What do you think?
Mémorial de la Shoah
The Origins of Nazi Genocide: From Euthanasia to the Final Solution
Tracing the rise of racist and eugenic ideologies, Henry Friedlander explores in chilling detail how the Nazi program of secretly exterminating the handicapped and disabled evolved into the systematic destruction of Jews and Gypsies. He describes how the so-called euthanasia of the handicapped provided a practical model for the later mass murder, thereby initiating the Holocaust.
The Nazi regime pursued the extermination of Jews, Gypsies, and the handicapped based on a belief in the biological, and thus absolute, inferiority of those groups. To document the connection between the assault on the handicapped and the Final Solution, Friedlander shows how the legal restrictions and exclusionary policies of the 1930s, including mass sterilization, led to mass murder during the war. He also makes clear that the killing centers where the handicapped were gassed and cremated served as the models for the extermination camps.
Based on extensive archival research, the book also analyzes the involvement of the German bureaucracy and judiciary, the participation of physicians and scientists, and the nature of popular opposition.
The Nazi regime pursued the extermination of Jews, Gypsies, and the handicapped based on a belief in the biological, and thus absolute, inferiority of those groups. To document the connection between the assault on the handicapped and the Final Solution, Friedlander shows how the legal restrictions and exclusionary policies of the 1930s, including mass sterilization, led to mass murder during the war. He also makes clear that the killing centers where the handicapped were gassed and cremated served as the models for the extermination camps.
Based on extensive archival research, the book also analyzes the involvement of the German bureaucracy and judiciary, the participation of physicians and scientists, and the nature of popular opposition.
450 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1995
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
Read
August 24, 2012Hard to believe I read this in Junior High. I was on a quest, I already knew some basic info, but I wanted to know the how and why. This book answers fully. No stars because well, yeah. I could give it 5 stars for thoroughness, but 1 star because why one earth did this happen?
April 3, 2022
My blood ran cold reading a few chapters in. It's know that the Nazis engaged in unmitigated evil, but how it started with the handicapped and children. That was something I did not know.
March 10, 2024
WAS THE ‘FINAL SOLUTION’ ENCOURAGED BY THE SUCCESS OF THE EUTHANASIA PROGRAM?
Historian and Holocaust historian Henry Friedlander wrote in the Preface to this 1995 book, “I wanted to understand the crimes of the Nazi regime… my reading of the documents had convinced me that the euthanasia program had been intimately connected to Nazi genocide. I realized that the ideology, the decision-making process, the personnel, and the killing technique tied euthanasia to the ‘final solution’ … I began to see that euthanasia was not simply a prologue but the first chapter of Nazi genocide… This book is an attempt to explain how Nazi genocide developed. From the first, the regime excluded members of the three targeted groups from the national community. During the 1930s, the regime… embrac[ed] ever more radical exclusionary policies, including compulsory sterilization for the handicapped, incarceration for Gypsies, and forced emigration for Jews. Eventually, the regime decided to implement a program of mass murder to eradicate these three targeted groups… Nazi genocide, the mass murder of entire biologically determined groups of human beings, cost the lives of millions of men, women, and children in the short period of four years and four months. The figure of 6 million dead is certainly not excessive if we are to account for all the Jews, Gypsies, and handicapped murdered by the Nazis.” (Pg. xii-xiv)
He explains, “One of the professed benefits of centrally directed euthanasia killings was decriminalization, that is, the removal of the threat of prosecution from physicians who killed their patients. Hitler’s refusal to promulgate a law prevented public decriminalization. Although almost everyone accepted the principle that the Führer’s word was law… [they] had difficulty convincing physicians and civil servants that they would not be criminally liable for murder in the absence of a dully enacted law clearly authorizing the killing of handicapped patients. To convince their collaborators… they decided to ask Hitler for written orders. In October 1939, Hitler signed a document.” (Pg. 67)
He recounts, “After the Nazi assumption of power in 1933, German scientists, freed from the constraints of laws protecting the rights of patients, could pursue the most unscrupulous methods of research and treatment. The terrible experiments carried out in the concentration camps were symptomatic of this amoral attitude of the German scientific community. Using prisoners who had not volunteered, physicians performed experiments without regard to the welfare of their human subjects. Indeed, at times researchers had even designed ‘terminal experiments,’ that is, experiments … such… that the death of the subjects was both expected and predetermined… One type of experiment… attempted to duplicate extreme hypothermia… [or] ways to enable humans to consume sea water… The Waffen SS also conducted experiments … on how to treat combat wounds. Deliberately inflicted wounds were treated with [experimental drugs] … while other experiments tested methods of bone, muscle, and nerve regeneration as well as bone transplants.” (Pg. 131-132)
