By Brannon S. Howse

Hitler killed 270,000 handicapped citizens through active euthanasia, [source: Dave Reynolds, “Holocaust Museum Unveils New Eugenics Exhibit,” Inclusion Daily Express, April 22, 2004.]
and America and the courts are rushing toward the same with the murder of individuals such as Terri Schiavo. Oregon voters passed a Death with Dignity Act in 1994 and re-affirmed it in 1997. Washington state voters legalized doctor-assisted suicide on November 4, 2008. In December 2008, a Montana judge ruled that terminally ill residents have the right to physician-assisted suicide, and “death with dignity” is gaining acceptance in other states as well.    

Even worse, Americans have permitted their own holocaust by killing more than 50 million babies since abortion was legalized through the U.S. Supreme Court in 1973. Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, became acquainted with doctors and scientists who had worked with Nazi Germany’s eugenics program and had no quarrel with the euthanasia, sterilization, abortion, and infanticide programs of the early Reich. [Source:  George Grant, The Family Under Siege: What the New Social Engineers Have in Mind for You and Your Children (Minneapolis: Bethany House Publishers, 1994), 62.]

Sanger even published several articles in Birth Control Review that reflected Hitler’s White Supremacist worldview. 

The Church in America has largely ignored the murder of 50 million unborn children just as the false church in Nazi Germany ignored the murder of 11 million innocent people. And I doubt the global false church will show any concern for the millions the Antichrist will murder as predicted in God’s Word. 

Other factors also contribute to the Church’s drift away from truth. Numerous studies reveal that with each passing generation, more and more self-described evangelicals embrace our culture’s leanings toward Cosmic Humanism. In a 2008 article entitled “New Evangelicals,” Newsweek quoted a young, self-described “evangelical” who sees no problem with abortion:

[quote] While abortion remains a bright line for most evangelicals, some Christian-college students admit there’s even a bit of wiggle room there. Hillary Waters graduated in 2008 from Wheaton with a political science degree and spent six months in Zambia. She didn’t grow up as a Christian, though she considers herself one now. “I don’t really have an opinion on abortion. I just can’t imagine if you were a single mother of four kids and got pregnant,” she says. “I can’t really justify forcing someone to raise a child in that circumstance.” Christian colleges, it seems, are making room for everybody. [end quote] 

History may not repeat itself precisely, but it does rhyme. What happened in Germany is now possible in America as the barrier of a Christian worldview has largely been removed from the American conscience. Just before he died, Dr. Leo Alexander, chief medical assistant to the prosecution at the Nuremberg trials, observed about the U. S.: “It is much like Germany in the Twenties and Thirties. The barriers against killing are coming down.” [source:  “The Real Brophy Issue,” Boston Globe, November 18, 1985.]

The slaughter of five million Jews and six million non-Jews was facilitated for the Nazi Party by the parents of disabled children and family members of the mentally ill and disturbed. In Germany in the 1930s and 40s: 

[quote] [T]he lives of hundreds of thousands of terminally ill, incurably sick and mentally incompetent patients were terminated, not by sadistic monsters but by Europe’s medical elite. The history of that era is all too similar to the present to be ignored. [end quote] [source:  Brief of Amicus Curia, Prepared by Mark A. Rothe for the Family Research Council, October 1996, 4.]

Hugh Gallagher confirms it “would be a mistake to call [the German euthanasia experience] a Nazi program. It was not. The program was conceived by physicians and operated by them. They did the killing.” [Source: Hugh Gregory Gallagher, By Trust Betrayed: Patients, Physicians, and the License to Kill in the Third Reich (Vandamere Press, 1990).]

To date, millions of Americans have aborted their children, and millions more have voted for candidates who promise to uphold a woman’s legal right to kill her unborn child. So I ask: What has America’s slaughter of unborn babies laid the foundation for? Will Christians speak up or be silent? Or will they ignore Abraham Lincoln’s somber warning, “Silence makes cowards out of the best of men?”

