When her grandmother died by euthanasia, it impacted her in ways she couldn't imagine.

Alex Schadenberg
Executive Director, Euthanasia Prevention Coalition

The latest short film from Dying to Meet You features Lovanie, a young woman who has been greatly impacted by her grandmother's death by euthanasia.

Lovanie lost her grandmother to euthanasia. Her story is similar to many of the stories that we receive. 

Watch and share Lovanie's story (Link).

Lovanie explains that her grandmothers death was really hard on her as she has also struggled with mental health in the past few years.

Lovanie fears that her grandmothers euthanasia death will encourage other family members to also die by euthanasia in the future.

Lovanie expresses that her grandmothers dignity would have been achieved by staying with her family and to realize how much her family loved and cared for her willingly, and not as a burden.

Lovanie asks, how do you explain to your kids?

Lovanie expresses that you can't remain strong all of the time. You need help for that. We need people around us. You need to learn to help others and be helped.

Lovanie explains that the euthanasia decision is significant because it ends everything. There is no, I made a bad mistake but I can keep living. Euthanasia robs us of hope and strength. Death does not need to be sudden or chemically induced.

The lesson for Lovanie is that there is always another road, there is always another way. Her grandmothers death is a puzzle for Lovanie who said: I don't think I will ever figure it out in this life.

Watch and share Lovanie's story (Link).

Will You Love Me Forever?

This article was published by Public Discourse on September 17, 2025.

If stillborn children could inspire one of the most-loved children’s books in the twentieth century, then maybe a grandpa with dementia will inspire one of the best stories in the twenty-first.

Amanda Achtman

By Amanda Achtman

When I was growing up in the 1990s, there was a children’s book that my mother read to me so many times that I can still hear the sing-song cadence with which she read the refrain. That book is Love You Forever by the American-born Canadian author Robert Munsch. One of the most-loved children’s authors of all time, his books have sold an astounding 87 million copies.

Love You Forever begins with a mother rocking her newborn as she sings: 

“I’ll love you forever / I’ll like you for always / As long as I’m living / my baby you’ll be.”

As the child grows, he causes his mother all manner of frustrations. But no matter what he does or how big he gets, she always goes into his room at night, picks him up, and rocks him, singing the same lullaby. Eventually, the mother grows old and sick and calls her son to visit her. She is so sick that she is unable to sing the lullaby that has been the lifelong expression of her love. And so her son sings it to her tenderly, revising the last lines to say, 

“As long as I’m living my Mommy you’ll be.”

It is a touching story of the natural circle of life and of the unconditional love for which we are made. This is one reason why many Canadians are shocked that the book’s author, of all people, is saying he wants a doctor to end his life by euthanasia. In a recent piece for The New York Times, Katie Engelhart has written a profile of Robert Munsch titled, “When Dementia Steals the Imagination of a Children’s Book Writer.” The article pays homage to Munsch’s creative process. He would tell stories to children at schools and events, and workshop the stories in real time based on the children’s reactions. Sometimes he would incorporate their spontaneous outbursts into the published versions of these stories. Engelhart tells us that Munsch often stayed with host families of schoolchildren “at first because he couldn’t afford hotel rooms, but later because he found that families were a good source of stories.” She pays tribute to Munsch’s insistence on retaining the names of children on whom he occasionally based his stories “because one of his rules was that if he made up a story about a real child, the child ‘owned’ the story.” Many of Munsch’s books were inspired by the real-life kids he met and by the thousands of pieces of fan mail he received from his young and imaginative readers.

His national legacy is, first and foremost, as a storyteller. Yet Munsch has the humility and transparency to admit his serious struggles with loss and grief, mental illness, and addiction. “I have worked hard to overcome my problems, and I have done my best. I have attended twelve-step recovery meetings for more than 25 years,” Munsch wrote in a note to parents on his personal website. “My mental health and addiction problems are not a secret to my friends and family. They have been a big support to me over the years, and I would not have been able to do this without their love and understanding.”

Much of this had been previously reported, for example, in a Toronto Life article from 2010 and on various news programs. He spoke candidly about his depression and suicidal ideation, confessing, “I didn’t have any friends. My career was eating my life.” At his wife’s insistence, Munsch began seeing a psychiatrist, particularly since his grandfather had died by suicide. It has been a tumultuous life to which we are barely privy: a life of overcoming obstacles in the hope of making a difference in the lives of the people around him.

Engelhart’s article then fixates on what Munsch can no longer do. He can no longer ride a bike, drive a car, and, particularly cruelly for an author, he can no longer read. Like the mother in his classic story, he himself has become old and sick. But, unlike her, he now is tempted to seek state-sponsored suicide.

To schedule his death at the hands of a physician would contradict the message of unconditional love that he shared all those years ago, a message that resonated with hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of children and parents. But it would also contradict the support and understanding with which, thankfully, he was met throughout his life. When he faced depression and suicidal ideation, he got a psychiatrist. When he struggled with drugs and alcohol, he joined Narcotics and Alcoholics Anonymous. After he lost two children, he and his wife welcomed three through adoption. But now that he is elderly and asking for euthanasia, what is on offer? Why, only now, should there not be any antidote?

Engelhart does not tell us what his wife, children, or grandchildren think about his decision. However, one daughter has since spoken out, informing the media that Munsch is not dying imminently and that the news that he was considering MAiD is not new since he discussed this with journalists four years ago upon receiving diagnoses of dementia and Parkinson’s.

Now, in The New York Times interview, he is admitting his deepening insecurities over having dementia, expressing his fear about becoming “a turnip” or “a lump.” The request for medical assistance in dying (MAiD) is a cry of the heart concerning self-worth and lovability. Now that he can no longer tell stories, which had always been such a key part of his identity, he is shaken and vulnerable. The request for euthanasia betrays a fundamental lack of self-esteem.

