Into That Darkness: From Mercy Killing to Mass Murder (10 page)

“The man I was thinking of was Professor Dr Josef Mayer, who was teaching moral theology at the Catholic philosophical-theological University of Paderborn, of which he had, in fact, been Rector for a time. He was therefore a man of considerable standing and, having produced a substantial work on the sterilization of the insane in 1927, was already known to be concerned with, and open to argument about, these questions.

“I went to see Professor Mayer, I think it was in the beginning of 1939 – but I can’t remember the exact date. I told him exactly what Brack had told me: that Hitler wanted an Opinion on the attitude of the Catholic Church towards euthanasia. I don’t think I knew Professor Mayer before this meeting – although I saw him repeatedly in later years: we travelled to Rome together in 1944; we stayed at the Hotel Felipe Neri … our trip then was for the purpose of finding out what possibilities there might be to change the course of the war at the last moment; to establish contact through the Vatican with the Western powers and join with them against the Bolsheviks. But that was much later.…

“In 1939, as I say, I don’t think I knew him personally. Yes, I had warned him of my coming – not through someone else: I did it myself. I was always very careful when seeing theologians or priests. And I never met them in uniform: it would have been embarrassing for them. I visited the professor two or three times I think, in his flat: it was in a university annexe. I think I saw two rooms, everything full of books. I ate with him, but I never stayed overnight. On that day, when I went the first time, I told Professor Mayer he would be paid a fee, obviously not depending in any way on what he said. What was required was a real expert Opinion. All he was going to be paid for was his time and expenses. Professor Mayer accepted the commission and, as I recall, worked on it for at least half a year.”

Hard says that at the end of that period, he himself went to pick up the paper in Paderborn. “I remember I went to the flat, and something or other – typing or correction – wasn’t quite done. The secretary still had it or something like that. Anyway, he finally brought it to me, to the train.”

The Opinion, says Herr Hartl, consisted of approximately one hundred pages, typewritten, on thin manuscript paper, average size and double-spaced. There were five copies of it, each bound in a blue folder. He left Paderborn on an afternoon train, spent the five hours of the journey reading, reached Berlin in the late evening and finished reading the manuscript that night.

Professor Mayer’s Opinion, he says, was an academic paper: but there
was
a feeling, there were indications, that he himself was sympathetic to euthanasia. Going at great length into historical precedents and quoting a number of moral arguments for and against, Professor Mayer suggested that the whole problem of the mentally ill suffered under the error of Christ that the mentally ill were possessed by the devil. It was because of this that, particularly in the Middle Ages, they were whipped, tortured and burned. He said that a subsequent period of relative enlightenment led to more humane treatment and the setting up, at least in some places, of asylums. But these times did not last and there was a return to the medieval practices and superstitions. Only in relatively modern times, Professor Mayer wrote, had a large number of theologians totally rejected euthanasia of the mentally ill, and even they not unanimously. These objections could not, therefore, be considered a categorical moral condemnation. As proof of this lack of decisive unanimity, Professor Mayer cited the Jesuit moral system of probability (
Probabilismus
). This system, he said, claims that “there are few moral decisions which are from the outset unequivocally good or bad. Most moral decisions are dubious. In cases of such dubious decisions, if there are reasonable grounds and reasonable ‘authorities’ in support of personal opinion, then such personal opinion can become decisive even if there are other ‘reasonable’ grounds and ‘authorities’ opposing it.” Mayer referred specifically to Thomas Aquinas and finally, concerning the killing of the incurably mentally ill, presented his conclusion: as there were reasonable grounds and authorities both for and against it, euthanasia of the mentally ill could be considered “defensible”.

Albert Hartl says he brought the five copies of the Opinion to Brack at the Führer Chancellery the next day. “About four weeks later Brack called me in and told me that, since the Opinion indicated clearly that a unanimous and unequivocal opposition from the two Churches was not to be expected, Hitler had withdrawn his objections and had ordered the Euthanasia Programme to be started.”

