'A prey on normal people': C. Killick Millard and the euthanasia movement in Great Britain, 1930-55

Journal of Contemporary History

Volumn 36, Issue 1, 2001, Pages

  Dowbiggin, Ian ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF PRINCE EDWARD ISLAND   (Canada)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

ACTIVE EUTHANASIA; ARTICLE; ETHICS; ETHNOLOGY; EUTHANASIA; HEALTH CARE ORGANIZATION; HISTORY; MEDICAL GENETICS; ORGANIZATION; POLITICS; PSYCHOLOGICAL ASPECT; PUBLIC HEALTH; RELIGION; UNITED KINGDOM; VOLUNTARY EUTHANASIA;

EUGENICS; EUTHANASIA; EUTHANASIA, ACTIVE; EUTHANASIA, ACTIVE, VOLUNTARY; GREAT BRITAIN; HISTORY, 20TH CENTURY; ORGANIZATIONS; POLITICS; PUBLIC HEALTH; RELIGION AND MEDICINE; SOCIETIES;

EID: 34248066159     PISSN: 00220094     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/002200940103600103     Document Type: Review

References (114)

1. Euthanasia is the Greek word for 'easy death' and is defined by Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary (1977) as the 'act or practice of killing individuals (as persons or domestic animals) that are hopelessly sick or injured for reasons of mercy' (395). Historically, euthanasia in practice has meant the deliberate hastening of someone's death, or the withdrawal of life-sustaining treatments, or the refusal to perform life-saving surgery. Thus, it can be 'passive' or 'active', performed either with or without the patient's consent. When I use the term euthanasia I am referring to 'active' mercy-killing, since this was virtually the only kind of euthanasia considered during the events recounted in this article. This definition also differs from what is today called physicianassisted suicide, or the participation of doctors in what ultimately is a self-administered death.
2. Much of the recent debate over euthanasia has focused on the Netherlands. Two commissions (1991 and 1996) examining the practice of both physician-assisted suicide and euthanasia have reported their findings. For two different interpretations of these reports, see the Editorial, 'Euthanasia in the Netherlands - Good News or Bad?', New England Journal of Medicine, 335, (1996), 1676-8;
3. and Herbert Hendin, Chris Rutenfras and Zbigniew Zylicz, 'Physician-Assisted Suicide and Euthanasia in the Netherlands: Lessons from the Dutch', Journal of the American Medical Association, 277 (1997), 1720-2.
4. As of July 1999 the Dutch government was preparing to decriminalize physician-assisted suicide altogether. 'Netherlands May Legalize Mercy Killing', National Post, 13 July 1999, A12.
5. Edward J. Larson and Darrel W. Amundsen, A Different Death: Euthanasia and the Christian Tradition (Downer's Grove, IL 1998).
6. see also W. Bruce Fye, 'Active Euthanasia: An Historical Survey of its Conceptual Origins and Introduction into Medical Thought', Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 52 (1979), 492-502.
7. See Michael R. Marrus, 'The Nuremberg Doctors' Trial in Historical Context', Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 73 (1999), 106-23.
8. see also Robert Jay Lifton, The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide (New York 1986);
9. Robert N. Proctor, Racial Hygiene: Medicine Under the Nazis (Cambridge, MA 1988);
10. Michael Kater, Doctors Under Hitler (Chapel Hill, NC 1989);
11. Paul Weindling, Health, Race, and German Politics Between National Unification and Nazism, 1870-1945 (Cambridge 1989);
12. Michael Burleigh, Death and Deliverance: 'Euthanasia' in Germany, 1900-1945 (Cambridge 1994);
13. Henry Friedlander, The Origin of Nazi Genocide: From Euthanasia to the Final Solution (Chapel Hill, NC 1995).
14. see also Volker Roelcke, Gerrit Hohendorf and Maike Rotzoll, 'Psychiatric Research and "Euthanasia": The Case of the Psychiatric Department at the University of Heidelberg, 1941-1945', History of Psychiatry, 5 (1994), 517-32.
15. It was not just doctors who participated in the nazi euthanasia programmes; nurses as well played an important role in the organized killings of handicapped and mentally ill men, women and children. See Susan Bendict and Jochen Kuhla, 'Nurses' Participation in the Euthanasia Programs of Nazi Germany', Western Journal of Nursing Research, 21 (1999), 246-64.
