The Nazi Euthanasia Program:
Forerunner of Obama's Death Council
by Anton Chaitkin
At his trial in front of the American National Military Tribunal in 1947, Karl Brandt, Hitler's escort physician and later a leading euthanasia operative, testified that, sometime in 1935, Hitler had informed Reich Health Leader Gerhard Wagner of his intention to implement euthanasia of the mentally disabled once war had begun. According to Brandt, Hitler believed the opposition to euthanasia from church circles would be less pronounced during war than in peacetime.
—Michael S. Bryant, Confronting the Good Death: Nazi Euthanasia on Trial, 1945-1953 (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2005)
The world economy is teetering ... With trillions of dollars evaporating in this crisis, millions of middle-class Americans face the prospect of losing their homes and jobs, and witnessing a dramatic contraction of their retirement savings. In response, the public will desperately want financial security.... [B]ailing out bankers and other gamblers [and the] huge increase in the federal debt that these bailouts will entail intensifies the pressure to rein in health-care costs....The dean of health-care economists, Victor Fuchs of Stanford, has long maintained that we will get health-care reform only when there is a war, a depression or some other major civil unrest. It's beginning to look like we might just have all three....
—Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, "The Financial Crisis and Health Care," the Chicago Tribune, Oct. 12, 2008
When Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel wrote those words, he was chair of the Department of Bioethics (euthanasia education) at the United States Institutes of Health. Today he is President Obama's leading representative on a Federal "death council" drawing up a list of medical procedures to be used to deny care to elderly, chronically ill, and poor people, whose lives are considered of less value. Ezekiel's brother, Obama's Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, is ramming this Nazi-revival policy through Congress.
The President beat the drums on May 11, after meeting with private insurance companies, saying that because of the financial crisis, $2 trillion must be cut from American health-care spending. The companies promised to help him shut down more "costly" treatments, which typically prolong life.
The Nuremberg Precedent
In the Medical Case conducted from October 1946 to August 1947 as part of the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials, the United States charged Nazi officials and doctors with mass killing of patients in the euthanasia ("mercy death") program. Among the defendants, Hitler's personal physician Karl Brandt created the organization for killing crippled children, and as National Health Commissioner ordered the murder of mental patients throughout the country. Viktor Brack, a member of Hitler's Personal Chancellery, carried out the Hitler-Brandt "Aktion T-4" euthanasia program that trained the doctors in genocide; then he assigned Tiergarten-4 euthanasia personnel to work on the gas chambers for the extermination of Jews. Brandt and Brack were convicted of war crimes and crimes against humanity and executed on June 2, 1948.
The U.S. National Military Tribunal identified as a prime motive of the euthanasia program, "to eliminate 'useless eaters' from the scene, in order to conserve food, hospital facilities, doctors and nurses for the more important use of the German armed forces."
That euthanasia program, and the rise to power of the Nazi regime that perpetrated it, had been sold to a population frantic from economic collapse and predisposed, from years of propaganda by the eugenics/euthanasia movement, to consider some lives unworthy to be lived.
After World War II, London and Wall Street supporters of Hitler's program continued the eugenics/euthanasia movement and spread it globally. Under names including "bioethics," this movement has prepared public opinion, medical education, and government policy to discard the notion of the sanctity of human life that holds our civilization together.
German advocates of eugenics (a crackpot notion of hereditary superiority and inferiority), law professor Karl Binding and psychiatry professor Alfred Hoche, had written a sensational 1920 pamphlet, The Permission To Destroy Life Unworthy of Life, a prime theoretical basis for the Nazi genocide. Binding and Hoche argued that society should cast aside the "obsolete" Hippocratic Oath, that binds doctors to do no harm to patients and commits them to consider only the patient's welfare.