In 1996, Mark Rothe and Timothy Quill drafted an amicus brief that they submitted to the U.S. Supreme Court in which they debated against the legalization of physician-assisted death. They argued: 

[quote] First, child euthanasia was permitted for disabled and “defective” infants and children. Soon thereafter, an adult program for an “easy death” of mentally ill and incurably sick Germans was instituted on grounds of compassion. Later, Jews and other “undesirables” were included, this time for racial and eugenic reasons. Ultimately, the genocide that was the Final Solution grew out of these programs of medicalized killing. The practice of physician aid-in-dying had small beginnings. In March 1937, a child was killed by his father because he was significantly mentally ill. When put on trial for murder, the local health office came to the father’s defense, influencing the court to grant him a nominal prison sentence instead of the death penalty asked for by the prosecutor. The next year, a man named Knauer wrote the German government, asking that his blind and mentally retarded daughter, born without an arm and leg be granted Gnadentod (mercy death). The chancellor instructed Dr. Karl Brandt to investigate and, if the letter were true, to grant the request.  [end quote] [source:  Brief of Amicus Curia prepared by Mark A. Rothe October 1996, 13.]

And these are not isolated cases: 

[quote] Many parents were eager to obtain the Wohltat of physician-assisted death for their ill, deformed, or disabled children and many “wrote to hospitals to ask if their child could be relieved of his or her misery and be granted euthanasia.” In May 1939, an advisory group, the Committee for the Scientific Treatment of Severe and Genetically Determined Illness, was formed to determine if and how a euthanasia program for children and adults would operate. The adult project was housed in Berlin at number 4 Tiergartenstrasse. It was thus code-named “T-4” and in the beginning there appeared to be a broad level of support for this throughout the country. [end quote] [Source:  Ibid., Proctor at 186.]

Within a few years, there were perhaps as many as 30 killing centers in Germany. The Rothe brief continues with these points:

The German experience in physician-assisted death was the direct result of utilitarian, cost-benefit analysis and the view within the medical community that the value of human life is relative, that some persons are better off dead. It was not the result of jack-booted thugs in brown shirts. 

The T-4 program was not a part of the Holocaust, rather, it was T-4 and the child euthanasia programs which preceded and served as models for the genocide of the Final Solution. 

In fact, even the idea of the infamous shower room gas chambers originated in the T-4 program with the killing of German Gentile patients. [Source: Brief of Amicus Curia prepared by Mark A. Rothe October 1996, 27.]

And it’s worth inserting this observation from Simon Wiesenthal before continuing with notes from the Rothe brief: 

[quote] No Jews were among them; most Jews had already been sent to the concentration camps. The Nazis considered euthanasia a quasi-ethical sort of murder, and reserved it for members of their own kind. [end quote] [Source:  Simon Wiesenthal, The Murderers Among Us: The Simon Wiesenthal Memoirs (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1967), 309-10]

Rothe continues: “Neither racism nor anti-Semitism were a factor in these developments in Germany. T-4 doctors occasionally even gave lethal injections to severely injured German soldiers.” [Source: Brief of Amicus Curia prepared by Mark A. Rothe October 1996, 27.]

Euthanasia was thought to be a blessing, a merciful act, reserved for “true” Germans—until a few years after the German euthanasia program was established. Jews were now exterminated by what the German people and doctors had created. Rothe explains that “Jews and other selected undesirables would be transported from the concentration camps to the same killing centers used by the T-4 program.” [Ibid., 1 Nurem. Mil. Trib. At 797.]

This new program was named 14f13, and “after the success of T-4 and 14f13, the hospital gassing equipment and procedures were adopted by Adolf Eichmann for use in the Final Solution.” [Ibid., 1 Nurem. Mil. Trib. At 804.] It seems that:

[quote] The final solution to the “Jewish problem” that was finally decided upon in early 1942, and implemented later, was chosen largely because the means to that solution already existed in the euthanasia program, killing centers, and gas chambers. Indeed, the same gassing equipment used in the T-4 and 14f13 hospital operations were dismantled, transported, and re-installed at Auschwitz, Treblinka, and Sobibor. [end quote] [ Source: Ibid., Proctor at 212; Gallagher at 14.]

