Euthanasia campaign’s gassing technology shifted from disabled Germans to Jews

Evidence

Following Hitler’s command of 1 September 1939, centres had been created in Brandenburg, Hadamar, Sonnenstein and Eichberg, which hid under a double lie: they called themselves, in hushed conversations between the initiated, ‘euthanasia institues’, while for the wider consumption they used still more deceitful and misleading names of a Charitable Foundation for ‘Institutional Care’ or the ‘the Transport of the Sick’ – or even the bland ‘T4’ code (from 4 Tiergartenstrasse, Berlin, where the co-ordinating office of the whole killing operation was located). When the command had to be rescinded on 28 August 1941 as the result of an outcry raised by a number of prominent luminaries of the Church, the principle of ‘actively managing the population trends’ was in no way abandoned. Its focus, together with the gassing technologies that the euthanasia campaign had helped to develop, was merely shifted to a different target: the Jews. And to different places, like Sobibór or Chelmno. — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 195

Categorization

• XREF: The bureaucratic euphemism (‘double lie’, bland codes) anticipates Bauman’s later argument that modern administrative rationality lets functionaries kill at a distance.
• SEED: The ‘double lie’ of institutional naming — kill centers disguised as charitable foundations — is an essay angle on how bureaucratic language launders atrocity.