16. The secondary literature on the history of Anglo-American euthanasia includes I. Van Der Sluis, 'The Movement for Euthanasia, 1875-1975', Janus, 66 (1979), 131-72;
17. Stephen Louis Kuepper, 'Euthanasia in America, 1890-1960', PhD dissertation, Rutgers University 1981;
18. Russell Hollander, 'Euthanasia and Mental Retardation: Suggesting the Unthinkable', Mental Retardation, 27 (1989), 53-61;
19. Rita Marker et al., 'Euthanasia: A Historical Overview', Maryland Journal of Contemporary Legal Issues, 2 (1991), 257-98;
20. Martin A. Elks, 'The "Lethal Chamber": Further Evidence for the Euthanasia Option', Mental Retardation, 31 (1993) 201-7;
21. Ezekiel J. Emanuel, 'The History of Euthanasia Debates in the United States and Britain', Annals of Internal Medicine, 121 (1994), 793-802;
22. Nicholas Kemp, 'What Was the Nature of the Debate on Euthanasia in Great Britain Leading Up to the Reading of the Voluntary Euthanasia (Legislation) Bill in December 1936?', MA dissertation, London School of Economics 1995;
23. Robin Condliffe, 'Merciful Release? A History of the British Voluntary Euthanasia Movement', BSc dissertation, Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine 1995;
24. Martin S. Pernick, The Black Stork: Eugenics and the Death of 'Defective' Babies in American Medicine and Motion Pictures Since 1915 (New York and Oxford 1996).
25. In particular, the history of euthanasia since 1945 has not been well documented. For one exception, see Ernst Klee, 'Durch Zyankali erlöst': Sterbehilfe und Euthanasie heute (Frankfurt am Main 1990).
26. see also Margaret Otlowski, Voluntary Euthanasia and the Common Law (Oxford 1997).
27. The VELS records are housed in the Contemporary Medical Archives Centre of the Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine, 183 Euston Rd., London, UK (hereafter cited as CMAC/SA/VES.) Other documents relating to the history of the VELS can be found in the Choice in Dying records, at the offices of Lewis Advertising in Baltimore, MD (hereafter cited as CID).
28. Van Der Sluis, 'The Movement for Euthanasia, 1875-1975', op. cit., 168.
29. For a more recent treatment of the subject that takes a similar position, see Wesley J. Smith, Forced Exit: The Slippery Slope from Assisted Suicide to Legalized Murder (New York 1997).
30. C. Killick Millard, 'Letter', British Medical Journal, 1 (1914), 382-4.
31. Millard once took his unvaccinated wife and two children to visit a smallpox ward to demonstrate his point that exposure to even severe cases did not mean infection. 'At 80, He Wants "Mercy" Killing', Reynolds News, 8 October 1950, For an account of the Leicester vaccination controversy, see Simmons, Leicester: Past and Present, vol. 2, 17-19. For Millard's role in the birth control movement, see Richard A. Soloway, Birth Control and the Population Question in England, 1877-1930 (Chapel Hill, NC and London 1982), 130-2, 233-5, 256-7, 311-13.
32. 'A Friend of Leicester', Leicester Evening Mail, 3 May 1934.
33. see also 'At 80, He Wants "Mercy" Killing', op. cit.;
34. 'Ex-City MOH, Dr Killick Millard is 80 Today', Leicester Evening Mail, 14 August 1950;
35. 'His 80th Birthday Present - A Motorcycle', Leicester Mercury, 14 August 1950.
36. For Millard's obituary, see the British Medical Journal, 22 March 1952, 660-2.
37. Peter Green, The Problem of Right Conduct: A Text-Book of Christian Ethics (London and New York 1931). Quotes are extracted from C. Killick Millard, The Movement in Favour of Voluntary Euthanasia: An Historical Survey (Leicester 1936).
38. According to Millard, Bond 'was the first to help me to start our Society. He was a man of quite exceptionally high character, and the respect and prestige attached to his name were undoubtedly a great help to the movement, especially in the early stages when it was still unknown.' Millard to Ann Mitchell, 17 February 1940, CID, Box C-3.
