Not another holocaust

There was actually a little known holocaust that preceded the historical mass slaughter, when the Nazis tried out their tactics on the disabled and impaired patients in medical facilities. Hitler named it the Aktion T4 program.

When most of us think of the Holocaust, we recall ghastly black and white footage of emaciated corpses at Belsen, Birkenau, and Auschwitz and the anguished cry of “We must never forget.”

Rightly so.

But we have forgotten the dirty little secret of six other names: Brandenburg, Sonnerstein, Bernburg, Hadamar, Grafeneck, Hartheim…

They are the names of six institutions that housed a wide array of people with some form of disability – from those with severe and profound disabilities to those who had fairly minor medical conditions such as epilepsy. These places of social charity were hijacked by Nazi thugs and turned from havens of comfort and safety to death chambers.

We have forgotten enough to allow extermination to creep back into the culture disguised as compassionate care, of all things.

Not again, Germans are saying, now that they see how far euthanasia is reaching in their country and culture.

The release of a video showing a former local politician helping a 79-year-old woman commit suicide has caused outrage in Germany and prompted some states to try to tighten their rules on assisted suicide.

Former Hamburg senator Roger Kusch, a prominent right to die campaigner, has said he advised the healthy pensioner on how to prepare a lethal cocktail of sedatives and malaria drugs which would kill her and left her flat shortly before she died.

Kusch filmed nine hours of conversations with unmarried and childless Bettina Schardt, who said she dreaded being taken to a home for the elderly. However, she did not have a terminal illness and said: “I can’t say that I am suffering.”

She wasn’t dying, or even suffering. The president of the German Medical Association said: “It is abhorrent and deeply shocking how an egotistical cynic has exploited the loneliness of an old lady in his craving for recognition,” and he’s right about all of it, including Kusch’s new high profile. Germans have recognized what he’s doing.

The case has spurred several German states in their efforts to introduce legislation which would hand people prison sentences of up to three years if they offered commercial or organized assistance in a suicide.

It’s become a national issue, and this is the kind of attention it needs to keep from spreading into another holocaust.

“What Mr. Kusch did was particularly awful,” Beate Merk, the justice minister of Bavaria, said in an interview. “This woman had nothing wrong other than her fear. He didn’t offer her any other options.”

Germany’s conservative chancellor, Angela Merkel, declared on a German news channel on Wednesday, “I am absolutely against any form of assisted suicide, in whatever guise it comes.”

They’ve taken the first most critical step of being aware that it’s happening, and calling it what it truthfully is.

“We want to make it illegal for people here to offer ‘suicide by reservation,’ ” Ms. Merk said. “That is inhumane.”

Yes it is. Everywhere it is executed.