SYSTEMATIC MURDER

Te Awamutu Courier, Volume 63, Issue 4463, 13 August 1941, Page 7

SYSTEMATIC MURDER

THE GERMAN WAY. “ A remarkable piece of information appears in the New Republic of sth May. In that issue there is reproduced a copy of the Acta Apostolicae Sedis for 15th December, containing a question to, and answer by, the Pope. The question Was whether it was permissible (licituim) to kill deliberately people who, on account of mental or physical defects, were no longer able to benefit a nation, but simply became a burden to it. The answer was that it was not, for such an act was contrary to positive natural and Divine law. There is little in that as it stands. The interest is in what lay 'behind it. The questioner was a German bishop, the cause of the question the fact that, 4 in September, October, and November of 1940, 85,000 blind, incurably ill, or aged Germans weire put to death by the Gestapo. They were put to death as casually as the S.P.C.A. chloroforms old and helpless dogs.’ The systematic murder was discovered when some priests in the town of Urach noticed that elderly people in the hospital were dying in increasing numbers, and dying on certain days of the week. Atrocity stories ought always to be scrupulously sifted; I am. simply summarising the New Republic article. But the official Vatican record of the question and answer is strong presumptive, evidence in itself.”—“ Janus,” in the Spectator, London.