But his stories did not only come from his own genius; they came from others, including from the tiniest and weakest. In fact, his most famous book of all was actually inspired by the two children that he lost. On his personal website, Munsch’s biography says that he wrote Love You Forever as a memorial for his two stillborn children, delivered in 1979 and 1980.

It was these gifts that completely transformed him, that made him a father, that broke open his heart to that radical Love You Forever kind of love. These two children who never took a breath in this life have had an incalculably positive impact on the world by inspiring Munsch to write his book and encouraging readers to love one another, despite failures and weaknesses, through every season of life.

No matter what he suffers now, Robert Munsch will never be more vulnerable, more discreet, more unspoken than his stillborn children who inspired his bestselling book of all. In the universality of Robert Munsch’s fears about dementia, we see the need to propose something other than death. It is time for someone else to continue the story with him still in it. Just as in the story, he needs someone to pick him up and rock him “back and forth, back and forth, back and forth.” Singing over him: “I’ll love you forever / I’ll like you for always / As long as I’m living / My [dear one] you’ll be.”

If stillborn children could inspire one of the most-loved children’s books in the twentieth century, then maybe a grandpa with dementia will inspire one of the best stories in the twenty-first.

Dying to Meet You: Renewing Life

By Amanda Achtman

My friend Rabbi Jonathan Jaffit didn't expect euthanasia to impact him personally.

As an Orthodox Jew, he always told me, "That's not something we do."

But one day, he got a phone call that brought the issue to him in an unexpected way.

In the newest Dying to Meet You vignette, "Renewing Life", Rabbi Jaffit shares the story and offers some poignant insights on our cultural moment.

The Renewing Life vignette is an excellent lead-in to the importance of the Compassionate Community Care program. 

To receive training in visiting, advocacy or calling people who need a friend, Contact Compassionate Community Care at info@beingwith.org

Euthanasia in the Castle: Inside Europe’s Museums of Nazi Medical Crimes

This article was published by The Public Discourse on October 14, 2024.

Amanda Achtman

By Amanda Achtman

Today we might instinctively look at Nazi criteria for death as utterly baseless, but at the time seasoned medical professionals regarded them as reasonable. To have a sense of history is to grasp the arbitrariness of such criteria. When it comes to killing patients, there is no way to get the criteria just right because the stamp of medical approval sends a social message that there is a category of persons who should not exist.

On a visit to Hartheim Castle, a 400-year-old Renaissance fortress not far from Mauthausen concentration camp, I found myself examining a skull-measuring device from 1940. The sinister metal calipers and two measuring scales are on loan from Vienna’s Museum of Natural History; across from the glass display case is a 1930 poster from the UK Eugenics Society featuring a strong, tall man scattering seeds in a field. It reads: “Only Healthy Seed Must Be Sown: Check the Seeds of Hereditary Disease and Fitness by Eugenics.”

Nearby is a 1927 American movie poster: “Youth has its fling—and then comes the burning question—Are you fit to marry?”

In the spring of 2022, I visited one of eight former Nazi euthanasia centers—what Simon Wiesenthal called “regular schools of murder.” Five are in Germany: Brandenburg is just outside Berlin; Hadamar is between Cologne and Frankfurt; Sonnenstein is close to Dresden; Bernburg is in Saxony, and Grafeneck is near Stuttgart. The remaining three are in Austria; Hartheim Castle is in the small village of Alkoven, near Adolf Hitler’s childhood town of Linz.

All but one—Brandenburg—served as psychiatric hospitals or homes for persons with disabilities before being converted to euthanasia centers by the Nazis. Today, Hartheim houses an exhibit on modern eugenics alongside a memorial to the tens of thousands of people killed within its walls.

The link between Nazism and eugenics is often noted only in passing. But it was precisely this link that enabled Simon Wiesenthal to answer questions that bothered him for years. As he writes in his 1967 memoir, The Murderers Among Us:

How were people selected and trained to carry out the murder of 11 million people, and how did they keep their secrets so well that they were not known for years after the end of the war? Obviously, men assigned to the gas chambers, who had to watch the deaths of tens of thousands of people day after day and week after week, would have to be trained technically and psychologically, otherwise they might collapse under the continuous stress. . . . Machines broke down, but the people handling them never did.

Wiesenthal wanted to understand how people could become so hardened to the cries of victims that they had less chance of cracking than even a machine. “Castle Hartheim and the other euthanasia centers were the answer,” he concluded.

“Hartheim was organized like a medical school—except that the ‘students’ were not taught to save human life but to destroy it as efficiently as possible,” Wiesenthal observed. Death was studied clinically, with a patina of medical authority; victims were “precisely photographed, scientifically perfected.” Before the death camps were established, euthanasia sites served as research facilities for what Nazis called Gnadentod, or mercy killings; physicians with stopwatches observed dying “patients” through a peephole in Hartheim’s cellar door and measured the length of the death struggle to one-tenth of a second. As Wiesenthal pointed out, “Nothing was left to chance.”

In a section of his memoir focused on his own visit to Hartheim, Wiesenthal pieced together a set of seemingly unrelated facts. Christian Wirth, the notorious leader of Operation Reinhard—the program to exterminate Polish Jewry—got his start supervising the Reich’s euthanasia program. Beginning in 1939, Wirth “troubleshot” extermination techniques at euthanasia centers. He would lure mentally ill or disabled “patients” to so-called showers or changing rooms, locking them in and exposing them to different fatal gas combinations in an attempt to observe which were most efficient. Following his tenure as chief of staff of Hartheim, Wirth went on to serve as commandant of the Belzec concentration camp, which became fully operational in March 1942.

