We must not open door for ‘mercy killing’
MY MOTHER grew up in Germany between the two world wars. Among her siblings she had a handicapped elder brother.
With the outbreak of the Second World War, ‘mercy killing’ started and continued until May 1945. The family spent that whole time moving him around the countryside, between friends and relatives, to avoid the death squads. He lived on into the mid-1960s.
The guiding idea of this ‘mercy killing’ was not of uniquely Nazi origin but came from a 1920s paper, ‘Permission for the Destruction of Life Unworthy of Life’ which had radically redefined ‘mercy killing’ from a matter of individual choice to escape a painful terminal illness to a legitimate means for society to dispose of ‘useless ballast existences’.
The financial crises of the 1920s and especially the Wall Street Crash of 1929 steeped German bureaucrats more deeply into this culture of cost-cutting and harsh choices about resource allocation.
The Nazi regime provided the impetus, institutional cover and secrecy that enabled the implementation of ideas which had never won over a majority within the medical and welfare lobbies, let alone mainstream public opinion, but it was the ‘bureaucrats’ who put it on the agenda and pushed it forward.
During the five years of war it would claim more than 216,400 victims,
more than any other group within Germany.
I strongly oppose any law that allows assisted death because life is sacred and once the door is open it usually opens wider and wider and is difficult to shut.
Germany has learnt it’s lesson, haven’t we?
T. F. HARVEY