Hartl says, however, that even then
he
was not convinced. “I suggested to Brack that considering what was at stake, I thought we should inform the representatives of both Churches of what the Opinion said, and of Hitler’s decision.” Brack, it appears, agreed and Hartl was told to inform Josef Roth, a former – and officially never lapsed – priest who was in charge of the Catholic section of the Reich Church Ministry.
*
Reichsleiter Bouhler himself, Brack said, would inform Bishop Wienken, the official liaison man between the Fulda Bishops’ Conference (the German Episcopate) and the government.

Hartl says he informed Josef Roth – who then received a copy of the Opinion from Brack – and that he asked Roth to inform the Papal Nuncio, Cesare Orsenigo, as well as the Archbishop of Osnabrück, Bishop Berning, who was very influential in Prussia. “When I told Roth, he didn’t voice any objection,” Hartl says. “He just listened. He told me later that he had informed both Berning and Orsenigo.” Berning apparently commented that “some pages of this Opinion” were “highly embarrassing to the Church”, while Orsenigo, Roth claimed, had apparently pointedly withheld all comment and merely remarked that he took “informal” cognizance of the information.” (In diplomatic language, this would mean that while an
official
acceptance of information would have entailed an official transmission of the information to the Vatican,
informally
accepted information entailed no such official obligation – in a situation like this, one would think, a pointless diplomatic distinction, as there could surely be no doubt what the Nuncio’s obligation was.)

Brack apparently told Hartl that Bishop Wienken had expressed “considerable understanding for the planned measures” but had remarked that “one had to realize there were some ‘hotspurs’ amongst the German Bishops who were likely to use this matter to deepen the controversy between Church and State.”

Hartl claims that on the Protestant side, the Pastor von Bodelschwingh – especially suitable as he was head of an institution for the mentally ill – was informed. Here again, Brack is quoted as saying that von Bodelschwingh said neither yes nor no, but merely insisted that his own institution was to be exempted. (According to Lothar Gruchmann’s
Euthanasia and Justice in the Third Reich
the Pastor von Bodelschwingh, together with Pastor Braune, another high-ranking Protestant minister, also director of an institution for the mentally sick, became particularly articulate in their protests
against
euthanasia, certainly as of the spring of 1940.)

Hartl says that shortly after these initial steps, he was instructed to meet with a small group of doctors and lawyers – about eight to ten people – and tell them about the Opinion. Later he was to address two more such groups. The first one included the psychiatrist Professor Werner Heyde who was to become the medical director of the programme. “I talked for about half an hour,” said Hartl. “There were no questions afterwards, and no discussion. They were quiet.”

If this account, as given by Hartl, is true it opens yet another dimension to the already existing doubts about the moral leadership of the Holy See during the period of the Nazi rule in Germany.

The credibility of this whole sequence of events seemed at first to depend to a large degree on the personality and motivations of this one man, Albert Hartl.

I was – to be blunt – originally disposed to distrust him: a priest who had given away to the Gestapo another cleric to whom, at the very least, he owed professional loyalty; a man who upon leaving the priesthood joined the
SS
and whose functions, furthermore, seemed to presuppose a readiness to deliver to the Nazis former brothers in faith; and a man who had eventually (as I learned from him) been sent to serve in Russia and had later been imprisoned in Nuremberg while under interrogation for his possible part in the
Einsatzgruppen
murders.
*
(He was in fact cleared of this in 1949.) It did not seem to me, initially, that this was a man whose word one could accept on an issue of such magnitude, without corroboration.

In addition, this was such an extraordinary – in journalistic terms such a sensational – story; how was it, how indeed
could
it be that no newspaper, no magazine had ever picked it up, even when it was apparently finally aired in Germany at two euthanasia trials, first in 1965 and then again in 1967? Indeed, why had it never been brought up in Nuremberg when Brack, after all, was on trial for his life, and when surely proof that the Churches had known about euthanasia before it began and had tacitly sanctioned it – by calculated silence – would have helped his case?
*

The fact that Herr Dieter Allers told me that Brack had told him, too, about Professor Mayer’s Opinion when he first met him in January 1940, and that he had added that the “Vatican knew about it too” did not necessarily add to my faith in the authenticity of this story.

