Based on a terrific conversation I had with Professor James Tyner yesterday--and an invitation I received to present a special lecture at California State University Northridge--CSUN(postponed from March 25, 2020), I'm returning to my research on the Nazi Euthanasia Program.

Professor Tyner has a terrific chapter in his book, Genocide and the Geographical imagination called "The State Must Own Death," one of the finest analyses of this topic.

The Nazi Euthanasia Program  was the bedrock of the Nazi movement: killing of human beings deemed "unworthy of living."  The killing of mental patients began in 1938, over three years before the Holocaust was undertaken. The first killing project led directly to the second. 

War against the Soviet Union was not separate from the euthanasia movement: Jewish-Bolsheviks were deemed "life unworthy life."  Hitler had no compunctions about waging a "war of extermination."

Below is a brief introduction to the Nazi Euthanasia Program. We'll follow with additional research and writing on this topic.

Best regards,
Richard Koenigsberg
______________________________________________________________

1. From: Allowing the Destruction of Life Unworthy of Life: Its Measure and Form (1920, Alfred Hoche and Karl Binding): “Viewed from the standpoint of a higher state morality, it cannot be doubted that the endeavor to sustain worthless life at all costs has been taken to excess. We view the state as an organism with its own laws and requirements. Like any self-contained human body, this organism, as we doctors know, abandons and rejects individual parts which have become worthless or damaging.”
    
2. Hoche took steps towards the justification of compulsory euthanasia.  In 1915 he wrote of the end of atomistic individualism, and of the transformation of the nation into an organism of a higher order. He argued that the Volk was an organism of a higher order with rights above those of the individual.
    
3. By 1920, Hoche and Binding were arguing that doctors were responsible for the welfare of the totality of the social organism and that exterminating the lives of harmful or useless members was necessary.  Many agreed that war casualties and the nation's lack of resources, food & Lebensraum justified euthanasia.  It was claimed that it was wrong to sustain worthless lives of the sick and deranged, while worthwhile lives of starving children were being lost.