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.

Early in 1978 the Federal German Chancellor, Helmut Schmidt, decided to propose the creation in Europe of a zone of monetary stability. He was offended by the neglect of the United States dollar by the administration of President Carter and by the effect on German competitiveness. He resented the pressure brought to bear on the German Government by countries such as the USA and the UK. They, unable to manage their own economies successfully, were seeking relief from their problems in the expansion of the German economy. This, he considered, would be inflationary. Germany's enormous reserves and its current account surplus were evidence of successful economic management. The USA and the UK should try to emulate Germany, not attempt to persuade it to become a ‘locomotive’ and thereby follow their primrose path. The zone of monetary stability in Europe was to be his answer to American neglect and American pressure. How exactly it would fulfil the role of an answer was never explained. But politics has its own rationale not always fit for frank exposition. The zone would be created by the linking of European exchange rates in a fixed but adjustable relationship. If, as expected, the yoking of weaker currencies acted as lead in the Deutschmark's balloon and thereby safeguarded German competitiveness, that would be a bonus, for the Chancellor if not for the Bundesbank. The now defunct Bretton Woods system had had the same objective of monetary stability and, indeed, had succeeded in it for many years. One of the surviving Bretton Woods institutions was the International Monetary Fund (IMF). In the same way the European zone of monetary stability would have its Fund, a European Monetary Fund (EMF), equipped with reserves subscribed by member states. Its activities would no doubt resemble those of the IMF, strengthening the resolve of governments in embracing the paths of economic prudence, thereby helping to calm markets when they turned against one currency or another. No doubt it would also, like the IMF, give governments advice which would not always be welcome.

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.

I was first taught by A. J. P. Taylor in the Hilary Term of my second year (1957–8) at Magdalen, for what was called English History III, the period from 1685 to 1939. I was not an expert on modern English history, but I had been taught the outlines well at school, and that background together with work on a prize essay the previous long vacation meant that I had a closer knowledge of the period than most undergraduates possess before starting tutorials on it officially, and because Alan Taylor started in 1760 I was soon on familiar ground, and even able to see that I knew more about some episodes than he did.

The era of cold wars and the two divisions – of Europe and of Germany – ran parallel: ‘The Cold War began with a deliberate Soviet decision to cut Europe in two, and in reacting the Western powers took a deliberate decision to cut Germany in two.’

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.

Alan Taylor was something of a transitional figure among British historians. He began with more than a touch of the old-style gentleman scholar about him but went on to become an early example of the media personality, in some ways a second-half-of-the-twentieth-century variant of this. Yet he was a substantial scholar who could draw large academic audiences as well as someone who could present history to a big national audience. He wrote on traditional topics in a traditional manner, but he took narrative history to new heights.

United Germany ‘will stand with us as an ally’, confidently predicted Robert B. Zoellick, who served as Secretary of State James A. Baker 3rd's chief of staff and as the overseer of US negotiations on reunification. Testifying before the Senate in September 1990 on the Treaty on the Final Settlement with Respect to Germany, Zoellick asserted that the unification process proved that ‘the United States can lead and persevere…in the post-cold war world‘. Despite such optimism, however, the ambivalance in past US–German relations, the erosion of American leverage during the unification process and the narrowness of Washington's conception of ‘leadership’ in Europe all suggested a future more problematic than the happy scenario Zoellick sketched for the senators.

The conflict between East and West had its origins in diverging views of how society should be organised which emerged in the course of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century industrialisation: the contrast between the pluralism of ‘Western’ civilisation, which in principle permitted a multiplicity of ways of life and patterns of power, and the centralised all-powerful state with its ‘Asiatic’ imprint; the contrast between capitalist means of production and socialist planning; the contrast between a parliamentary state under the rule of law and a totalitarian state. Such contrasting attitudes appeared to be irreconcilable, but they were indissolubly linked, at the latest, from the time of the Bolshevik victory in the October Revolution of 1917. Furthermore, the Bolshevik's seizure of power in Russia turned these conflicting views into an international political problem. By claiming to be the vanguard of an historically necessary world revolutionary movement the leadership of the Soviet Union tied a particular combination of socialist and anti-Western attitudes to the advancement of Soviet national interests, thus introducing into the international system a specific conflict between ‘Western’ industrialised nations and the Soviet state.

A survey of the economic problems in East–West relations during the era of the Cold War is of particular interest from the German perspective. First, no other Western industrial country played a comparable role in the economic relations with East European countries; and secondly, East–West trade, especially the economic contacts with the German Democratic Republic (GDR), became an outstanding feature of German Ostpolitik under the conditions of the divided country. It appears to be an acceptable proposition to say that this form of West Germany economic and trade policy was the equivalent of the militarily defined US policy towards the Soviet Union, in so far as the famous dictum of the former Federal Chancellor Willy Brandt, that the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) was ‘an economic giant and a political dwarf only partly corresponded to reality. It therefore seems appropriate to discuss the economic dimension of the East–West conflict in the context of German interests and policies – not to the exclusion of all else, but with a certain priority.