Why Ordinary People Do Bad Things for the State

Abstract

On 1 October 1939 Adolf Hitler issued a Fuhrer order. It said simply:Hitler’s order, backdated to 1 September 1939, set loose what became known as Aktion T4, a state policy that enabled German physicians to diagnose patients as ‘incurably sick, by critical medical examination and then to kill these patients’ (Proctor 1988: 177). Over 270,000 people with various mental illnesses or with physical disabilities and deemed to be ‘useless’ or ‘life unworthy of living’ were killed by teams of doctors and nurses in Germany. In addition, state policy mandated the use of starvation diets such as the Bavarian Ministry of the Interior’s Starvation Diet Decree of November 1942, authorizing diets designed to kill patients.