West Germany’s highest tribunal, the Constitutional Court, ruled here this weekend that physicians involved in the Nazi euthanasia program–a policy of killing mental defectives “for the purity of the race” –cannot claim they were unaware of wrong-doing and that they had acted under “existing laws.”
The high court handed down the decision in the case of a 63-year-old doctor, Walter Schulutze, who from 1933 to 1945 was an official in the Bavarian State Health Department. He had been accused of complicity in the murder of more than 380 adult mental patients whom the Nazi regime had regarded as “unfit to live.”
The court ruled that the secrecy under which euthanasia measures had been carried out should have convinced the doctors of their illicit character. The court declared that “if the so-called mercy killings had been legal, the pertinent laws should have been publicized even under the Nazi regime.”
The court also ruled that the “killing of human beings” with promulgation of the law “is such an obvious violation of all legal and moral standards of civilized nations that the illegality of the measures should have been clear to any intelligent person.”
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
