This account of how the two major Churches responded to the Nazi ‘euthanasia’ programme, namely the mass murder of the mentally ill and mentally or physically deficient between 1939 and 1945, deals with the responses of their hierarchies and the stratagems adopted by the asylums which were part of their respective charitable networks. It is based upon both original archival sources and a large variety of secondary literature dealing with the two Churches and the individual asylums. Before considering how the Churches conducted themselves during the Nazi period, it is necessary to establish the broader context of their response to eugenics in general.

After the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 and the re-unification of Germany in the following year, the contemporary history of Germany was characterised by a rise in the more potent manifestations of racism, notably an increase in support for extreme right-wing parties and an enormous upsurge in the number of racial attacks which have taken place against minorities of all descriptions. In addition, as a reaction against the racist violence, specifically the attack upon a Turkish home in Solingen in June 1993, there was also a violent response on the part of the Turks.

Ever since the end of the Second World War, the connection between the horrors of the ‘classic’ fascism of the interwar years and contemporary movements of the European radical right has seemed obvious. In the later 1940s and 1950s any extreme nationalist groups were naturally identified as neo-fascist or proto-Nazi, not least because they harboured so many old henchmen of the fascist regimes. But even today, news of violent acts or electoral successes of radical right organisations in Europe raise the spectre of fascism in the minds of observers everywhere. There is hardly a popular or scholarly article that does not refer to this link at least indirectly, above all in analyses of German politics. Thus one German weekly, in a report on nationalist activities in the new eastern Länder, asked forebodingly: ‘Is the ex-GDR sinking into a brown [Nazi] morass? Is the SA marching again, is the Fourth Reich imminent?’2 A recent scholarly article on the German Republikaner made the same obligatory references in a more veiled manner: ‘Against the background of the course of twentieth-century European history, right-wing radical tendencies any where in Europe warrant special attention.’3 No doubt, this will hold true for decades to come. The link of all present-day right-wing movements with the interwar years remains inescapable. The catastrophes associated with fascism are the kind of historical experience that shapes the political consciousness of several generations. Both for the adherents of extreme nationalism and for their enemies, interwar fascism thus provides a basic paradigm through which contemporary rightist groups are defined or define themselves.