www.theamericancause.org/a-pjb-050323-nazi.htm
Nazis: Pioneers in Medicine by Patrick J Buchanan March 23, 2005 Ours is a nation where a judge may not sentence Beltway sniper Lee Malvo to death, because he is too young to die, but can sentence Terri Schiavo to death, because she is too severely handicapped to live. Schiavo continues the process of dying by starvation and dehydration, a m ethod of capital punishment most would consider criminal if done to a pe t This was the method used at Auschwitz to murder Father Maximilian Kolbe, the priest who volunteered to take the place of a Polish father of a lar ge family, who was one of 10 the camp commandant had selected for execut ion in reprisal for the escape of a prisoner. After being starved and dehydrated for days, Kolbe was injected by his Na zi captors with carbolic acid. He died a martyr's death, said the church that canonized him. Only she would have been denied the lethal injection by those watching her die. That there arose a national outcry at the execution of Schiavo so loud Co ngress and President Bush heard it and came to the rescue is a sign Amer ica is not morally dead ... But a culture of death has taken deep r oot in America's soul. One wonders if our young, so many of them cheated of a knowledge of histo ry in schools they are forced to attend, are aware of how closely our el ites approximate, in belief and argument, the elites of Weimar and Nazi Germany in the 1920s and 1930s. Alfred Hoche, professor of psychiatry at the University of F reiburg, and Karl Binding, a law professor at Leipzig, authored "The Per mission to Destroy Life Unworthy of Life." They urged a national policy of assisted suicide for those "empty shells of human beings" the termina lly ill and mentally retarded, and those with brain damage and psychiatr ic conditions. In October 1933, The New York Times quoted the Nazi minister of justice a s saying that ridding Germany of such poor creatures would make it "poss ible for physicians to end the tortures of incurable patients, upon requ ests, in the interests of true humanity." "If we desire a certain type o f civilization," said George Bernard Shaw, "we must exterminate the sort of people who do not fit in." In researching "The Death of the West," I discovered that the first episo de of publicized "legal" killing of an innocent was the case of "Baby Kn auer." The father of the little boy, who was blind, retarded and missing an arm and a leg, appealed to the Fuhrer for permission to have his son put to death. Hitler referred the matter to his physician, Karl Brandt. When war came in 1939, a program code-named "Aktion 4" went about systema tically eliminating all "life unworthy of life" in the Reich. Then, Bishop Clemens von Galen took to the pulpit of Munster Cathedral to damn Hitler's regime for "pl ain murder" and direct German Catholics to "withdraw ourselves and our f aithful from their (Nazi) influence so that we may not be contaminated b y their thinking and their ungodly behavior." One of its graduates, Franz Stangl, would tu rn up two years later as commandant of Treblinka. After the war, the German doctors who had carried out Hitler's orders in violation of the Hippocratic Oath were judged guilty of "crimes against humanity." The Dutch doctors who refused to cooperate in the Nazi progra m of eliminating "life unworthy of life" during the occupation of Hollan d were placed among the moral heroes of an immoral era. Ironically, as the protest to save Schiavo built up steam over the weeken d, The New York Times in its "Saturday Profile" warmly featured another Dutch doctor. Eduard Verhagen has, said the Times, become famous in Europe for having "presided over the medically induced deaths of four ex traordinarily ill newborns." "For his efforts to end what he calls unbearable and incurable suffering, " wrote reporter Gregory Crouch, "Dr. Death , a second Hitler and worse mostly by American opponents of euthanasia." Verhagen describes himself as a bearer of peace and happiness to children . When these suffering little ones die, he says, "the child goes to slee p ... They're children who are severely il l and in great pain. It is after they die that you see them relaxed for the first time. You see their faces in a way they should be for the firs t time." Hitler's doctors may prove to have been the medical pioneers of 21st century.
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