The T-4 physicians and other personnel were also put to work in the camps. 

Dr. Andrew Ivy, another Nuremberg prosecutor’s medical assistant, has stated that if it were not for the already established, physician-assisted death programs, “it is conceivable that the entire idea and technique of death factories for genocide would not have materialized.” [source:  Ibid., citing: Gallagher, By Trust Betrayed, 62.]

Some experts believe if it were not for the already established death centers, the Jews might possibly have just been deported since many German soldiers that took part in firing squads either had mental breakdowns or committed suicide. The gas chambers of the T-4 program solved this “problem” of psychological casualties among the German army.

This all started with Germans killing Germans in what they believed were “mercy killings.” The practice used a cost-benefit analysis not unlike what the U.S. government established through the 2009 stimulus bill. As Bloomberg reports:

[quote] The Federal Council is modeled after a U.K board…. This board approves or rejects treatments using a formula that divides the cost of treatment by the number of years the patient is likely to benefit. Treatments for young patients are more often approved than treatments for diseases that affect the elderly.... [end quote] [Source:  Betsy McCaughey, “Ruin Your Health with the Obama Stimulus Plan,” Bloomberg.com, February 9, 2009.]

Ideas have consequences, and once a nation becomes willing to murder its own children, the people will eventually murder each other. Fully nationalized healthcare in America and elsewhere will ultimately bring with it the euthanizing of seniors, many of whom, ironically, supported abortion on demand or the right to die. 

The “right to die” is gradually becoming the “duty to die” promoted by humanist liberals. John Hardwig from the Department of Philosophy at the University of Tennessee wrote a 13-page paper entitled, “Is There a Duty to Die?” In his short but dangerous work, the professor makes a case that people have a responsibility to die under wide-ranging conditions, such as: 

[quote] when continuing to live will impose significant burdens—emotional burdens, extensive care giving, destruction of life plans, and, yes, financial hardship—on your family and loved ones. This is the fundamental insight underlying a duty to die. [end quote] [Source: John Hardwig, “Is There a Duty to Die?”, Hastings Center Report 27, no. 2 (1997), 34-42.]

The acceptance of this thinking has been growing at least since the mid-twentieth century. Again, Fabian socialist Julian Huxley had a role in its popularity. As director general of the United Nations Educational, Science, and Cultural Organization, he authored UNESCO: Its Purpose and Its Philosophy (1948) in which he declared:

[quote] [E]ven though it is quite true that any radical eugenic policy will be for many years politically and psychologically impossible, it will be important for UNESCO to see that the eugenic problem is examined with the greatest care, and that the public mind is informed of the issues at stake so that much that is now unthinkable may at least become thinkable. [end quote] 

And where are today’s mega-church pastors on the topic of abortion? In an article entitled, “Emphasis Shifts for New Breed of Evangelicals,” the New York Times reports that they are strangely quiet on the topic:

[quote] Typified by megachurch pastors like the Rev. Rick Warren of Saddleback Church in Orange County, Calif., and the Rev. Bill Hybels of Willow Creek Community Church outside Chicago, the new breed of evangelical leaders—often to the dismay of those who came before them—are more likely to speak out about more liberal causes like AIDS, Darfur, poverty and global warming than controversial social issues like abortion and same-sex marriage. [end quote] [Source:  Michael Luo and Laurie Goodstein, “Emphasis Shifts for New Breed of Evangelicals,” May 21, 2007, posted at: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/21/us/21evangelical.html]

Even if we know abortion will continue and that active euthanasia will increase, Christians must speak out and oppose the satanic origin of these practices. To do less is to agree they are acceptable, and I, for one, will not agree because God has declared “thou shall not murder.” As healthcare costs rise and threaten government entitlements, a false global church will increasingly embrace abortion and euthanasia. 

Copyright 2015 ©Brannon Howse. This content is for Situation Room members and is not to be duplicated in any form or uploaded to other websites without the express written permission of Brannon Howse or his legally authorized representative.