39. See A.T. Patterson, Radical Leicester (Leicester 1954).
40. see also Jack Simmons, Leicester: Past and Present, 2 vols (London 1974);
41. David Nash and David Reeder (eds), Leicester in the Twentieth Century (Leicester City Council 1993).
42. In the USA three crucial figures in the early history of the euthanasia movement were either Unitarians or ex-Unitarians: Inez Celia Philbrick, Charles Francis Potter and Eleanor Dwight Jones.
43. Robert Fleming Rattray, From Primitive to Modern Religion (London 1937), 95.
44. See Robert Moats Miller, American Protestantism and Social Issues, 1919-1939 (Chapel Hill, NC 1958) for references to American Unitarianism's involvement in liberal social activism.
45. John Haynes Holmes, The Revolutionary Function of the Modern Church (New York 1912), 38.
46. David Robinson, The Unitarians and the Universalists (Westport, CT 1985), 147.
47. Simmons, Leicester: Past and Present, op, cit., vol. 2, 17-19
48. John Welshman, 'Eugenics and Public Health, 1900-1940: Scenes from Provincial Life', Urban History, 24 (1997), 56-75, especially 57-61.
49. See Jane Lewis, 'The Public's Health: Philosophy and Practice in Britain in the Twentieth Century' in Elizabeth Fee and Roy M. Acheson (eds), A History of Education in Public Health: Health that Mocks the Doctors' Rules (Oxford and New York 1991), 195-229.
50. see also John Welshman, 'The Medical Officer of Health in England and Wales, 1900-1974', Journal of Public Health Medicine, 19 (1997), 443-50;
51. Jose Harris, Private Lives, Public Spirit: Britain, 1870-1914 (Harmondsworth 1994), 59-60.
52. One example of this viewpoint among British public health physicians was the issue of voluntary sterilization. Support for sterilization, mainly 'as a preventive strategy to relieve institutions from the pressure of long-term care', was strong among Medical Officers of Health like Millard. Matthew Thomson, The Problem of Mental Deficiency: Eugenics, Democracy, and Social Policy in Britain, c.1870-1959 (Oxford 1998), 195.
53. see also Welshman, 'Eugenics and Public Health in Britain, 1900-1940', op. cit., 60;
54. John McNicol, 'Eugenics and the Campaign for Voluntary Sterilization in Britain between the Wars', Social History of Medicine, 2 (1989), 147-69.
55. For the concern in early twentieth-century Britain over demographic and biological decline, see Richard A. Soloway, Demography and Degeneration: Eugenics and the Declining Birthrate in Twentieth-Century Britain (Chapel Hill, NC 1995 edn).
56. see also Roy Porter, The Greatest Benefit to Mankind: A Medical History of Humanity (New York and London 1998), especially chap. 20, 'Medicine, State and Society', for the rise in the twentieth century of 'an expansive vision of the socialization of medicine and the medicalization of society', justifying the state's intervention in the planning and surveillance of individual health. Patients with chronic disorders, like sickly infants, backward children, the mentally ill and retarded and senior citizens suffering from the maladies of old age were the focus of attention in twentieth-century medicine. As Porter writes: 'It became widely accepted that the smooth and efficient functioning of intricate producer and consumer economies required a population no less healthy than literate, skilled and law-abiding.' Within such an altered conceptualization of medicine's relation to society, the traditional nineteenth-century notion of the private contract between a doctor and individual patient looked as out-dated as the idea of 'robber-baron' capitalists unrestrained by laws governing commerce and industry. The issue of patient voluntarism in twentieth-century social medicine, even for the elderly and dying, became increasingly moot.
57. For a good example of one British surgeon's dismay and frustration over a patient with cancer who took a long time to die, see H.H., Greenwood to Charles Potter, 26 January 1938, CID, Box C-4.
