Hans Meiser: Intervention against Euthanasia


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In October of 1939, Hitler authorized the killing of people with illnesses and disabilities in a letter retroactively dated to September 1, 1939. Around 70,000 people were gassed, shot or killed with medications by August 1941 in the first wave of killing. Some 200,000 people in Germany and the occupied territories lost their lives to the euthanasia program by the end of the Nazi regime.


The Neuendettelsau Institutions, which had been founded in 1854were the largest institution for Protestant social work in Bavaria, were also affected. In 1940-41, nine homes and asylums with 1758 residents with mental and physical disabilities were run in and outside Neuendettelsau. During the first wave of killing, at least 1238 home and asylum residents were transferred to state-run homes and asylums, whence they were taken to euthanasia centers. Most of them were killed.


The Bavarian church government had knowledge of the killing of people with illnesses and disabilities early on. Numerous consultations were held in the Munich regional consistory and in churchwide bodies but, just like most of the other church governments, Regional Bishop Hans Meiser (1881–1956) and the regional consistory held back with protests to government authorities. They also refrained from public condemnation. A very early personal intervention by Regional Bishop Meiser with Bavarian Nazi Reich Governor Franz Ritter von Epp (1868–1946) has, however, come to light.


According to an undersecretary’s minutes, Meiser called on von Epp visibly agitated on February 23, 1940 and reported to him that people with mental illnesses housed in asylums... had been removed from the asylums by the Gestapo and that, in individual cases, the relatives had already been sent an urn with ashes and an accompanying letter stating the ill person had died from some illness or other. ... It is unequivocal that the people with illnesses were being violently put to death there. Meiser’s intervention remained unsuccessful, though, because von Epp learned shortly afterward that Hitler himself had given the extermination order. The Reich Governor therefore felt unable to intervene.


No other protest of Meiser’s has come to light. In a letter of December 30, 1940, he reported to Christian Stoll (1903–1946), Dean of Schwabach, however, that what could be done to make the church’s opinion emphatically known in this matter has been done (Landeskirchliches Archiv Nürnberg, Personen XXXVI, 119). Apart from his own call on von Epp, Meiser presumably was also referring to the negotiations of Friedrich von Bodelschwingh (1877–1946), director of the Bodelschwingh Institutions, with responsible Nazi authorities and to Württemberg Regional Bishop Theophil Wurm’s (1868–1953) protest letters addressed to various government authorities. Meiser worked closely together with Wurm in churchwide bodies.


Church protests against euthanasia in Bavaria very likely failed to materialize because of fear of Gestapo actions, the impending seizure of the Neuendettelsau Institutions by the National Socialists, the home and asylum administrations’ partial approval of eugenics and euthanasia and Bodelschwingh’s plea not to jeopardize his negotiations with protests. Public protest by Clemens August Graf von Galen (1878–1946), Catholic Bishop of Münster, however, induced Hitler to officially stop the euthanasia program. It was resumed unofficially as “unauthorized euthanasia”, though.


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  • © H. Schmid, Wetterleuchten, p. 399f. (Verlag der Evangelisch-Lutherischen Kirche in Bayern)

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