5 At just the same time, however, the Eastern shooting campaign was expanding and, because these massacres were causing psychological problems for many shooters, Nebe and Fritzsch were about to embark on their search for a more “humane” way of killing civilians (ending in their discoveries of two cheap and mobile gassing techniques). 4 After placing the popular and potentially influential von Galen under house arrest, on 24 August 1941, the Führer ended, at least officially, the euthanasia program. For this reason, Hitler had always been sensitive to the emotional vagaries of public opinion. 3 The Nazis may have been a dictatorship but they knew, as all long-lasting autocracies do, broad public dissent does not bode well for political longevity. 2 Heated and public protests ensued-most notably led by Count Clemens August von Galen, the Archbishop of Münster. Some said that victims who had long ago had their appendixes removed died of appendicitis. On 8 July 1940, for example, a provincial probate judge wrote in a letter to the minister of justice, “‘Everyone knows as well as I do’ that ‘the murder of the mentally ill is as well known a daily reality as, say, the concentration camps.’” 1 These suspicions were confirmed when some of the victims’ families received death certificates claiming clearly spurious causes of death. ![]() Soon after the start of the Nazi regime’s furtive T4 euthanasia project in 1939, rumors spread that the Nazi regime was killing Germans with disabilities.
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