He states, “Physicians played an important role in the euthanasia killing operation. We have seen how scientists and physicians advocated the exclusion of those considered ‘unworthy of life’ and how their racial and eugenic theories were absorbed and integrated into the Nazi movement. Using scientists to legitimate their ideology, the Nazi leaders granted them limited control over the implementation of exclusionary policies. Physicians and scientists thus served the state as theorists and experts.” (Pg. 216)
He reports, “Many staff members… were willing to do their assigned work.. These staff members worked day after day in a factory with only one product: corpses of murdered human beings. An atmosphere of licentiousness rapidly developed, an attitude of ‘anything goes.’ One constantly used stimulus was alcohol, which was freely distributed by the supervisors…. Reports abounded of drunken orgies, numerous sexual liaisons, brawling and bullying, and stealing the property of victims.” (Pg. 237)
He asserts, “We must also ask why they accepted the job and why they remained even after they witnessed the horror of these camps. After the war, most of them claimed that they were under orders and could not refuse, but that is also unbelievable… The fear that requests to leave would result in death, an excuse for participation that was advanced after the war, was unwarranted… Finally, we must ask why these men were selected… They had probably been selected because their superiors believed them capable of the killings expected in the East… A substantial number were members of the SS and the SA, some even with concentration camp experience, but many had no such backgrounds…. When all is said and done, we are still unable to grasp the reasons that seemingly normal men and women were able to commit such extraordinary crimes. Neither ideology nor self-interest is a satisfactory explanation for such behavior. Those killers belonged to that time and place. Attempts to replicate their actions in the laboratory must fail, even if experiments seem to show, as did the one by Stanley Milgram, that ordinary men and women can commit such crimes. But there is a fundamental difference between the antiseptic experimental setting and the grisly reality of the killing fields and the killing centers… In Milgram’s social science experiment, the subjects might have lacked the imagination to understand the pain they could inflict, but the Nazi killers, even if they were entirely lacking in imagination, could not avoid knowing what they were doing. They could see how their actions affected real human beings. They understood the consequences of their deeds.” (Pg. 244-245)
He acknowledges, “Historians investigating Nazi genocide have long debated who gave the order to kill all Jews, when it was issued, and how it was transmitted. Even though the specific mechanism, including the approximate date, has been a matter of contention, there now appears to be general disagreement that Hitler had a decided voice, although no one has ever discovered, or is likely to discover, a smoking gun. The chronology of Nazi killing operations provides a road map for those seeking answers to these questions. The murder of the handicapped preceded the murder of Jews and Gypsies, and it is therefore reasonable to conclude that … [the] killing operation served as a model for the final solution. The success of the euthanasia policy convinced the Nazi leadership that mass murder was technically feasible, that ordinary men and women were willing to kill large numbers of innocent human beings, and that the bureaucracy would cooperate in such an unprecedented enterprise… German police officers and government administrators in the East proposed killing the Jews before the final solution started. But nothing so radical or unprecedented could be initiated without Hitler’s approval. There is no reason to believe that the decision-making process that led to the final solution was substantially different from the one that preceded the euthanasia killings. The decision-making process thus illustrate the linkage between the two killing operations.” (Pg. 284-285)
He continues, “We do not know the date Hitler issued his order to kill the Jews. Obviously, this order had to precede the killings and Göring’s letter, and most historians accept the spring of 1941 as the earliest possible time. But the decision on the highest level to kill handicapped Jewish patients as a group provides at least some indication that a preliminary decision might already have been reached in the spring of 1940… [Hitler] nevertheless did not issue a definite order until he was certain that such an ambitious killing enterprise was feasible. But when international conditions, the progress of the war, and the killing capabilities demonstrated by euthanasia made radical extinction attainable, Jews as a group were included in the killing operations.” (Pg. 285-286)
He concludes, “In the postwar world, Auschwitz has come to symbolize genocide in the twentieth century. But Auschwitz was only the last, most perfect Nazi killing center. The entire killing enterprise had started in January 1940 with the murder of the most helpless human beings, institutionalized handicapped patients, [and] had expanded in 1941 to include Jews and Gypsies, and had by 1945 cost the lives of at least 6 million men, women, and children.” (Pg. 302)
This book will be of great interest to those studying the Holocaust and its origins, the euthanasia program, and related topics.
