrolment in T4 none of them had any idea of its existence, let alone its purpose. Different from the doctors and nurses who were to lend their hand in the ‘euthanasia’ killings, hardly any of them had ever personally visited a psychiatric ward, nursing home or insane asylum and it is highly doubtful whether they had any understanding of (or interest in) their government’s intention with its inhabitants. Typical in this respect was perhaps Reinhold Vorberg’s reaction when cousin Brack promoted him to head of T4’s transport service. When Brack explained its purpose, Vorberg reportedly answered him that he had no idea what the concept of euthanasia stood for and that he couldn’t understand why, in times of war, one should bother with ‘die Verrückten’ [‘the lunatics’].43
Of course, one could still suspect that T4 selected its staff by political criteria, i.e. that the recruitment of the men described here was somehow related to their Nazi profile. And it is certainly true that all of the above were members of the NSDAP or any of its branch organizations. But neither their grounds for entry (often linked to ‘economic’, career-related considerations), nor their commitment to the Party organizations of which they were members (none of them occupied a particularly profiled position within these organizations) can really explain for their selection. That T4 primarily recruited its collaborators from within the circle of Party comrades seems understandable enough, but why exactly it chose these ones from among the millions of candidates can only be explained through the use of the social network described earlier, combined with random selection.44
This even applies to such a notorious T4 criminal as the Stuttgart Kriminalkommissar Christian Wirth, who would play a leading role in both the ‘euthanasia’ killing program as well as in its successor, the Aktion Reinhard. His former colleague, Dietrich Allers, had this to say about the ratio behind Wirth’s recruitment for T4:
I am sure that when Grafeneck [the first extermination centre at which Wirth was appointed ‘office chief’, close to the CID bureau in Stuttgart where he was ←39 | 40→employed, DdM] was opened up and they needed a couple of police officers to put in charge, whoever was the chief of police in that district simply said “You and you” – and one of them was Wirth. Perhaps it was because he was a tough sort of man his superiors thought him capable of doing a difficult job; but it wasn’t a matter of careful or scientific selection of these people.45
And if we may believe the same witness, their motives for acceptance were no less trivial and lacking in ‘inner conviction’ than the grounds for their selection. Invariably, these motives rooted in a common concern for the (im)material advantages associated with T4 employment. That is to say, they consisted of such conventional incentives as concern for jobs, income and status, as well as the welcome perspective of being exempted from military service in times of war. One could call this ordinary opportunism, and that is in fact pretty much what it was.
5 The opportunist route to crime (and back)
That something as trite as common self-interest could serve as the prime motivation for participation in mass murder may be considered too meager an explanation. And yet, everyone knows how potent an incentive opportunism can be, even in societies which we would generally consider to be liberal, diversified, democratic and free. In social environments with an authoritarian, dictatorial or totalitarian ruling system, however, its prevalence as a behavior governing principle is obviously even more manifest. Here, opportunism becomes a veritable way of life for anyone but the incorrigible rebel at all costs. And it is precisely because of these costs that the latter’s presence is quite rare in such societies. Thus, under the circumstances prevailing in the Third Reich opportunism became the supreme ally of its criminal regime. Far more than the personal idiosyncrasies of its collaborators, these circumstances form the true key to Michael Marrus’ puzzle, and their impact can again be studied particularly well within the context of Hitler’s Euthanasie-Aktion.
To Hitler, his medical assassination program was more than the fulfilment of a long cherished wish; it was the ultimate test for his claim to unconditional power. For with the inauguration of this program on the day of his invasion of Poland, he crossed a threshold which he had eschewed until then. In 1935 Hitler had already informed his inner circle that, in case of war, he would settle the ‘euthanasia question’ as public opposition ←40 | 41→to it would be less prominent and easier to tackle than in normal times.46 Obviously, two years after his appointment to Reich Chancellor he still could not trust the German people to support his extermination agenda. Indeed, only a few months earlier, his own Minister of Justice, National-Conservative Franz Gürtner, had informed his staff in no unclear terms that any form of state-organized euthanasia remained unacceptable: ‘If we would start out in this direction, it would touch on the very foundation of Christianity’s teachings to humanity; it would be the fulfilment of Nietzschean thoughts.’47 Consequently, in the final report of the Ministerial Committee for the Revision of the Penal Code of 1936, any suggestions in this ‘Nietzschean’ sense were dismissed out of hand: ‘There can be no question of an authorization of the extermination of so-called life-unworthy life.’ Thus, the committee concluded that forced sterilization was to remain the most drastic measure which the state was allowed in its combat against the ‘degeneration within society’:
But the strength of the moral standard of the prohibition on killing should not be allowed to weaken through the provision of exemptions for victims of severe illnesses or accidents because of considerations of mere expediency, even if these unfortunate persons are still only related to society through their past or outward appearance.
And so it was to remain, in legal terms at least. For until the very end of Hitler’s rule any form of euthanasia would continue to be forbidden by law.
For obvious reasons then, Gürtner and his department were kept in the dark when the extermination program was being set up by the Führer Chancellery in the summer of 1939. It was not until a year later that Gürtner received a photocopy (!) of the decree which had set the killings in motion. It consisted of a one-line note, dated September 1, 1939, and signed by Hitler:
Reichsleiter Bouhler and Dr. Brandt, M.D., are charged with the responsibility of enlarging the authority of certain physicians, to be designated by name, so that persons who, according to human judgement, are incurable can, upon a most careful diagnosis of their condition of sickness, be accorded a mercy death.
By this time, however, Gürtner had already been informed of the killing practices which, based on Hitler’s ruling, were taking place all over Germany. On 8 July 1940, he had received an extensive report by the guardianship judge of the Brandenburg court, Dr. Lothar Kreyssig. It mentioned murders which
