87
In Padua Hospital, il cervello di Tito was analyzed using ultrasound, electroencephalograms and MRI scans.
No abnormalities were detected.
Up until now, no machine has uncovered the origin of his cerebral palsy.
88
Lou Costello in Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein: “I’ve had this brain for thirty years. It hasn’t done me any good.”
89
(Picture Credit 1.7)
90
In the previous image: Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein.
Glenn Strange is the monster: deformed, ungainly, spastic, green.
91
In 1939, Adolf Hitler received a letter from Richard Kretschmar, a farmhand from Leipzig.
Richard Kretschmar begged Adolf Hitler to help him kill what he, in the letter, called a “monster.”
The “monster” was Richard Kretschmar’s own son, Gerhard Kretschmar.
Gerhard Kretschmar had been born blind, as well as missing a leg and part of his arm. He had also, according to his father, been born an “idiot.”
92
Adolf Hitler ordered his personal physician, Karl Brandt, to go to Leipzig University and examine Gerhard Kretschmar for himself.
At the Nuremberg Trials, Karl Brandt gave his own account of events: “If the facts given by the father proved to be true, I was to inform the doctors that, in Hitler’s name, they could use euthanasia.”
93
After examining Gerhard Kretschmar, Karl Brandt authorized his death.
On 25 July 1939, at the age of five months, Gerhard Kretschmar — blind and with a leg and part of his arm missing and, according to his father, an idiot — was executed with a large dose of the barbiturate Luminal.
94
In a statement made thirty years later, Gerhard Kretschmar’s father, Richard Kretschmar, recalled the “euthanasia” of his “monster” in these terms:
Karl Brandt explained to me that the Führer was very, very interested in my son’s case. The Führer wanted to solve the problem of people who had no future, whose lives were worthless. That is why he had granted a merciful death to our son. Later on, we would be able to have other perfectly healthy children of whom the Reich would be proud.
An example of Pride of State?
95
Four weeks after the murder of Gerhard Kretschmar, Adolf Hitler’s Ministry of the Interior determined that all disabled newborns should be reported to the regime’s authorities.
The Ministry of the Interior’s rules mentioned in particular those children suffering from “mongolism, microcephaly, hydrocephalus, deformities of the limbs or spine, and paralysis, including spasticity.”
That’s right: Tito.
96
On 1 September 1939, the Second World War began.
On the same day, Adolf Hitler signed a secret memorandum setting out his euthanasia program.
The memorandum gave doctors the power to “decide whether those who have — as far as can be humanly determined — incurable illnesses can, after the most careful evaluation, be granted a merciful death.”
97
Mercy killing. Gnadentod.
Euthanasia. Euthanasie.
Those were some of the terms used by Nazism to legitimize the mass extermination of disabled newborns.
A worthless life. Unwertes Leben.
A life not worth living. Lebensunwerten Leben.
Adolf Hitler’s “euthanasia” program offered “mercy killings” to those whose lives were “worthless” or “not worth living.”
98
99
In the previous image: the memorandum signed by Adolf Hitler, granting a mercy killing for Tito.
100
In the first phase of Adolf Hitler’s euthanasia program, five thousand disabled newborns were killed.
The historian Robert Jay Lifton published the testimony of one of the doctors responsible for those deaths, identified simply as Doktor F: “Those who were approved for killing received high doses of Luminal. They were spastic children, incapable of talking or walking. Anyone seeing them would imagine they were sleeping. In fact, they were being killed.”
101
After he was born, Tito was taken into the intensive-care unit of Padua Hospital, where he received high doses of Luminal. Anyone seeing him would imagine he was sleeping. In fact, he was being brought back to life.
102
Adolf Hitler’s involuntary euthanasia program, known as Action T4, quickly widened its scope. As well as exterminating disabled newborns, it went on, in its second phase, to exterminate disabled adults, the mentally ill, epileptics and alcoholics.
Six hospitals were converted into extermination centers, where the doctors were charged with eliminating patients by injecting them with a mixture of morphine, scopolamine, curare and cyanide.
103
104
In the previous image: one of the children suffering from cerebral palsy who was selected to die under the Action T4 program.
105
In the first few months of 1940, in Brandenburg Hospital, Karl Brandt observed an experiment that would change the direction of the Action T4 program.
Twenty patients, confined in a place resembling a public shower room, were gassed to death with carbon monoxide.
Their bodies were immediately cremated by the SS.
106
When Karl Brandt reported back on the result of the Brandenburg experiment, Adolf Hitler decided that all the “biological enemies” of the Third Reich should be eliminated in the same way: gassed and cremated.
107
Biological enemies. Biologische Feinde.
Only “racial hygiene” could eliminate the “biological enemies” contaminating the Third Reich.
Racial hygiene. Rassenhygiene.
108
In the second quarter of 1940, Adolf Hitler’s Ministry of the Interior ordered that an inventory should be made of all Jews in the Action T4 program.
In June of that year, the first group of two hundred Jews, from a psychiatric hospital in Berlin, were gassed and cremated at Brandenburg Hospital.
109
The extermination of Gerhard Kretschmar — a disabled child rejected by his father — had become the extermination of a whole people: the Holocaust.
110
In less than two years, Action T4 killed more than a hundred thousand people.