Historian and Holocaust historian Henry Friedlander wrote in the Preface to this 1995 book, “I wanted to understand the crimes of the Nazi regime… my reading of the documents had convinced me that the euthanasia program had been intimately connected to Nazi genocide. I realized that the ideology, the decision-making process, the personnel, and the killing technique tied euthanasia to the ‘final solution’ … I began to see that euthanasia was not simply a prologue but the first chapter of Nazi genocide… This book is an attempt to explain how Nazi genocide developed. From the first, the regime excluded members of the three targeted groups from the national community. During the 1930s, the regime… embrac[ed] ever more radical exclusionary policies, including compulsory sterilization for the handicapped, incarceration for Gypsies, and forced emigration for Jews. Eventually, the regime decided to implement a program of mass murder to eradicate these three targeted groups… Nazi genocide, the mass murder of entire biologically determined groups of human beings, cost the lives of millions of men, women, and children in the short period of four years and four months. The figure of 6 million dead is certainly not excessive if we are to account for all the Jews, Gypsies, and handicapped murdered by the Nazis.” (Pg. xii-xiv)
He explains, “One of the professed benefits of centrally directed euthanasia killings was decriminalization, that is, the removal of the threat of prosecution from physicians who killed their patients. Hitler’s refusal to promulgate a law prevented public decriminalization. Although almost everyone accepted the principle that the Führer’s word was law… [they] had difficulty convincing physicians and civil servants that they would not be criminally liable for murder in the absence of a dully enacted law clearly authorizing the killing of handicapped patients. To convince their collaborators… they decided to ask Hitler for written orders. In October 1939, Hitler signed a document.” (Pg. 67)
He recounts, “After the Nazi assumption of power in 1933, German scientists, freed from the constraints of laws protecting the rights of patients, could pursue the most unscrupulous methods of research and treatment. The terrible experiments carried out in the concentration camps were symptomatic of this amoral attitude of the German scientific community. Using prisoners who had not volunteered, physicians performed experiments without regard to the welfare of their human subjects. Indeed, at times researchers had even designed ‘terminal experiments,’ that is, experiments … such… that the death of the subjects was both expected and predetermined… One type of experiment… attempted to duplicate extreme hypothermia… [or] ways to enable humans to consume sea water… The Waffen SS also conducted experiments … on how to treat combat wounds. Deliberately inflicted wounds were treated with [experimental drugs] … while other experiments tested methods of bone, muscle, and nerve regeneration as well as bone transplants.” (Pg. 131-132)
He states, “Physicians played an important role in the euthanasia killing operation. We have seen how scientists and physicians advocated the exclusion of those considered ‘unworthy of life’ and how their racial and eugenic theories were absorbed and integrated into the Nazi movement. Using scientists to legitimate their ideology, the Nazi leaders granted them limited control over the implementation of exclusionary policies. Physicians and scientists thus served the state as theorists and experts.” (Pg. 216)
He reports, “Many staff members… were willing to do their assigned work.. These staff members worked day after day in a factory with only one product: corpses of murdered human beings. An atmosphere of licentiousness rapidly developed, an attitude of ‘anything goes.’ One constantly used stimulus was alcohol, which was freely distributed by the supervisors…. Reports abounded of drunken orgies, numerous sexual liaisons, brawling and bullying, and stealing the property of victims.” (Pg. 237)
