Wednesday, December 01, 2004

Death is not the Solution, Death is the Problem

The first officially sanctioned infanticide in Germany occurred in 1939 after the father of a disabled baby, “Baby Knauer,” wrote to Chancellor Hitler seeking permission to have his son euthanized. Hitler, believing the time was ripe to begin eradicating the “defectives,” sent his physician, Dr. Karl Brandt, to inform Baby Knauer’s doctors that there would be no legal consequence for killing the infant. This was done, so pleasing Hitler that he issued a secret directive licensing doctors to kill disabled infants.

In The Nazi Doctors, Robert J. Lifton quotes a 1973 interview in which the father of Baby Knauer recalled the reasons Brandt and Hitler agreed to the killing of his son:

He [Brandt] explained to me that the Führer had personally sent him, and that my son’s case interested him very much. The Führer wanted to explore the problem of people who had no future—whose [lives were] worthless. From then on, we wouldn’t have to suffer from this terrible misfortune, because the Führer had granted us the mercy killing of our son. Later, we could have other children, handsome and healthy, of whom the Reich could be proud.
-Wesley J. Smith


The Netherlands now has the blood of four Baby Knauers on its hands. See Netherlands Hospital Euthanizes Babies

For more, see Hugh Hewitt here and here and also Dawn Eden

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