Toward the new future

Human Life Review, Winter 1999 by McFadden, J P

Clearly the AAP intends these extra-legal tribunals to hand down the final solutions to hard cases. Further, AAP-type professionals would control their actual make-up and have the power to enlarge the "at least 8 members" by additional "safe" members. The possibilities seem limitless, up to and including the kind of murderous "mercy killing" advocated by many German medical professionals before Hitler, and which they diligently practiced under the Nazi regime. I know: even to mention the Nazi experience is to invite "extremism" charges. Yet the historical record is clear (cf. the definitive study by Leo Alexander of "Medical Science Under Dictatorship," which appeared in the July 14, 1949 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine). And to say that "it can't happen here" is fatuous: pre-Hitler Germany was ranked very high among civilized nations, and was also the veritable fount of the reigning scholarship and wisdom in many if not most sciences, not least medicine. It is indisputable fact that German medical "scholarship" of the 1920's-in re euthanasia, genetics and more-laid the foundations for Nazi genocide. The Thousand Year Reich's brief dozen years of power, however malignant in intention, could not have "succeeded" without the groundwork the medical professionals laid for it.

But weren't Nazi atrocities (including, remember, forced abortions) condemned for all time at the Nuremburg war-crime trials? Yes indeed.

Malcolm Muggeridge has long contended (several times in the pages of this journal) that the only reason the "advanced" German doctrines on euthanasia and genetics did not spread throughout the Western world is that Hitler "gave them a bad name" and thus inadvertently slowed down the process that the legalization of abortion has now re-accelerated. But charges of extremism will still be leveled at anybody who invokes the Nazi precedent, and understandably so.

The notion that such horrors will happen strains ordinary credibility. Who could seriously want to go that far? Surely our doctors are still humane, dedicated men? Surely they would agree. Here, alas, another of those not-tobe-mentioned Nazi precedents is germane. Dr. Karl Brandt was the highest-- ranking doctor in Nazi Germany, a well-respected professional who joined the Nazi hierarchy literally by chance. He was tried and convicted for war crimes at Nuremburg, and duly executed. He of course readily admitted that the Nazis had gone too far-but that was his only defense. Both before and during Hitler's regime, Brandt had in fact endorsed (indeed, helped formulate) the basic policies of euthanasia and experimentation on living humans (his argument-familiar?-was that animals were not "adequate subjects"). In his final statement, the condemned man said: "I am fully conscious that when I said 'Yes' to euthanasia I did so with the deepest conviction . . ." His defense of the special category of "child euthanasia" is even more relevant here; he based it on the desire to avoid long-term difficulties for the families, saying "We wanted to kill and put an end to these deformities as soon as possible after they had been born."