Nazi euthanasia and the Catholic Church
During the Second World War, the Roman Catholic Church protested against Aktion T4, the Nazi involuntary euthanasia programme under which 300,000 disabled people were murdered.
The Holy See declared on 2 December 1940 that the policy was contrary to natural and positive Divine law, and that: "The direct killing of an innocent person because of mental or physical defects is not allowed."
[6] By the time the Nazis commenced their programme of killing invalids, the Catholic Church in Germany had been subject to prolonged persecution from the state, and had suffered confiscation of property, arrest of clergy, and closure of lay organisations.
Archbishop Conrad Groeber of Freiburg wrote to the head of the Reich Chancellery, and offered to pay all costs being incurred by the state for the "care of mentally ill people intended for death."
Wienken cited the commandment "thou shalt not kill" to officials and warned them to halt the program or face public protest from the Church.
The government refused to give a written undertaking to halt the program, and the Vatican declared on 2 December that the policy was contrary to natural and positive Divine law.
Subsequent arrests of priests and seizure of Jesuit properties by the Gestapo in his home city of Munster, convinced Galen that the caution advised by his superior had become pointless.
She escaped the confinement and Galen, who had also received news of the imminent removal of further patients, launched his most audacious challenge on the regime in a 3 August sermon.
[10] In 1941, with the Wehrmacht still marching on Moscow, Galen, despite his long-time nationalist sympathies, denounced the lawlessness of the Gestapo, the confiscations of church properties, and the Nazi "euthanasia" programme.
[2] Kershaw characterised Von Galen's 1941 "open attack" on the government's "euthanasia" program as a "vigorous denunciation of Nazi inhumanity and barbarism.
[2] Bishop von Preysing's Cathedral Administrator, Bernhard Lichtenberg, met his demise for protesting directly to Dr Conti, the Nazi State Medical Director.
With deep horror Christian Germans have learned that, by order of the State authorities, numerous insane persons, entrusted to asylums and institutions, were destroyed as so-called "unproductive citizens."
At present a large-scale campaign is being made for the killing of incurables through a film recommended by the authorities and designed to calm the conscience through appeals to pity.
He stated his "profound grief" at the murder of the deformed, the insane, and those suffering from hereditary disease... as though they were a useless burden to Society," in condemnation of the ongoing Nazi "euthanasia" program.
Conscious of the obligations of Our high office We deem it necessary to reiterate this grave statement today, when to Our profound grief We see at times the deformed, the insane, and those suffering from hereditary disease deprived of their lives, as though they were a useless burden to Society; and this procedure is hailed by some as a manifestation of human progress, and as something that is entirely in accordance with the common good.
Yet who that is possessed of sound judgment does not recognize that this not only violates the natural and the divine law written in the heart of every man, but that it outrages the noblest instincts of humanity?
