James Tyner is Professor of Geography at Kent State University and author of 20 books and over 100 articles and book chapters. He is one of the world's foremost scholars on collective forms of violence. Among his books are the titles directly below. Click links for ordering info. Iraq, Terror, and the Philippines’ Will to War His War, Violence, and Population: Making the Body Count, The Politics of Lists: Bureaucracy and Genocide under the Khmer Rouge   For ordering information, please click here.   Genocide and the Geographical Imagination: Life and Death in Germany, China, and Cambodia

Chapter II of Genocide and the Geographical Imagination, “The State Must Own Death,” is the best synthesis of research articulating the origins and development of the Nazi’s “Euthanasia Movement”—how medical killing led  to the Holocaust.
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Scroll down to the right for information on Genocide & the Geographical Imagination: Life & Death in Germany, China & Cambodian and how to purchase it.
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Tyner cites the famous passage from the 1920 book by Alfred Hoche and Karl Binding, Allowing the Destruction of Life Unworthy of Life, the foundational text justifying, authorizing, and generating state murder:

If one thinks of a battlefield covered with thousands of dead youth and contrasts this with our institutions for the feebleminded with their solicitude for the living patients.

One would be deeply shocked by the glaring disjunction between the sacrifice of the most valuable possession of humanity on the one side, and on the other the greatest care of beings who are not only worthless but even manifest negative value.

If the state is willing to sacrifice the lives of its soldiers, why should so many resources be expended to keep mental patients alive? If the state is willing to kill its most valuable citizens, why can’t it kill “worthless” human beings?

Beginning with this syllogism, the origins of mass-murder in Germany becomes clear: why Hitler and the Nazis believed that the state gave them the “right” to kill.