58. See also C. Killick Millard, The Movement in Favour of Voluntary Euthanasia: An Historical Survey, 3-4. This is the text of a speech Millard gave before the Leicester Literary and Philosophical Society, 27 January 1936
59. C. Killick Millard, Euthanasia: A Plea for the Legalisation of Voluntary Euthanasia (London 1931).
60. C. Killick Millard, 'The Medico-Legal Aspect of Voluntary Euthanasia', CMAC/SA/VES/Box 7/C.3.
61. 'More C3 Men To-Day', Nottingham Evening Post, 19 December 1931. Purves-Stewart returned to the topic in a speech on 25 May 1939. In it he defended voluntary euthanasia, but ended by citing an unnamed surgeon who put four badly burned men out of their misery with injections of morphine, admitting that such a case could not be 'classed within the category of voluntary euthanasia' and tacitly saying that it ought to be. See Sir James Purves-Stewart, 'Voluntary Euthanasia', CID, Box C-3. For more references to the 'social problem group', see the Report of the Departmental Committee on Sterilisation, presented by the Minister of Health to Parliament by Command of His Majesty, December 1933 (London 1934), esp. 16-18.
62. see also Soloway, Demography and Degeneration, op. cit., 170, 171, 191, 192, 194, 203, 215, 229, 270, 292, 328, 333, 341. The systematic history of the relations between the euthanasia and eugenics movements in Great Britain and elsewhere has still to be written. A recent monograph that addresses the American context of this subject is Pernick, The Black Stork, op. cit. For the history of British eugenics, see Soloway, Demography and Degeneration, op. cit., and Pauline M.H. Mazumdar, Eugenics, Human Genetics, and Human Failings: The Eugenics Society, its Sources, and its Critics in Britain (New York 1991).
63. 'Lethal Chamber for Babies', Daily Herald, 16 March 1932.
64. 'Easy Death for Incurables', Cambridge Chronicle, 21 March 1934, italics added. C.J. Bond, perhaps second-in-command only to Millard in the early euthanasia movement, told the Daily Mail that if the principle of voluntary euthanasia for incurables could be established then 'it would be extended to other cases', Daily Mail, 11 November 1935.
65. 'Plea For Condemned Woman', Manchester Guardian, 3 December 1934. George Bernard Shaw went considerably further than Millard, saying that regulations should have enabled the state to do what the unfortunate mother had been forced to do herself.
66. Tredgold's original article appeared in the British Medical Journal, 4 January 1935, 33.
67. see also his and Millard's letters to the editor of the British Medical Journal, 18 January 1936.
68. 'Euthanasia Society', British Medical Journal, 1937, 552.
69. Cited by Van Der Sluis, 'The Movement for Euthanasia, 1875-1975', op. cit., 153.
70. The Times, 8 September 1936, described Moynihan, who died at the age of 71, as 'the most successful British surgeon of modern times'.
71. See Tim Helme, 'The Voluntary Euthanasia (Legislation) Bill (1936) Revisited', Journal of Medical Ethics, 17 (1991), 25-9.
72. Officially, an amendment was carried to the effect that the bill would be read for a second time six months later, which Millard said was 'the polite way of moving the rejection of a Bill'. Millard to Charles Potter, 31 December 1936, Inez Celia Philbrick File, Nebraska State Historical Society, State Archives and Manuscript Division, Lincoln, Nebraska, MS 1058, Philbrick Scrapbook. Hereafter cited as ICP. The entire debate in the House of Lords was reprinted in the British Medical Journal, 12 December 1936, 1232-4. Only 49 out of 774 Peers voted on the measure. Two of the most impressive opponents of the bill were Lord Horder, the King's physician, and Lord Dawson, who earlier the same year had allegedly performed euthanasia on King George V, then dying painfully from cancer. See F. Watson, 'The Death of George V, History Today, 12 (1986), 21-30.
73. Millard to Charles Potter, 31 December 1936, ICP, Philbrick Scrapbook.
74. In 1935 Millard published a statement on the ethical aspects of euthanasia signed by 15 prominent English religious leaders, none Catholic. To him it was proof that euthanasia was not contrary to the teachings of Christianity.
75. Catholic Times, 23 October 1931;
76. Catholic Herald, 6 February 1934;
77. The Universe, 29 November 1935;
78. Catholic Herald, 7 August 1936;
79. The Tablet, 21 November 1936.
80. Fairfield (1885-1978), a sister of the novelist Rebecca West and an ardent suffragette, was also a vigorous opponent of the Eugenics Society's proposed voluntary sterilization legislation, which was based partly on the 1934 report of the Ministry of Health's Committee on Sterilization under Sir Lawrence Brock. Fairfield argued that voluntary sterilization, like voluntary euthanasia, would eventually be made compulsory for mental defectives since they could hardly be said to be able to give consent. See Letitia Fairfield, The Case Against Sterilization (London 1935); Contemporary Medical Archives Centre, the Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine, Eugenics Society Archives, D.229/Box 44 (hereafter cited as CMAC/SA/EUG).