Obama advisor Ezekiel Emanuel likewise suggested that the Hippocratic Oath ought to be junked to cut costs, in an article in the Journal of the American Medical Association, June 18, 2008. \
Medical school education ... emphasize[s] thoroughness," he wrote. Doctors "are trained to identify and praised for ... enumerating all possible diagnoses and tests that would confirm or exclude them.... Peer recognition goes to the most thorough and aggressive physicians.... This culture is further reinforced by a unique understanding of professional obligations, specifically, the Hippocratic Oath's admonition to 'use my power to help the sick to the best of my ability and judgment' as an imperative to do everything for the patient regardless of cost or effect on others.
The $2 trillion health-care cuts, now demanded by Obama and the financiers, were previously promoted in a speech by Dr. Gerhard Wagner, head of the Nazi organization for physicians, at the Sept. 8-14, 1936 Nazi Party rally at Nuremberg:
The millions and billions that we have spent ... for care of the genetically ill, is a squandering of our national resources that we National Socialists cannot justify when we consider the needs of the healthy population. Healthy working class families with numerous children today earn only enough for the necessities of life, which means that it is irresponsible that the state must provide the money for some genetically ill families who may have several family members in institutions costing thousands of marks annually....
The previous year, Hitler had told this same Dr. Wagner, that the doctors, primed for murder through the eugenics/euthanasia movement, would have to wait for the crisis of the war to convince the public to give up their moral principles—the identical point made by Ezekiel Emanuel in October 2008.
Behind the Nazi Health Reform
The death-lobby movement whose propaganda supports the program of Obama and Ezekiel Emanuel, originated with eugenics founder Sir Francis Galton, and Thomas Huxley, Arthur Balfour, and other late-19th-Century British Empire strategists of a new dark age. They spread this filth among Anglophiles in Germany and the United States.
Galton's British eugenics movement opened its German branch in 1904, as the Society for Race Hygiene, and its U.S. branch in 1910, as the Eugenics Records Office. The movement operated internationally under Galton's direct leadership, and held world Eugenics Congresses in 1912 (London), 1922 (New York), and 1932 (New York).
The last Congress made Nazi race theorist Ernst Rudin president of the International Federation of Eugenics Societies. Rudin ran Nazi eugenics work in Germany at the Rockefeller Foundation's Kaiser Wlihelm Insitute for Anthopology, Human Heredity and Eugenics. After Hitler took power in 1933, Rudin and his followers—with Rockefeller money—shaped the entire Nazi race genocide program, beginning with sterilization and then, euthanasia of "costly patients." Rudin's men ran the medical experiments on Jewish death camp inmates.
Since, as Hitler noted, the German population was still resistant to euthanasia, the British leaders of the movement acted to break down the resistance globally, with the founding of the Voluntary Euthanasia Society in 1935, and a U.S. branch in London's movement cheered on the German program as the sterilization and killing escalated.
After the war, with corpses still smoking in Europe, the eugenics/euthanasia movement laid low for a time, inventing new names for itself such as "social biology" and "the right to die."
The British royal family, whose palace physicians such as Lord Thomas Jeeves Horder had officially run the eugenics/euthanasia movement all through the Hitler era, now teamed with their Wall Street moneybags to retool the movement behind population reduction, especially for non-white peoples.
This led to the initiative known as Bioethics (whose U.S. government chief in recent years has been Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel), and to the Obama "death council"—the Federal Coordinating Council for Comparative Effectiveness Research, of which Dr. Emanuel is a leading member.
A few highlights will suffice to show the nature of the beast.
- The American Eugenics Society merged with, and moved its offices into the headquarters of the Rockefeller family's new Population Council in 1953.
- A eugenics zealot in the Ernst Rudin tradition, Daniel Callahan, got a Population Council grant and continual Rockefeller family sponsorship in 1968-69 to found the Hastings Center, in Garrison, N.Y., to push euthanasia under the new title, "Bioethics."
- Geneticist and evolutionary biologist Theodore Dobzhansky was simultaneously a founding director of the Hastings Center and chairman of the American Eugenics Society. Hastings founder Callahan became a director of the Eugenics Society.
- The Hastings Center is now headquarters for the Obama reform agenda, still under the active leadership of emeritus president Callahan, the Hitlerian eugenist.