But then, in anticipation of meeting Herr Hartl, I obtained records and transcripts of a Frankfurt euthanasia trial in March 1967 at which not only Albert Hartl, but also Professor Josef Mayer had appeared as witnesses. And simultaneously I received a copy of a circular sent on March 6, 1967, by Johann Neuhäusler, Auxiliary Bishop of Munich, to all archepiscopal and episcopal authorities in Germany, Austria and all countries formerly occupied by the Germans. I also received two more photocopies: one a brief extract, in Latin, from the
Diocesan Gazette
for the Württemberg Diocese of Rottenburg dated March 24, 1941; the other a copy of a circularized Pastoral letter,
Mystici Corporis
, from Pope Pius
XII
, dated
June 29, 1943.

Important though Herr Hartl’s personality was to start with, it now became almost irrelevant, and so did any other doubts. The documents speak for themselves.

In the 1967 Frankfurt euthanasia trial, the transcripts show, Herr Hartl told his story – just as, according to another transcript he had done in 1965 and as he was to do again, in 1973, when talking to me – without hesitation and remaining totally unruffled despite an obvious atmosphere of scepticism in the court, and aggressive cross-examination. He spoke briefly, clearly, factually and without any attempt to magnify or for that matter to justify his own part in the events.

Professor Josef Mayer, for whom – even reading the transcript – one could feel instant compassion since he was eighty-one years old and very obviously under desperate strain,
*
denied at first all knowledge of Herr Hartl, and an Opinion such as he had described. In the course of cross-examination however, every one of his denials and arguments collapsed and what emerged in the end was that Professor Mayer
had
been commissioned by Hartl to write the Opinion,
had
done this work in full knowledge of “all his friends and colleagues” (and one must remember that he was, in 1938–9, professor at a Catholic university and thereby under the eyes and the authority of the Church),
had
had the Opinion typed by a secretary and
had
delivered the copies himself to Hartl at the railway station. It would take too much space to reprint here the details of this testimony. But in essence Professor Mayer thus confirmed every claim Hartl had made. This is particularly important as every trace of this document has disappeared; it has never been produced at any of the euthanasia trials; all Catholic authorities in Germany deny ever having seen it; the superbly equipped Institute for Contemporary History in Munich and the Ludwigsburg Central Authority (for the prosecution of Nazi crime) searched all its relevant files without finding a copy, or even a mention of it in any documents of the period. And the West German
Bundesarchiv
in Koblenz which now houses the more or less complete documentation of the period including the documents recently returned by the National Archives in Washington, although aware of its existence, was also unable to find it. It is impossible to avoid the conclusion that the total disappearance of this historical document is probably more indicative of the importance assigned to it by those most closely affected by its content and significance, than would have been its ready availability for inspection.
†

Professor Mayer also presented to the Frankfurt court upon request, the letter circularized by Bishop Neuhäusler.

In this letter the Bishop (an inveterate opponent of the Nazis who spent most of the war years in Dachau concentration camp, and whose own political integrity is beyond question) requested all those to whom it was addressed to search in their pastoral archives for evidence of pronouncements by the Church on the question of euthanasia, be it in pastoral letters, sermons by bishops, protests to any authorities whatever or directions to the clergy or to Catholic (medical) institutions.

After describing, with asperity, the personality and record of Albert Hartl, and implying that the persons who were allegedly informed of the planned euthanasia were all, or nearly all, lapsed priests,
*
Bishop Neuhäusler wrote that Professor Mayer totally denied that he had ever pronounced himself in favour of euthanasia. In a tone bordering on despair, he then cited all the German bishops who had spoken up against euthanasia. Beginning with Cardinal Bertram and Cardinal Faulhaber in 1934 – both of whom he quoted at length
verbatim
– he went on to Archbishop Gröber in 1937. He next mentioned, briefly, the Vatican’s correspondence with the German government as reported in the Vatican “White Books” of 1934 and 1935 – when the Vatican “already rejected sharply the small evil of sterilization. Unfortunately there were no more ‘White Books’ in the following years, and we cannot ascertain at present,” the Bishop’s letter continues, significantly enough, “whether the Holy See pronounced itself on the subject, when large-scale euthanasia began in 1939. We are requesting information from the Vatican about this today.”