He asserts, “We must also ask why they accepted the job and why they remained even after they witnessed the horror of these camps. After the war, most of them claimed that they were under orders and could not refuse, but that is also unbelievable… The fear that requests to leave would result in death, an excuse for participation that was advanced after the war, was unwarranted… Finally, we must ask why these men were selected… They had probably been selected because their superiors believed them capable of the killings expected in the East… A substantial number were members of the SS and the SA, some even with concentration camp experience, but many had no such backgrounds…. When all is said and done, we are still unable to grasp the reasons that seemingly normal men and women were able to commit such extraordinary crimes. Neither ideology nor self-interest is a satisfactory explanation for such behavior. Those killers belonged to that time and place. Attempts to replicate their actions in the laboratory must fail, even if experiments seem to show, as did the one by Stanley Milgram, that ordinary men and women can commit such crimes. But there is a fundamental difference between the antiseptic experimental setting and the grisly reality of the killing fields and the killing centers… In Milgram’s social science experiment, the subjects might have lacked the imagination to understand the pain they could inflict, but the Nazi killers, even if they were entirely lacking in imagination, could not avoid knowing what they were doing. They could see how their actions affected real human beings. They understood the consequences of their deeds.” (Pg. 244-245)
He acknowledges, “Historians investigating Nazi genocide have long debated who gave the order to kill all Jews, when it was issued, and how it was transmitted. Even though the specific mechanism, including the approximate date, has been a matter of contention, there now appears to be general disagreement that Hitler had a decided voice, although no one has ever discovered, or is likely to discover, a smoking gun. The chronology of Nazi killing operations provides a road map for those seeking answers to these questions. The murder of the handicapped preceded the murder of Jews and Gypsies, and it is therefore reasonable to conclude that … [the] killing operation served as a model for the final solution. The success of the euthanasia policy convinced the Nazi leadership that mass murder was technically feasible, that ordinary men and women were willing to kill large numbers of innocent human beings, and that the bureaucracy would cooperate in such an unprecedented enterprise… German police officers and government administrators in the East proposed killing the Jews before the final solution started. But nothing so radical or unprecedented could be initiated without Hitler’s approval. There is no reason to believe that the decision-making process that led to the final solution was substantially different from the one that preceded the euthanasia killings. The decision-making process thus illustrate the linkage between the two killing operations.” (Pg. 284-285)
He continues, “We do not know the date Hitler issued his order to kill the Jews. Obviously, this order had to precede the killings and Göring’s letter, and most historians accept the spring of 1941 as the earliest possible time. But the decision on the highest level to kill handicapped Jewish patients as a group provides at least some indication that a preliminary decision might already have been reached in the spring of 1940… [Hitler] nevertheless did not issue a definite order until he was certain that such an ambitious killing enterprise was feasible. But when international conditions, the progress of the war, and the killing capabilities demonstrated by euthanasia made radical extinction attainable, Jews as a group were included in the killing operations.” (Pg. 285-286)
He concludes, “In the postwar world, Auschwitz has come to symbolize genocide in the twentieth century. But Auschwitz was only the last, most perfect Nazi killing center. The entire killing enterprise had started in January 1940 with the murder of the most helpless human beings, institutionalized handicapped patients, [and] had expanded in 1941 to include Jews and Gypsies, and had by 1945 cost the lives of at least 6 million men, women, and children.” (Pg. 302)
This book will be of great interest to those studying the Holocaust and its origins, the euthanasia program, and related topics.
August 6, 2026
Tan necesaria como aterradora.
La desgarradora historia real que el autor describe durante la II Guerra Mundial en el lado de la Alemania nazi pone los pelos de punta. Todo perfectamente referenciado, consultado y descrito tras una búsqueda bibliográfica increíble.
No hay nada que no se haya hablado o explicado en multitud de libros, películas o documentales, ensayos, artículos o prensa en general.
Sacude la moralidad humana como pocas obras se atreven a hacerlo. No es lo que pasa, sino cómo pasa. No es lo que se diseña, sino cómo y para qué se diseña. No es que se mate, sino por qué se mata. Y con semejante ensañamiento.
Pocas veces encontraremos una forma tan directa, simple y lógica de entender qué ocurrió en aquella sociedad, por qué una ideología se llevó por delante la ética humana y cómo fueron capaces algunos de crear la maquinaria de muerte más y mejor engrasada de la historia.
