The Gene: An Intimate History - Siddhartha Mukherjee Page 0,56

the late thirties and wrote admiringly of its surgical efficacy. On trial during Stoddard’s visit was a manic-depressive woman, a girl with deaf-muteness, a mentally retarded girl, and an “ape-like man” who had married a Jewess and was apparently also a homosexual—a complete trifecta of crimes. From Stoddard’s notes, it remains unclear how the hereditary nature of any of these symptoms was established. Nonetheless, all the subjects were swiftly approved for sterilization.

The slip from sterilization to outright murder came virtually unannounced and unnoticed. As early as 1935, Hitler had privately mused about ramping up his gene-cleansing efforts from sterilization to euthanasia—what quicker way to purify the gene pool than to exterminate the defectives?—but had been concerned about the public reaction. By the late 1930s, though, the glacial equanimity of the German public response to the sterilization program made the Nazis bolder. Opportunity presented itself in 1939. In the summer of that year, Richard and Lina Kretschmar petitioned Hitler to allow them to euthanize their child, Gerhard. Eleven months old, Gerhard had been born blind and with deformed limbs. The parents—ardent Nazis—hoped to service their nation by eliminating their child from the nation’s genetic heritage.

Sensing his chance, Hitler approved the killing of Gerhard Kretschmar and then moved quickly to expand the program to other children. Working with Karl Brandt, his personal physician, Hitler launched the Scientific Registry of Serious Hereditary and Congenital Illnesses to administer a much larger, nationwide euthanasia program to eradicate genetic “defectives.” To justify the exterminations, the Nazis had already begun to describe the victims using the euphemism lebensunwertes Leben—lives unworthy of living. The eerie phrase conveyed an escalation of the logic of eugenics: it was not enough to sterilize genetic defectives to cleanse the future state; it was necessary to exterminate them to cleanse the current state. This would be a genetic final solution.

The killing began with “defective” children under three years of age, but by September 1939 had smoothly expanded to adolescents. Juvenile delinquents were slipped onto the list next. Jewish children were disproportionately targeted—forcibly examined by state doctors, labeled “genetically sick,” and exterminated, often on the most minor pretexts. By October 1939, the program was expanded to include adults. A richly appointed villa—No. 4 Tiergartenstrasse in Berlin—was designated the official headquarters of the euthanasia program. The program would eventually be called Aktion T4, after that street address.

Extermination centers were established around the nation. Particularly active among them was Hadamar, a castlelike hospital on a hill, and the Brandenburg State Welfare Institute, a brick building resembling a garrison, with rows of windows along its side. In the basements of these buildings, rooms were refitted into airtight chambers where victims were gassed to death with carbon monoxide. The aura of science and medical research was meticulously maintained, often dramatized to achieve an even greater effect on public imagination. Victims of euthanasia were brought to the extermination centers in buses with screened windows, often accompanied by SS officers in white coats. In rooms adjoining the gas chambers, makeshift concrete beds, surrounded by deep channels to collect fluids, were created, where doctors could dissect the corpses after euthanasia so as to preserve their tissues and brains for future genetic studies. Lives “unworthy of living” were apparently of extreme worth for the advancement of science.

To reassure families that their parents or children had been appropriately treated and triaged, patients were often moved to makeshift holding facilities first, then secretly relocated to Hadamar or Brandenburg for the extermination. After euthanasia, thousands of fraudulent death certificates were issued, citing diverse causes of death—some of them markedly absurd. Mary Rau’s mother, who suffered from psychotic depression, was exterminated in 1939. Her family was told that she had died as a consequence of “warts on her lip.” By 1941, Aktion T4 had exterminated nearly a quarter of a million men, women, and children. The Sterilization Law had achieved about four hundred thousand compulsory sterilizations between 1933 and 1943.

Hannah Arendt, the influential cultural critic who documented the perverse excesses of Nazism, would later write about the “banality of evil” that permeated German culture during the Nazi era. But equally pervasive, it seemed, was the credulity of evil. That “Jewishness” or “Gypsyness” was carried on chromosomes, transmitted through heredity, and thereby subject to genetic cleansing required a rather extraordinary contortion of belief—but the suspension of skepticism was the defining credo of the culture. Indeed, an entire cadre of “scientists”—geneticists, medical researchers, psychologists, anthropologists, and linguists—gleefully regurgitated academic studies to reinforce the scientific logic of the eugenics