Other SS officers followed suit; after a stint leading Hartheim, Franz Stangl became commandant of Treblinka. Gustav Wagner directed Hartheim before going on to lead Sobibor. A great many SS men who did technical work manning gas chambers and crematoria in the camps first worked at one or another euthanasia clinic. During his final weeks at Mauthausen, Wiesenthal recalled that “experts from Hartheim” were sent for to fix broken ovens or other machinery.

The questions that spurred me to visit were related to, but distinct from, Wiesenthal’s: how are victims of Nazi euthanasia remembered? How should we study and teach about their dehumanization, which differed from how Jews were dehumanized? For a time, Jews were formally banned from being “treated” at Nazi euthanasia sites. At least at first, it was understood that euthanasia was reserved not for Jewish enemies, but for German citizens whose death would be a mercy, both for them and for the country.

It is only recently that museums have been established at Nazi euthanasia sites. My work often takes me to Europe and, over the course of a couple of years, I went on solo trips to three: Hartheim, Hadamar, and Sonnenstein. What follows is not a thorough history of Nazi euthanasia under the Aktion T4 and Aktion 14f13 programs, but a travel diary of sorts, driven by questions that continue to trouble me.

The euthanasia memorials do not receive nearly the volume of visitors that flock to the more notorious death camps; most people are unaware of the links between them. But euthanasia victims often passed through multiple concentration camps before being deported and ultimately killed at euthanasia centers; and as noted, many euthanasia employees were later assigned to high positions within the death camps. How eugenics and euthanasia were both instrumental to and constitutive of the Nazis’ broader campaign of dehumanization deserves to be better understood.

First, Hartheim

The day I traveled to Hartheim Castle, I was struck by the juxtaposition of the bucolic setting and the site’s grim history. The castle seemed deserted, but fortunately, a receptionist at the front desk was on hand. She gave me a pamphlet explaining that chronically ill and disabled people—“useless eaters” in Nazi parlance—began arriving at Hartheim to be killed by the thousands in 1940. Later, from 1941 to 1944, thousands more prisoners and forced laborers from Mauthausen, Dachau, Ravensbruck, and Gusen were murdered there as well.

I made my way upstairs to Hartheim’s permanent “Value of Life” exhibit, which occupies much of the second floor. A sign at the entrance told an ugly story:

The murder of tens of thousands of people here, in this castle, during the National Socialist period formed the starting point for reflections on the value of life. This was narrowed to focus on the questions of how those deemed “useless” have been dealt with: What are the criteria used to define people as “useless”? Who sets the criteria? What have been the consequences of this judgment for those affected?

The exhibit doesn’t definitively answer these questions, but begins with an interesting yet cursory history of ideas ranging from Christianity—the viewpoint of which is succinctly summarized as “no one is useless”—to industrial rationality, utilitarianism, and capitalism, with panels explaining how each ideology contributed to the poor, weak, and disabled being deemed useless.

The next room in the Value of Life exhibit traces the rise of the modern eugenics movement. Pioneered by men like nineteenth-century scientists Charles Darwin and his cousin Francis Galton, eugenics quickly rose to prominence in highly developed countries including the U.S., Canada, and England. It took a variety of forms; on display, for example, are “Better Babies” medals. These were designed by famed American sculptor Laura Gardin Fraser and, beginning in 1913, were awarded at state fairs across the country to the most “scientific” babies, with an eye toward improving infant mortality and overall health among children. The national magazine Woman’s Home Companion explained the contests this way: “underneath the inviting charm of the idea is a serious scientific purpose—healthy babies, standardized babies, and always, year after year, Better Babies.”

Eventually, these gave rise to the 1920s “Fitter Family Contests,” which were more explicitly aimed at improving America’s gene pool. Also on display is a copy of Margaret Sanger’s 1929 work Motherhood in Bondage, a collection of letters from poor urban and rural mothers meant to illustrate the “socio-economic rationale for birth control.”

Around the corner was a large reproduction of a 1941 Nazi actuarial table detailing government savings should some number of people with disabilities be prevented from living ten years more. Daily and annual costs of caring for these citizens were meticulously calculated in Reichsmarks, making the case that the state would fare better if they did not exist. This type of formalized dehumanization of those living with disabilities and mental illness, under the guise of medical or actuarial science, contributed to the widespread desensitization and moral degradation of the “educated class.” By degrees, this emboldened people to dehumanize Jews under the pretext of racial hygiene.

The Value of Life exhibit underscores the “ordinariness” of the employees responsible for the sterilization and killing of those sent to Hartheim: kitchen and administrative staff, security guards, drivers, orderlies, technicians, and of course doctors and nurses. As far as we know, they generally worked for the euthanasia programs willingly and without compulsion. Once entrenched, however, they were sworn to secrecy and could not easily leave. But the pay was good, there were plenty of perks, and many were ideologically motivated to carry out their lethal work in the belief that it was beneficial.

It is also important to note that the Nazi euthanasia campaign involved multiple phases. First came the killing of children with physical and intellectual disabilities, then a wider range of patients with mental illnesses and, later, the so-called “Special Treatment” murder of political prisoners. Although Jews were initially kept away from the more “professional” environments of the euthanasia facilities, they were eventually included among the victims of Nazi euthanasia. At the Brandenburg euthanasia center, Jewish psychiatric patients were systematically killed. Some Jewish children were euthanized at Hadamar, and Jews were also among the prisoners euthanized under the “Special Treatment” campaign. The effort to distinguish medical euthanasia centers from the death camps became blurred.

In his memoir, Simon Wiesenthal quotes Bruno Bruckner, a photographer responsible for taking pictures of patients’ “death struggles” and autopsies. Bruckner candidly admitted that he enjoyed the food and abundant liquor at Hartheim and was glad to make “300 marks a month and . . . a little money on the side.” He also noted that “there were lots of parties. Everybody was sleeping with everybody else.”