- Peter Orszag, now the White House Budget Director, sent his deputy Philip Ellis to Hastings last May to assure the Center that "comparative effectiveness" would be the criterion for an Obama Administration's attack on respect for human life.
- Regular Hastings writer Henry J. Aaron has now penned a demand for tough adherence to the comparative effectiveness doctrine. Aaron is Orszag's fellow "behavioral economist" and was Orszag's partner on the Brookings Institution team for taking down medical care and Social Security. Regular Hastings writer Anthony Culyer is research director for the British Crown's National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) the model for the Obama-Emanuel "death council." NICE runs the rationing that has already killed thousands under Britain's National Health Service.
- Ezekiel Emanuel is a Hastings Center fellow, as is his former wife and longtime bioethics collaborator, Linda Emanuel. She set up and ran the death education initiative for the American Medical Association, sponsored by George Soros's Project on Death in America.
- Ezekiel Emanuel's deputy director of the Federal Department of Bioethics, Christine Grady, is a director of the Hastings Center and a Hastings fellow.
- Animal liberation guru Peter Singer is no doubt the most famous Hastings Center fellow, and founding president of the International Association of Bioethics. Singer advocates the killing of handicapped infants, to stop them from being a burden to parents and a cost to society. He believes that humans have no right to life above that of beasts, and that it may be more appropriate to do medical experiments on disabled, unconscious people than on healthy rats.
- In 1980, Britain's Voluntary Euthanasia Society founded the World Federation of Right to Die Societies. They sent London Times reporter Derek Humphrey to America, to found the Hemlock Society for euthanasia and suicide.
The eugenics/euthanasia movement has now hammered the public for decades to give up their humanity and accept Hitler's point of view, for example, to assent to the demand that old people die now, to make way for others. The "debate" over this crime is sanitized by movement leaders, such as when, according to Ian Dowbiggin:
Ezekiel Emanuel argues that ... a third of Americans endorse legalization under a wide variety of circumstances, a third oppose it under any circumstances, and a third support it in isolated cases but oppose it under most circumstances.
(Ian Dowbiggin, in A Merciful End: the Euthanasia Movement in Modern America).
Emanuel and some other movement spokesmen have stated that physician-assisted suicide is not necessary, that life-saving care can simply be denied to the elderly and costs will be saved. This will be painless, supposedly, if the patient is unconscious and is starved to death—starvation being one of the first methods used by the Nazi T-4 killers before gassing was adopted.
In line with the central euthanasia administration of the Hitler regime, Obama's health-care advisors want to set up a "non-political" structure which would decide the parameters on who should live, and who should die.
In his 2008 book, Healthcare, Guaranteed, Dr. Emanuel calls for an independent National Health Board to oversee and cut health care in America, and to approve all payments and procedures. "To reduce political interference and allow the necessary tough choices to be made," Emanuel says, this board must be insulated from "pressure" by elected officials such as Congress or the President, and must get funding independently of Congressional appropriations. The board's life-or-death decisions would proceed without possibility of objection from victims or voters.
Emanuel's plan is a virtual carbon copy of that put forward by former Sen. Tom Daschle (D-S.D.)—originally slated to be Obama's health czar—in his 2008 book, Critical: What We Can Do About the Health-Care Crisis. Daschle demands the equivalent of the Federal Reserve Board, to be run just as the private financiers run the Federal Reserve. Daschle calls for a rule, that all who register for Medicare must sign a document outlining the degree to which they consent to be killed in an "end of life" situation.
Dr. Emanuel and the other 14 members of the Obama Administration's death council were confronted by this author at their June 10 public hearing in Washington. I concluded my testimony:
You on the Council are drawing up the procedure list to be used to deny care, which will kill millions if it goes ahead in the present world crash. You think, perhaps, that the backing of powerful men—financiers—will shield you from accountability. But you are now in the spotlight. Disband this Council, and reverse the whole course of this Nazi revival—now.
