The acceptance of two key concepts is what makes this extension inevitable – first it is accepted that there is such a thing as a life not worth living and second that the active ending of a person’s life is justified in order to lessen the suffering of others. It was these two principles that were used to justify the killing an infant with limb abnormalities and congenital blindness (named Knauer) with parental consent by Dr Karl Brandt in neighbouring Germany in 1939. This ‘test-case’ paved the way for the registration of all children under three years of age with ‘serious hereditary diseases’. This information was then used by a panel of ‘experts’, including three medical professors (who never saw the patients), to authorise death by injection or starvation of some 6,000 children by the end of the Second World War. The euthanasia programme in Nazi Germany, later headed by the same Karl Brandt, did not begin in prison camps like Auschwitz and Treblinka. It began far more subtly with doctors in hospitals and its very first victims were children who were killed on supposedly compassionate grounds. It is bitterly ironic that child euthanasia is happening again seventy years later on the very same grounds in two countries that share a common border with Germany.
Posted on: Wed, 19 Jun 2013 18:19:23 +0000
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