Bruckner’s attitude seems to have been more the norm than the exception. Few in Germany or Austria resisted the Nazi euthanasia effort; as one plaque noted, “it took a long time for this resistance to be acknowledged in society. It was not until the 1990s when the history of Nazi euthanasia was researched in greater depth in Austria as well, that it found more widespread recognition.”

The main resistance figure recognized at Hartheim is Clemens von Galen, the Catholic bishop of Münster during the Nazi years. His resistance is also alluded to at Yad Vashem, where one display notes that Churches were instrumental in shutting down an early iteration of the program: “When the Euthanasia institutions were closed, their medical and operational personnel were sent to Poland, where they engaged in establishing and commanding the extermination camps for Jews.”

Another resistance figure commemorated at Hartheim is Franz Sitter, a nurse who left Hartheim almost immediately after being hired. He faced no repercussions for walking away, and his example damns all those who made a different choice. Sitter and a small handful of others are presented by the museum as ethical exemplars for visitors, inviting them to probe their own character and conscience as they reflect on what happened here.

The Value of Life exhibit concludes with a display titled “Breaks and Continuities,” containing items or images related to abortion, contraception, in vitro fertilization, surrogacy, genetic testing, disability aids, prosthetics, and more. These are presented without much commentary; it is left to viewers to consider the extent to which any of them relate to the ideology of eugenics and what that might mean for medical practice today.

I returned to the ground floor and Hartheim’s foundational exhibit, which includes the original “killing rooms.” I looked at photographs of victims and a selection of their belongings. When I walked into the gas chamber and crematorium, I felt the emptiness of a world in which so many innocents have been unjustly eliminated.

Later, just outside the castle’s courtyard, I started a conversation with a group of Austrian high school students during their lunch break. I asked if they thought there are ever circumstances in which euthanasia is appropriate. To general agreement, one student answered, “Only if the person asks for it.”

I have continued to reflect on this and other persistent, uncomfortable questions. The students, I realized, freely agreed that no one is qualified to determine the value of anyone else’s life. Clearly the Nazis had profoundly failed to recognize the value of the lives of their neighbors. But do we run the risk of wrongly assessing the worth of our own lives, or becoming convinced our lives are less worthy due to some perceived deficit along medicalized or other standardized lines? If medical practitioners could err so profoundly in their judgments of life’s value, couldn’t I, couldn’t any of us, err similarly? Could “consent” merely corroborate an assessment of a life’s value that is fundamentally inaccurate or untrue? And might others who support a faulty assessment, perhaps out of a misguided sympathy, wrongly encourage people to end their own lives?

The doctors, nurses, and other staff at Hartheim Castle appear to have been driven by personal conviction; their views had become a matter of widespread professional consensus. For years, the judgment of assessors and providers of euthanasia were considered to be beyond reproach. Now, we recognize that their devaluation of human life was abhorrent and unjustifiable. But on what basis can we scrutinize this assessment of the value of life and deem it false?

I often think about how an estimated 30,000 persons were euthanized inside that elegant European castle. Many people participated out of a belief that this was for the good of the victims and for society at large. Hartheim Castle is a reminder that the insidious ideology of Nazism included a specific form of dehumanization that made it easier for modern, technocratic, and prosperous countries to do horrifying things.

Next, Hadamar

In February 2023, several months after my visit to Hartheim, I made my way to a second Nazi euthanasia memorial, Hadamar, located roughly between Cologne and Frankfurt. Usually, public museums are built in city centers for ease of access; concentration camps and euthanasia sites, of course, were deliberately out of the way.

Formerly an ordinary public psychiatric hospital, Hadamar was converted by the Nazis into their sixth euthanasia center as 1940 came to a close. Beginning in January 1941, patients with disabilities and mental illness were regularly bused to Hadamar, led into the main building, told to undress, registered by administrative staff, and then directed to the basement gas chamber, where they were killed. As at Hartheim, they were then incinerated; smoke could be seen from afar and locals reported smelling it. Some at Hadamar received lethal injections or were starved to death. Relatives of the euthanized were sent “comfort letters,” which included false information about the circumstances and time of death and, sometimes, the place of death. If the relatives so requested, they were sent urns containing ashes—though not the ashes of their loved ones.

Beginning in 1942, a more diverse array of “patients” was sent to Hadamar: forced laborers with tuberculosis, former SS soldiers suffering from shell shock, half-Jewish “mixed children.” More than 15,000 people were euthanized at Hadamar from 1941 to 1945, and many more had been sterilized there over the years.

Hadamar physicians were apparently enthusiastic about their work; staff celebrated the death of the 10,000th victim with beer and revelry, with one employee mockingly impersonating a priest. Hadamar staff received perks similar to those of Hartheim’s workers: excursions, concert tickets, even vacation homes. Eventually, it was the employees of Hadamar who went on to build the extermination camp, Treblinka.

The photos of victims especially drew me in. One young woman, identified as Selma K. [Klein], wore her short hair parted to the side, and faced the camera with a slight smile and her right arm folded over her left. According to the exhibit panel, Selma’s mother died when she was young, and she was raised in a Jewish girls’ home. At twenty-one, she got pregnant and, according to her medical records, was judged to be “destitute.” Despite an order banning Hadamar from receiving Jewish patients, Selma was sent there in 1936 and subjected to a sterilization order prior to Hadamar’s becoming a euthanasia center. After Selma was sterilized on the grounds of “not being able to satisfy expectations in life,” her father fought to no avail to get her released. Selma was later deported to Ravensbrück concentration camp, where she is likely to have died in 1942.

There was also Minna Heinze, an elegant-looking middle-aged mother of two, who had helped a Jewish family flee the country after Kristallnacht. Subjected to interrogation concerning her involvement with the Jewish refugees, Minna began to experience anxiety attacks and insomnia and was institutionalized. She was ultimately sent to Hadamar in 1943 and died in March 1944, at around the age of fifty, either from severe deprivation or lethal injection. Her family was prevented from visiting and received no news of her until her reported death from “influenza.” I thought about the Jewish family that fled and may have descendants living today because of Minna’s courage.