Este libro puede, perfectamente, ser un espejo en el que mirarse. Mirar qué está pasando a nuestro alrededor, ver qué fallos estamos cometiendo y adelantarnos a desagradables consecuencias para la estirpe humana. Estas barbaridades no pasan por una mera casualidad. Utilizando el símil de Jay Gould, y su teoría del equilibrio puntuado, en la que el autor sostiene que "las especies pasan por largos periodos de estabilidad sin cambios notables (éstasis), interrumpidos por momentos breves de cambios rápidos donde surgen nuevas especies", las sociedades humanas y sus políticas sociales, económicas y culturales pasan largos periodos de tiempo sin apenas modificar su dirección en los que no se dejan de acumular daños y bruscos enquistamientos entre las distintas poblaciones del planeta.
Y en un momento dado, cuando se dan las circunstancias, todo salta por los aires, los que se autodenominan buenos procuran acabar con los malos y la barbarie se convierte en inevitable. Pasamos a ser chimpancés por unos años hasta que nos rescata el sapiens que llevamos dentro.
En definitiva, obra imperdible y de obligatoria lectura, según mi opinión personal.
La desgarradora historia real que el autor describe durante la II Guerra Mundial en el lado de la Alemania nazi pone los pelos de punta. Todo perfectamente referenciado, consultado y descrito tras una búsqueda bibliográfica increíble.
No hay nada que no se haya hablado o explicado en multitud de libros, películas o documentales, ensayos, artículos o prensa en general.
Sacude la moralidad humana como pocas obras se atreven a hacerlo. No es lo que pasa, sino cómo pasa. No es lo que se diseña, sino cómo y para qué se diseña. No es que se mate, sino por qué se mata. Y con semejante ensañamiento.
Pocas veces encontraremos una forma tan directa, simple y lógica de entender qué ocurrió en aquella sociedad, por qué una ideología se llevó por delante la ética humana y cómo fueron capaces algunos de crear la maquinaria de muerte más y mejor engrasada de la historia.
Este libro puede, perfectamente, ser un espejo en el que mirarse. Mirar qué está pasando a nuestro alrededor, ver qué fallos estamos cometiendo y adelantarnos a desagradables consecuencias para la estirpe humana. Estas barbaridades no pasan por una mera casualidad. Utilizando el símil de Jay Gould, y su teoría del equilibrio puntuado, en la que el autor sostiene que "las especies pasan por largos periodos de estabilidad sin cambios notables (éstasis), interrumpidos por momentos breves de cambios rápidos donde surgen nuevas especies", las sociedades humanas y sus políticas sociales, económicas y culturales pasan largos periodos de tiempo sin apenas modificar su dirección en los que no se dejan de acumular daños y bruscos enquistamientos entre las distintas poblaciones del planeta.
Y en un momento dado, cuando se dan las circunstancias, todo salta por los aires, los que se autodenominan buenos procuran acabar con los malos y la barbarie se convierte en inevitable. Pasamos a ser chimpancés por unos años hasta que nos rescata el sapiens que llevamos dentro.
En definitiva, obra imperdible y de obligatoria lectura, según mi opinión personal.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
July 15, 2020
As a severely disabled person, I am immensely interested in this subject-matter, for obvious reasons and several not-so-obvious reasons. Needless to say, I went into this with great expectations; and, perhaps not-so-surprisingly, I came away very disappointed. Although the author seeks to do honor to the lesser-known victims of the Holocaust; the book itself doesn't do a good enough job of this, at least personally. I'm unsure whether this is a stylistic issue; if, indeed, this is a result of the scant amount of concrete evidence pertaining to this atrocious aspect of the wider horrors of WWII, as the author claims; or whether this is due to something else entirely.
June 15, 2011
3.5. Once again, a little academic for my taste but it definitely added to my knowledge of the Nazi regime.
July 20, 2011
Absolutely chilling. Behind-the-scenes look at how the Nazis went from exterminating their own people - even children - and gradually broadened their evil quest.
May 20, 2014
A sad treatise outlining the legalization of genocide.
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews