Category Archives: T4

The above photograph is of Eugen Fischer, a German professor of medicine, anthropology, and eugenics and a member of the Nazi Party. He authored a 1913 study of the Mischlinge (racially mixed) children of Dutch men and Hottentot women in German Southwest Africa. Fischer opposed racial mixing, arguing that Negro blood was of lesser value and that mixing it with white blood would bring about the demise of European culture. After 1933, Fischer adapted the activities of his institute to serve Nazi antisemitic policies. He taught courses for SS-Doctors, served as a judge on the Hereditary Health Court of Berlin and provided hundreds of opinions on the paternity and racial purity of individuals, including the Mischlinge offspring of Jewish and non-Jewish German couples.

Eugenics was not a German concept. Types of eugenic practices have existed for millennia. Some indigenous peoples of Brazil are known to have practised infanticide against children born with physical abnormalities since pre-colonial times. In ancient Greece, the philosopher Plato suggested selective mating to produce a guardian class. In Sparta, to determine whether or not a Spartan child was fit to live, the children were inspected by the council of elders, the Gerousia.

The Nazis modelled their Eugenics program on the American eugenics movement. It was rooted in the biological determinist ideas of Sir Francis Galton, which originated in the 1880s. In 1883, Sir Francis Galton first used the term eugenics to scientifically describe an improvement biologically of genes in human races and the concept of being well-born.

The Nazis also admired the Jim Crow-era laws that discriminated against African Americans and segregated them from European Americans, and they debated whether to introduce similar segregation in Germany. Yet they ultimately decided that it would not go far enough.

The views of Eugen Fischer helped create the Nuremberg Laws of 1935, serving as justification for the Nazi belief that Aryans were racially superior to other races—especially the Jews. Adolf Hitler read the works of Fischer while imprisoned in 1923 and used his eugenic notions to support a pure Aryan society in his manifesto, Mein Kampf.

Fischer retired in 1942 as Director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics. After the war, he worked to secure university teaching positions for many of his former students (including Otmar von Verschuer). As professor emeritus at the University of Freiburg, Fischer continued to lecture and publish articles in anthropological journals. He died in 1967.

Paul Nitsche, a founding member of the German Racial Hygiene Society and prominent psychiatrist, long-combined the advocacy of treatment, including occupational and electroshock therapy, for fitter patients with support for mercy death for incurables. A member of the Nazi Party since May 1933, he served as deputy, then head, of the T-4 Medical Office, a division charged with selecting patients for transfer to T-4 facilities.

Nitsche received his medical license in 1901 and a professorship in 1925. Nitsche did not join the Nazi Party until May 1933. He was a strong supporter of eugenics and euthanasia and was present at the gassing demonstration at what would become the Brandenburg euthanasia centre in either December 1939 or January 1940. He was driven not so much by Nazi racial ideology as by his support of racial science and his vision of progressive medicine. Being well established, Nitsche was no longer motivated by the prospect of career advancement but ideologically committed when he later joined Action T4.

In 1948, Nitsche was placed on trial in Dresden by East German authorities for his crimes in the T-4 Euthanasia program. In 1948, the psychiatrist received the death penalty and was executed.

Otmar von Verschuer (rear, in the photo above) supervises the measurement of the heads of two men as part of an anthropometric study of heredity.

Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer, as the head of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute—Department for Human Heredity, Verschuer, a physician and geneticist, examined hundreds of pairs of twins to study whether criminality, feeble-mindedness, tuberculosis, and cancer were inheritable. In 1927, he recommended the forced sterilization of the mentally and morally subnormal. Once a member of an ultra-nationalist paramilitary Freikorps unit of World War I veterans, Verschuer typified those academics whose interest in German national regeneration motivated their research.

In the late stages of the Second World War, Verschuer directly or indirectly started to use research material obtained in the Auschwitz concentration camp, mainly through his former student Josef Mengele, who served there as a camp physician.

Verschuer was never on trial for war crimes despite many indications that not only was he fully cognisant of Mengele’s work at Auschwitz, encouraging collaboration with Mengele. In a report to the German Research Council (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft; DFG) from 1944, Verschuer talked about Mengele’s assistance in supplying the KWI-A with some scientific materials from Auschwitz:
“My assistant, Dr Mengele (MD, PhD), has joined me in this branch of research. He is presently employed as Hauptsturmführer and camp physician in the concentration camp at Auschwitz. Anthropological investigations on the most diverse racial groups of this concentration camp are being carried out with the permission of the SS Reichsführer [Himmler]; the blood samples are being sent to my laboratory for analysis.”

A prominent figure in German psychiatry, genetics, and eugenics in the first half of the 20th century was Ernst Rüdin. Rüdin began his career in psychiatry in Munich. He amassed a vast collection of patient genealogies and concluded that mental disorders were genetic and could be predicted and averted through sterilization. In 1931, he became the director of the government-funded Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Psychiatry in Munich. Believing one of the critical dangers facing Germany was the growing number of the mentally unfit. Rüdin helped draft the Nazi sterilization law for the Prevention of Genetically Diseased Offspring and wrote its official commentary.

The American Rockefeller Foundation funded numerous international researchers to visit and work at Rüdin’s psychiatric genetics department, even as late as 1939. These included Eliot Slater and Erik Stromgren, considered respectively the Founding Fathers of psychiatric genetics in Britain and Scandinavia, and Franz Josef Kallmann, who became a leading figure in twins research in the US after emigrating in 1936.[⁶] Kallmann had claimed in 1935 that minor anomalies in otherwise unaffected relatives of schizophrenic people should be grounds for compulsory sterilization.

Claiming that he was a scientist and not a politician, Rüdin was de-Nazified and classified as a nominal party member. The psychiatrist who helped develop the Nazi mass sterilization law died in retirement in 1952.

These were just the Nazi scientists. There were many more—and they often obtained well-paid jobs after the war.

https://www.ushmm.org/exhibition/deadly-medicine/profiles/#01-fischer