Despite Jews’ being occasionally banned from admission to Hadamar, there were exceptions. It was also at Hadamar that the Nazis designated “an Educational Home for Jewish half-breeds of minority age.” Children who had one Jewish parent were sent to Hadamar under the pretense of receiving social welfare education.

Among them were brothers Wolfgang and Günther. According to the boys’ medical files, they were deemed “incapable of being educated,” “inclined toward criminality,” and “morally neglected.” The boys had been growing up without their father; the Nazis had tortured and killed him for being half Jewish and alleged that he was communist. The brothers were admitted as “Jewish half-breeds” to Hadamar’s “educational institution.” They were both killed in the summer of 1943 and given false causes of death. About thirteen-year-old Wolfgang, the medical records said: “Skilled, can be used for domestic work and light gardening. Like his brother, he disturbs the sleeping hall at night and tells the most cock-and-bull stories.”

There is a photo on display of Wolfgang and Günther with their mother, Helene, whose protective expression reveals she knows something dreadful awaits her children. As usual, the doctor at Hadamar invented fictitious causes of death. But Helene also reported that the doctor told her directly: “Mrs. H. You have to accept that you will not see your children again, since Jewishness has to be eliminated.” Of the forty-three children enrolled in the “educational home,” thirty-eight were killed.

I descended to Hadamar’s former gas chamber with the somber realization that these walls were the last thing seen by the victims whose stories I had been learning upstairs.

The Hadamar memorial opened to the public in 1983. In 1991, they created a permanent exhibit. Gradually, the number of visitors, their countries of origin, and the languages in which the material is offered are increasing. The main visitors seem to be German students, but there are also professionals, such as nurses, doctors, and police officers.

According to a Hadamar pamphlet, “The Hadamar Memorial Museum is a place of remembrance, historical enlightenment, and political education and is aimed at children, young people, and adults. Its task is to provide visitors with information about the Nazi euthanasia crimes and to discuss current issues and political education.”

Though the causes of death were often fabricated, my visit made me realize the extent to which ostensibly scientific criteria and an air of medical authority had been wielded to rationalize ending the lives of “inconvenient” innocents. The unspoken logic of the criteria is that it qualified patients to be killed.

The medical records of the euthanasia victims list such things as: “congenital feeble-mindedness,” “social nonconformity,” “anxious relational psychosis,” “unable to work,” “incurable,” “danger to the public,” “unstable and dishonest,” “sullen and unapproachable,” “senile dementia,” etc., as conditions that obviously warranted death.

Ambiguous as these criteria are, they were used to reduce people to conditions that disqualified them from belonging in the world. The person with a name became the mere instance of a type. Doctors would refer to patients by their illness, disability, or inner struggle as a kind of shorthand that eclipsed the person. This is a particularly insidious form of dehumanization, when a person’s entire identity is reduced to a diagnosis, prognosis, or accessibility aid.

In short, a consensus arose around a social valuation of life, which became difficult to dispute. The rationale for killing people became entrenched under the guise of general agreement. The precedent became part of the argument. If the general presumption becomes that the rationale is logical, if there is a sense that fungible criteria are legitimate, then people are susceptible to being classified within them, regardless of whether they would have put themselves in that category.

Today we might instinctively look at Nazi criteria for death as utterly baseless, but at the time seasoned medical professionals regarded them as reasonable. To have a sense of history is to grasp the arbitrariness of such criteria. When it comes to killing patients, there is no way to get the criteria just right because the stamp of medical approval sends a social message that there is a category of persons who should not exist.

Finally, Sonnenstein

In December 2023, I visited a third Nazi euthanasia center: Sonnenstein, in eastern Germany, not far from Dresden in a little town called Pirna. Earlier that morning, I had taken a stroll nearby to the former home of Victor Klemperer, the Jewish chronicler of Dresden, who stored his diary at a home at Maxim Gorki Street No. 16. In the diary, he quotes a friend named Annemarie Kohler, a doctor from Pirna:

The Sonnenstein is no longer the state mental asylum. The SS has it. They built their own crematorium. Disagreeable people are brought here in a kind of police car. Here it is generally called the “whisper carriage.” The relatives then receive the urn. Recently a family received two urns at once.

The euthanasia center at Pirna was located on the grounds of the Sonnenstein Castle. As with Hadamar, the site had been an ordinary psychiatric hospital since 1811, before being converted by the Nazis. There, an estimated 13,720 persons living with disabilities and mental illness were euthanized under Aktion T4. In 1941, more than a thousand concentration camp prisoners from Auschwitz, Buchenwald, and Sachsenhausen were killed there.

Among the more recent locations to become a memorial site, Sonnenstein was inaugurated as such in 2000. The site documents the ways in which the eugenics movement distorted the founding aims of the Sonnenstein Asylum, which once served as a model for the care and treatment of patients.

In the memorial exhibit, there is a first-edition copy of a 1920 book, The Destruction of Life Unworthy of Life, by the German professors and eugenicists Karl Binding and Alfred Hoche; a record of the Nazi-enacted Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring, also known as the Sterilization Law, from 1933; and a copy of the private letter signed by Hitler to his physician, Karl Brandt, triggering Aktion T4—the initial phase of the Nazi euthanasia project, authorizing the killing of those with disabilities.

The Sonnenstein memorial team put together a series called “Giving Victims Back their Names,” biographical portrait booklets commemorating some of those killed. Among these is a profile of the rabbi and academic Arnold Grünfeld, who was born in 1887 and killed at Sonnenstein in 1941. A concentration camp prisoner deported to Pirna to be euthanized, Arnold was one of eighty-five Jews from Buchenwald murdered on either July 14 or 15 in 1941.

