During 1940 protest letters were sent to the Reich Chancellery and the Ministry of Justice, some of them from Nazi Party members. The first open protest against the removal of people from asylums took place at
Absberg in
Franconia in February 1941, and others followed. The SD report on the incident at Absberg noted that "the removal of residents from the Ottilien Home has caused a great deal of unpleasantness", and described large crowds of Catholic townspeople, among them Party members, protesting against the action.
[78] Opposition to the T4 policy sharpened after the
German attack on the Soviet Union in June 1941, because the war in the east produced for the first time large-scale German casualties, and the hospitals and asylums began to fill up with maimed and disabled young German soldiers. Rumours began to circulate that these men would also be subject to "euthanasia".
By August the protests had spread to Bavaria. According to Gitta Sereny, Hitler was jeered by an angry crowd at
Hof – the only time he was opposed in public during his 12 years of rule.
[86][87] Despite his private fury, Hitler knew that he could not afford a confrontation with the Church at a time when Germany was engaged in a life-and-death war, a belief which was reinforced by the advice of Goebbels,
Martin Bormann, head of the Party Chancellery and SS leader Heinrich Himmler. Robert Lifton writes: "Nazi leaders faced the prospect of either having to imprison prominent, highly admired clergymen and other protesters – a course with consequences in terms of adverse public reaction they greatly feared – or else end the programme." Himmler said: "If operation T4 had been entrusted to the SS, things would have happened differently", because "when the Führer entrusts us with a job, we know how to deal with it correctly, without causing useless uproar among the people."
[88]
On 24 August 1941 Hitler ordered the cancellation of the T4 programme. He issued strict instructions to the Gauleiters to avoid further provocations of the churches for the duration of the war. The invasion of the Soviet Union in June provided new opportunities to use the T4 personnel. Many were transferred to the east to begin work on a vastly greater programme of killing: the "
final solution of the Jewish question". The winding-up of the T4 programme did not end the killing of people with disabilities. From the end of 1941, the killing became less systematic. Lifton documents that the killing of adults and children continued to the end of the war, on the local initiative of institute directors and party leaders. The methods reverted to those employed before use of the gas chambers: lethal injection or starvation.
[89] Kershaw estimates that by the end of 1941 75,000 to 100,000 people had been killed in the T4 programme. Tens of thousands of concentration camp inmates and people judged incapable of work, were killed in Germany between 1942 and 1945. (This figure does not include Jews who were deported to their deaths in 1942 and 1943). The Hartheim and Hardamar centres continued to kill people sent to them from all over Germany until 1945.
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