Comment by reitzensteinm | Hacker News Reader

Comment by reitzensteinm | Hacker News Reader

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The "euthanasia" actually began in September 1939. October was when the law was passed, which was backdated to September 1st.

This isn't just to be pedantic, I'm currently reading The Third Reich trilogy by Richard J. Evans, and this is an instance of the Nazi emphasis on appearing as though they had a legal basis for their actions, even well into the dictatorship. It's one of the most bizarre parts of the story to me.

The euthanasia was attempted to be done in secret, so under what circumstance the backdating (or even the existence) of the law could possibly have been useful is beyond me. Under Nazi victory, those involved were safe from prosecution, and in case of defeat, the law could not have saved them.

It's like something straight out of the movie Brazil, though not being fiction and having resulted in the death and suffering of countless real people makes not possible to enjoy the insanity of the situation.

I highly recommend the books, though I don't exactly have a weak stomach, and many parts were quite difficult for me. It reminded me quite a bit of Robert Fisk's The Great War for Civilisation, which was also extremely long and dense with suffering.

I don't think the Nazis felt as secure from internal challenge in Germany during their rule as they appear to have been in retrospect. In any case, whether it was really unnecessary or not, they seem (from the little I've read about this) to have been past masters at controlling potential domestic opposition using the rapier rather than the bludgeon, using a combination of bribery and conciliation, isolation and media control, divide-and-conquer, obfuscation and legal hoop-jumping, and judicious applications of extreme violence. Instead of flattening German "civil society" outright, they won the tug of war with it, dragging it along with them instead of having it pull them back. There was in fact open (though of course not, in the end of the day, effective) opposition to T4 from inside Germany, notably from the Catholic Church which was one institution the Nazis had to handle with some care, and Cardinal van Galen was invoking the German Penal Code against it as late as 1941. So legal changes were probably all part of the minuet.

I also don't think it's inevitable that the T4 perpetrators would have been punished if the Nazis had lost power at some point in, say, early 1941. The western world had been increasingly heading in that direction before the war, and to a large and increasing extent it's arriving back there now, as evidenced by, for example, the mysterious absence of Down's Syndrome children in many places these days. Come to think of it, many of the people implicated in T4 didn't in fact end up facing justice after the war either.

>the mysterious absence of Down's Syndrome children in many places these days.

could you please expand ?

I don't know what places the author's referring to, but according to one study, most fetuses diagnosed with Down Syndrome in Europe [0] and the United States [1] are aborted. The rate of live births has remained steady, but apparently it would be significantly higher if not for prenatal screening [2]. This discrepancy isn't very mysterious, nor is it really an absence, so maybe the GP has something else in mind?

[0]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10521836

[1]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22418958

[2]: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/pd.2702/full

I think is it a lot easier to convince people what they are doing is ok or not so bad, if it is "legalized" by law. NSA also insists that everything they do is covered by the law or at least their secret interpretation.

This kind of legalism is particularly puzzling in cases like the Khmer Rouge, which avoided enlisting sympathetic intellectuals and foreign backers to help build bureaucracies and theoretical justification for their actions and instead massacred them whilst being deliberately obscurantist about their aims and beliefs, but still kept meticulous records of their prisoners and the "confessions" they extracted as if they believed such evidence procedures had been followed correctly would assure history judged their actions kindly.

Anomalies like that can be important, I think. Clearly it made sense to the actors, but to us it seems incomprehensibly bizarre; that means our mental model is wrong, or, at least, has a gap.

I think we tend to err by confusing cruel governments with common criminals. Criminals tend to be irrational and self-defeating. Governments and larger criminal organizations tend to be cold and calculating, and their use of violence is not random; their goal isn't violence at any cost, like an individual who goes on a killing spree. They wanted to operate a government, after all, and they expected it to be enduring. They could not abolish all order and personal responsibility. Presumably, even if you were doing something abominable as part of your job, government workers could still be fired if they showed up late or got drunk on the job, etc. Maybe record-keeping was considered an essential part of maintaining an organized regime.

Edit: I don't want to overstate the calculating aspect-- It's possible that, from the standpoint of the Nazis, persecuting Jews was a drain on resources and served no rational purpose for the organization, and even that some Nazis were aware and privately opposed it. But what matters as far as running a disciplined organization is not so much that orders must serve a rational purpose; what matters is that the orders must come from the appropriate authority.

This is actually true in any disciplined organization: in the army, if you are in combat and your commanding officer orders you to shoot that guy, you're expected to shoot that guy, period. But the order makes the difference; you can't shoot people at random.

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