Born in a Moravian town that had had a significant Jewish community since the fourteenth century, Arnold had lost both his parents by the age of fifteen. He is presumed to have lived with other family members until he finished school; there’s a record of a school trip he took to Vienna to meet Theodor Herzl, during which students gave Herzl donations they had collected.

Arnold served his community as a rabbi and wrote his doctorate on the divine will. His daughter Edith managed to flee Europe in a youth Aliyah. Arnold was deported first to Dachau and then to Buchenwald, before being brought before a medical commission and deported to Sonnenstein, where he was probably gassed on arrival.

After his murder, he was given a false cause of death, and his wife in Prague was told she could receive his urn for a fee.

Whether his ashes were actually in the urn is unknown, but the urn was buried in the Jewish cemetery in Prague. As at Hadamar, families were provided with ashes that could have belonged to anyone, and had no means of knowing whether they had been those of their loved ones. Reportedly, the only differentiation the Nazis made was the amount of ash put into an urn of a child versus that of an adult.

As for the fabricated causes of death, my guide informed me that relatives began to be suspicious upon, for example, receiving a death certificate listing the cause of death as appendicitis for a “patient” whose appendix had already been removed years before.

In a museum pamphlet, I read that about “one-third of those employed at the Sonnenstein killing center were later assigned, most in higher positions, to the extermination camps Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka in 1942 and 1943. Those camps were responsible for the murder of about 1.75 million Jews.”

The booklet also includes a photograph of two employees of the Sonnenstein killing center having a beer at the Belzec concentration camp. It is related as a historical fact that the ethical callousness of the euthanasia killings and the corresponding radical desensitization contributed to the mass murders in the concentration camps. But it was also noted that there were between sixty and seventy people on site at all times and that not all of them were ideological National Socialists. Other motivations for their participation included career aspirations, higher salaries, a sense of authority and prestige, and protection from being called up for frontline military service.

Meeting with a young educator there, I asked her about the reactions of the students who visit. “What is it that really hits them?” I asked. My guide explained that what really gets to students is when they realize they could be selectively discarded. Oh wow, I could have been one of those ones who got killed.

When I heard this, I was pleased. I think it is a realization that makes a healthy presumption: that the world would be at a loss without you because the world is better with you in it. Whenever we discard someone, even in our minds, it unwittingly damages our own sense of self-worth because we will have made ourselves more precarious by their dismissal.

As noted, euthanasia, which is already a euphemism, was sometimes referred to by the Nazis as “mercy killings.” However, as with many things, the Nazis got this terribly wrong. Mercy is to be patient with ourselves and others in our weakness. Euthanasia ends a person’s life prematurely; it is an expression of impatience. Callousness can be shown quickly; expressing mercy takes time.

Having visited these three memorials, I am grateful that it is now possible to pay tribute to these lesser-known victims of Nazi euthanasia and eugenics. These sites are worth visiting; these victims deserve our remembrance and commemoration.

Exploring these memorial sites revealed to me the ways in which the euthanasia centers existed in a bizarre, liminal space: sometimes they were regarded as healthcare facilities, sometimes as killing centers. Jews were usually banned from them, but sometimes they got sent to them; many doctors and nurses were true believers in “mercy killing” but they also operated in top secrecy, falsifying death certificates and deceiving patients’ relatives; death was sometimes rationalized as being in the patient’s interest, other times it was a wartime necessity in the interest of the state; propaganda films and posters suggested that the public needed to be convinced, but the prevailing helplessness and fear experienced amid the war naturally limited pushback.

This fog of motivations and perceptions obscures the study of Nazi euthanasia and eugenics. And this is why this history is so crucial to confront: the Nazis surely hoped we would forget it, but the victims of Nazi euthanasia are not just a footnote; the dehumanization against which we need to be on guard is any instance in which a person is deemed “unworthy of life.” To study or visit these sites, I think, is to become responsible in this regard.

At the same time, my travel to these sites showed me that historical facts alone cannot teach us morality. Rather, these facts must be reckoned with and interpreted through a sincere wrestling with our own fears, insecurities, ideals, and hopes.

More articles on this topic:

• Grafeneck T-4 killing centre killed more than 10,000 people (Link)
• Hartheim Castle T-4 killing centre killed more than 30,000 people (Link).
• Hadamar T-4 killing centre killed approximately 15,000 people (Link).

Join the "Dying to Meet You" webinar with Amanda Achtman (September 25).

Amanda Achtman

Register for the Zoom event with Amanda Achtman who has been studying, travelling and speaking about re-humanizing the culture and preventing euthanasia.

Amanda who is Dying to Meet You - will share her mission and her goals and relate them with stories and experiences to how we can change the culture by encouraging hope.

The Zoom event is Wednesday, Sept 25 at 2 pm (Eastern Time).

Register in advance for the event: (Registration Link)
After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.

Amanda states:

Now we do not so much have a culture of death as we have death without culture.

That's why we need a better cultural conversation - one that explores death as an occasion for discovering who and what we truly are.

I am convinced that artistic beauty, humanizing storytelling, and edifying examples are critical to restoring our cultural health when it comes to our experiences of death and dying.

The Euthanasia Prevention Coalition encourages people to become active in their community, with friends and family and to share hope. EPC opposes euthanasia and assisted suicide, as we oppose killing people. We support a culture of care, such as Compassionate Community Care and Dying To Meet You initiatives.

Roger Foley: A Passion to Live

Alex Schadenberg
Executive Director, Euthanasia Prevention Coalition

Amanda Achtman, who is leading a project called Dying to Meet You, visited Roger Foley in London Ontario. Roger lives with Cerebral Ataxia and says that he has been pressured on several occasions to ask for euthanasia. (Link to the youtube video)

In the video, Foley gives Achtman context from his life concerning his disability. Foley states that as a child he was always uncoordinated and very tired. He was not diagnosed with his condition, so he thought that he could work through it.

