AGED AND UNFIT

Wairarapa Times-Age, 3 July 1941, Page 6

AGED AND UNFIT

j EXECUTIONS BY NAZIS ' i i SOME REVELATIONS. QUESTION SENT TO THE POPE. Out of the fastness of Germany has come the story of an act as terrible 1 in its cruelty as any known of Hitler's regime, writes Michael Straight in the "New Republic." The- sole outward evidence lies buried in a back page of the Acta Aposto lica? Sedis, the official monthly publication of the Vatican, in which Pope Pius XII. decrees the policies which his bishops are to follow. It is a decree signed by the Notary of the Supreme Sacred Congregation of the Holy Office; it is entitled "Concerning the Direct Killing of the Innocent Done by Order of Public Authority." The decree is in the form of a question sent to the Pope by an unnamed bishop. It reads: "It was asked of this Supreme Sacred Congregation: •Whether, by order of public authority, it is licit directly to kill those who, although they have committed no crime deserving death, yet, because of mental or physical defects, are no longer able to benefit the nation, and are considered rather to burden the nation and. to obstruct its energy and l strength’." The bishop was a German bishop. IHe asked whether it was right for I thousands of infirm and aged Germans to be put to death by Adolf Hitler because they were no longer of service in Hitler's war economy. “IN THE NEGATIVE.” The decree continues: "In a general session of the Supreme Sacred Congregation heid on Wednesday. November 27, 1940, the Eminent and Most Reverend Cardinals appointed to safeguard faith and morals, having hoard the ‘votum’ of the Reverend Doctors Consuitors, ordered that it must be replied . 1 “ ‘ln the negative,’ since it is contrary to natural and divine positive law." This decree Pope Pius approved and ordered to bo published. In this article there are presented for the first time the facts which lie behind this decree. They have been brought to me by a dignitary of the Church whose name must necessarily be withheld. The facts are these: In September, October and November of 1940, 85 000 blind, incurably ill or aged Germans were put to death by the Gestapo. They were put to death as casually as the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals chloroforms old and helpless dogs. They were not killed for mercy. They were killed because they could no longer manufacture guns in return for the food which they consumed; be-

cause the German hospitals were needed for wounded soldiers; because their death was the ultimate logic of the National Socialist doctrine of racial superiority and the survival of the physically fit. This direct killing of the innocent done by order of public authority was not discovered at once.

There is a big hospital near Urach in Wurtemburg. In September the priests of Urach noticed that the elderly people in the hospital were dying in increasing numbers, and dying on certain days.

These priests discovered that systematic euthanasia was being practised in this hospital. The old and incurably ill were being killed off by the injection of small quantities of poison into their veins. The poison was one which causes death and cannot be detected. Later, according to the accounts of those priests, the Gestapo found that poisoning was unnecessarily expensive. Gas chambers were used, the priests reported, until the Nazis found an even simpler method which involved no cost at all. Air bubbles were injected into the veins of those chosen to die, and

death was instantaneous when the bubbles reached the heart. Relatives of the victims were never told, of course. They merely received a small box containing 1 the victim’s ashes. Nor could the truth escape easily from Germany. The Public Health Service at Washington learned only that tubercular patients in Germany were given death sentences when the war broke out, in the form of compulsory labour in munition factories, which their weakened bodies could not stand. CATHOLICS PERSECUTED. From the pulpits in Germany Catholic priests began to unveil this appalling story. They delivered sermons protesting against euthanasia and sterilisation, and they were strengthened in their stand on December 16 by the decree of the Vatican which has been quoted, and which warned that euthanasia was contrary to the laws of the Church.

The reply of the Nazis was immediate and drastic. More than 300 Catholic priests were imprisoned in concentration camps, and the publication of the decree in the churches of Germany was forbidden. Today the practice of euthanasia in Germany is still continuing, and the persecution of the Catholics has been intensified. Refugees report that religious education has been abolished and Sunday schools closed. Catholic members of the Hitler Jugend, the Bund Deutscher Madchen. and the Arbeitdienst are discouraged from attending church. Abbeys, monasteries, and convents are used to quarter Germans brought to the Reich from Rumania, Russia, and the Baltic countries. The Episcopal sees of Aachen, Palerborn, and Cologne are vacant because the Nazis prevented the nomination of new bishops, while at Rottenberg. Bishop Sproll was exiled and his palace fired and destroyed because he refused to vote for Hitler in a “free election." In Poland, where the monasteries have been seized and sometimes destroyed, the Catholics suffered most of all, although the campaign to exterminate the Church has been carried on in Austria, Czechoslovakia, Belgium, and France as well. Unlike the Jews, however, Catholics are seldom permitted to leave Germany. The church dignitary who gave me this information charges that the majority of the 800,000 prisoners in German con- x centration camps are Catholics.