Roger said that he is bedridden and has severe pain levels every day. He needs to take medications or he can't even function.

Amanda Achtman

Achtman asked him why he is living in a hospital and not a home. Roger responds:

Unfortunately we live in a country where persons with disabilities aren't allowed to choose who's around them.

You're worked at; not worked with.

Foley then gave the example of a care worker who helped him get into the bath tub. He washed himself but when he needed help getting out of the tub, he called but got no answer. So he crawled out of the tub over the slippery floor, without full control of his limbs. As he was crawling down the hallway he hears snoring. He finds the caregiver stretched out on one of his chairs in a deep sleep. When he reported it to the agency, the care-giver confessed to the act but they didn't care.

Achtman asked him if he has been offered euthanasia? Roger replied:

Yeah, multiple times.

A nurse asked him if he had thoughts of self-harm? Foley responded honestly that he has thought about ending his life because of what he is going through. Out of nowhere, the nurse told him that he could apply for an assisted... you know what I mean.

Achtman asked him what is the impact on him, as a patient, of having euthanasia suggested? Foley responded:

It's completely traumatized me. Now it's this overlying option, where, in my situation, when I say I'm suicidal, I'm met with, Well, you know, the hospital has a program to help you with that, if you want to end your life.

That didn't exist before MAiD was legalized, but now it's there.

Roger says that he is having flash backs from this experience and that this has devalued him and all that he is.

Achtman asks about the accusation that it is only religious people who are trying to prevent euthanasia. Foley responds:

That's the ultimate gas lighting statement. Like, I'm not religious. I respect people who are religious. Saying that its just religious persons who oppose euthanasia and assisted suicide are completely wrong. And these people who usually say it have an ableist mindset and they look at persons with disabilities and see us as just better off dead and a waste of resources.

Foley has hope is that one day he will be able to break through the wall of the system and get access to the services he needs.

Foley wants to live at home with workers who want to work with him as a team.

Foley concludes the interview by saying:

I have a passion to live.
I don't want to give up on my life.

Previous articles about Roger Foley: 

• UN disability envoy demands protection for people with disabilities from euthanasia in Canada (Link).
• People with disabilities oppose expansion of MAiD in Canada (Link).
• Canada is getting comfortable with killing people with disabilities (Link).

A Warning from Canada to Hungary about Euthanasia

Dear Hungarians,

Amanda Achtman

I visited your country this time last year and was deeply impressed and inspired by it. Now that I hear Hungary is considering legalizing euthanasia, I must issue a warning to you about this from my home country of Canada.

Canada legalized euthanasia nationwide in 2016. Since then, with the criteria expanded and safeguards eroded, euthanasia now accounts for 4.1% of all deaths and is the fifth leading cause of death.

In fact, the number of Canadians who have died by euthanasia since legalization is commensurate with the total number of Canadians who died of Covid.

Having monitored the debate and expansion of euthanasia closely for the past several years, I have some important information to share with you that will hopefully prevent Hungary from going down the same path.

Euthanasia will not be limited.

Initially, euthanasia was legalized for those whose deaths were deemed “reasonably foreseeable.” Patients were required to have a “grievous and irremediable” condition. But soon, this was seen as discriminatory against those who were suffering but not imminently dying. And so, a second track (literally named “Track 2”) was created to qualify for euthanasia those whose deaths were not imminent. Initially, this was for those suffering from physical pain but then this was seen as discriminatory against those who were suffering from psychological pain. So, euthanasia was expanded to those not imminently dying and to those with psychological suffering rather than physical all under the rubric of equality. As long as euthanasia is seen as a reasonable solution to suffering, then there is no limit as to who should quality for this relief. For this reason, euthanasia activists have advised euthanasia for children who, when speaking before parliamentary committess, they refer to as “mature minors.” As soon as euthanasia is seen as a good for society and for suffering persons, any rationale to limit it will be arbitrary and considered unjust by at least some of those who are excluded by the criteria.

Euthanasia will undermine suicide prevention efforts.

Though we have gone through many euphemisms, nothing can change the reality that euthanasia is simply suicide with an accomplice. The euthanasia lobby stopped using the terms euthanasia and assisted suicide because it is bad for public relations. And so, we have gone from “euthanasia” to “assisted suicide” to “physician-assisted suicide” to “medical aid in dying.” Now in law, politics, and journalism, the English acronym for the latter is used universally. This deadens people’s consciences so that they do not realize that premature killing is precisely what is meant by “MAID.” As George Orwell said, “As language corrupts thought, so thought also corrupts language.” Many people who work in palliative care believe that palliative care is the true assistance in dying; they would never dream of killing their patients. But now, these lines are becoming blurred. Unfortunately, we now have a two-tier society where some people get suicide prevention and others get suicide assistance. This is terribly unjust because everyone deserves suicide prevention.

Euthanasia will devalue the lives of people with disabilities.

Many people with whom I speak tell me they think euthanasia is reasonable for persons with a certain illness or disability. They will usually name a particular condition that, in their mind, justifies premature death. Yet, even if they would say that euthanasia should never be coerced, suggesting that there is any threshold at which a person’s life is not worth living denigrates their life and sends the message that their life is less valuable. Furthermore, many persons with disabilities attest that they are being de facto coerced to consider euthanasia due to lack of adequate supports to live. I cannot stand by idly when my fellow citizens with disabilities attest that they are tempted to seek euthanasia because they lack housing, money for food, accesibility provisions, or even family, friends, or visitors who care about them. This is clearly an urgent cry for help, not death.

Euthanasia will threaten the doctor-patient relationship.

When a doctor raises euthanasia with a patient, it already deflates them. Simply put, it is dehumanizing to tell someone that they qualify to die. In Canada, many advocates tried to ensure that euthanasia would only ever be patient-initiated. At least, this way, patients would not be counselled to consider suicide in a moment of weakness, vulnerability, or pain. But now it is the complete opposite. Doctors are being compelled to present “MAID” as an option to all eligible patients which, as you can see, is many of them. Even if someone does not choose euthanasia for themselves, it takes a toll to even have it suggested or to know that the phsyician has euthanized other patients or referred them to their deaths. This makes it harder to trust that the doctor will truly do everything for the sake of preserving health. Euthanasia is an easy way out and, since it is legal and commonplace, there is next to no investigation of the abuses which often leaves grieving family members traumatized.

Euthanasia will cut short our opportunities to love.

Premature death cuts short the capacity to show and receive kindness in the world. Every euthanasia death short circuits our opportunities to love. And if someone is asking for euthanasia because they do not feel loved in first place, then the right response is not lazy indifference (sometimes masqueraded as “support”) but rather a loving and urgent intervention. Those who are in need make an appeal to us. It is so important that we do not miss the opportunity to respond to them. It is the very basis of our humanity to be responsible in this way -- to care and be cared for.

To avoid descending into a euthanasia society, my recommendations are to:

1. Provide the supports that people across diverse demographics need to live.
2. Bolster self-harm and suicide prevention efforts across all generations.
3. Work toward ever-better inclusion of persons with disabilities.
4. Insist on the role of doctor as healer, not killer.
5. Affirm the value of those suffering and caregiving heroically by letting them know that it’s good they exist. Notice the challenge that it is to suffer, die, and caregive well and praise those who are doing it for their courage.

Through promoting these actions and attitudes, we can create a society where dying naturally is not shameful or “undignified”, but rather a supreme occasion for realizing what is significant in life. All of this is what the dying person deserves. And for all of us, one day that dying person will be us.

Amanda Achtman recently served as the senior advisor to a Canadian parliamentarian working to prevent the expansion of euthanasia on the basis of disability and mental illness. She currently works with Canadian Physicians for Life on ethics education and cultural engagement. Amanda is also the founder of Dying to Meet You, a project dedicated to preventing euthanasia and encouraging hope.

@AmandaAchtman / DyingToMeetYou.com

Euthanasia cannot be "culturally safe"

Medical killing obviously undermines cultural preservation.

 

By Amanda Achtman

 

Amanda Achtman

Health Canada is currently conducting a survey of Indigenous perspectives on Canada’s euthanasia program.

These are some examples of the highly leading questions the Government is using in its attempt to solicit support for euthanasia from Indigenous respondents:

• What supports should be in place to allow Indigenous people to make decisions about MAID?
• What supports should be in place to help someone preparing for their MAID journey? What supports should be in place to help their families and caregivers?
• If you have supported or are supporting a loved one who has chosen MAID, what was your experience with the process?

The purported intent of collecting such data is to ensure “cultural safety” which the Government defines as: 

“A way of being that is created by a trusting and respectful environment. Culturally safe practices are actions in colonized spaces where Indigenous Peoples, families and communities feel respected, included, welcomed and comfortable expressing all aspects of who they are as Indigenous Peoples.”

I am reminded of Cardinal Robert Sarah’s critique of an ideological colonialism that persists today which he described as “the imposition of a false morality and deceitful values.”

Premature death through medical killing is precisely this kind of imposition.

According to a Statistics Canada report, 

“Suicide rates among First Nations people, Métis and Inuit were significantly higher than the rate among non-Indigenous people. The rate among First Nations people (24.3 deaths per 100,000 person-years at risk) was three times higher than the rate among non-Indigenous people (8.0 deaths per 100,000 person-years at risk). Among First Nations people living on reserve, the rate was about twice as high as that among those living off reserve.”

Killing, whether through suicide or euthanasia, obviously undermines cultural preservation insofar as it destroys persons, the bearers of culture.

Despite having high rates of suicide, this is not a sign that it is an Indigenous value. On the contrary, suicide is a sign of distress, trauma, and inadequate support to live.

If Canada euthanizes Indigenous persons, this will go down in national shame like the forced sterilizations and other dehumanizing eugenic practices perpetuated due to “deceitful values.”

I hope more Indigenous persons will speak out against the Government’s euthanasia regime and the explicit targeting of First Nations support for it.

In case you missed it, I invite you to check out the short film I produced about Eulalia Running Rabbit, a Blackfoot elder, on why she opposes euthanasia.

Canada requires doctors to falsify death certificates.

Alex Schadenberg
Executive Director, Euthanasia Prevention Coalition

An essay by Amanda Achtman was published by lawliberty.org challenging the fact that Canadian doctors are required to falsify death certificate. 

Achtman wrote her article in response to the fact that the Ontario College of Physicians is soliciting feedback on a draft policy, concerning euthanasia which includes a section concerning death certificates.

Achtman writes:

Physicians who provide MAID must complete the medical certificate of death.

When completing the medical certificate of death, physicians: must list the illness, disease, or disability leading to the request for MAID as the cause of death; and must not make any reference to MAID or the medications administered on the certificate. (emphasis mine)

Here we have the deliberate directive by a governing professional body to falsify medical records. A doctor’s administration of midazolam, propofol, and rocuronium is undeniably the cause of his or her patient’s premature death.

Achtman then states that:

However, despite euthanasia lobbyists insisting that “medical assistance in dying is a legal, federally regulated end-of-life choice, driven by hope and autonomy,” the mandating of professional cover-up betrays the pangs of conscience that still admit there is something fundamentally wrong with it. 

I agree. Read Amanda's essay (here). 

You can respond to the Ontario College of Physicians Draft Policy on MAiD (here).