81. see also John MacNicol, 'Eugenics and the Campaign for Voluntary Sterilization in Britain Between the Wars', Social History of Medicine, 2 (1989), 147-69.
82. C.K. Millard to Ann Mitchell, 19 November 1940, CID, Box C-3. For Barnes's statements, see 'The Feeble-Minded', Manchester Guardian, 8 March 1937;
83. 'Bishop Barnes Examines the Birth-Rate Problem', Birmingham Gazette, 8 March 1937
84. see also 'Bishop Barnes Says We Have Too Many Children', Daily Express, 4 September 1950.
85. Millard to Inez Philbnck, 5 November 1938, ICP, MS 1058, Folder #2. In a letter to psychiatrist C.P. Blacker, Secretary of the ES: 'When I first founded [the VELS] I wrote to each of your members and quite a number of them joined us.' Millard to Blacker, 5 April 1951. CMAC/SA/EUG/D.201/Box 41. Another example of the parallel interests of the euthanasia and eugenics movements was the willingness of the ES and Birthright, a US organization that supported sterilization policies, to exchange mailing lists. See The Association for Voluntary Sterilization, Inc., Papers, 1929-1964, Box 2, Folder 16, Social Welfare History Archives, University of Minnesota.
86. Bond's correspondence with Blacker on eugenics matters can be found in CMAC/SA/EUG/C.31-32/Box 5. For more on Millard's interest in eugenics, see Welshman, 'Eugenics and Public Health', op. cit., 56-75. Although Millard, like the more renowned Marie Stopes and Margaret Sanger, viewed birth control largely in terms of eugenics, he did resign from the ES in 1928.
87. Despite his disinclination to merge the two organizations in a meaningful way, Blacker made it clear to Millard that he was 'in entire sympathy with [VELS] aims'. Their mutual interests led to the two men collaborating on the ES project to draft a health certificate for prospective marriage partners. Millard to Blacker, 9 September 1933; Blacker to Millard, 11 February 1935; Millard to Blacker, 12 February 1935; Blacker to Millard, 13 February 1935; Millard to Blacker, 14 May 1935; CMAC/SA/EUG/C.232/Box 19. Millard, a member of the Malthusian League, had earlier been active in trying to obtain the Eugenics Society's acceptance of birth control as a eugenic method. Soloway, Demography and Degeneration, op. cit., 176-7.
88. Originally called the National Society for the Legalization of Euthanasia, the NSLE changed its name in early 1938 to the Euthanasia Society of America. For ESA correspondence, see CMAC/SA/VES/A. 19-21, Box 3. Charles Potter, the ESA president, told Millard that 'the rapid progress of the euthanasia movement was due somewhat to the success of the birth control movement, since the former had learned from the experiences of the latter'. Potter to Millard, 12 January 1939, CMAC/SA/VES/A. 19/Box 3. Potter was an ex-Unitarian minister closely identified with the liberal, modernist current within American Christianity in the early twentieth century. In 1925 he had travelled to Dayton, Tennessee to defend John Scopes's right to teach evolution in public schools during the famous 'Monkey' Scopes Trial. Edward J. Larson, Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America's Continuing Debate over Science and Religion (New York 1997), 116-18, 157-8. For the best account of the ESA's history, see Kuepper, 'Euthanasia in America', op. cit.
89. Other VELS members whose names appeared on the ESA's advisory board included Bond, Havelock Ellis, H.G. Wells and Eleanor Rathbone.
90. For Kennedy's speech, see 'Doctor's Defence of Euthanasia', The Daily Telegraph, 15 February 1939.
91. see also his letter to the editor of the New York Times, 22 February 1939, For the ESA's draft bill, see '"Mercy" Death Law Proposed in State', New York Times, 27 January 1939.
92. According to an early ESA insider, Mitchell was really its founder. As both a student of psychology and former asylum inmate, Mitchell had concluded that euthanasia of incurable mental patients was an urgent necessity. She then approached Charles Potter, the president of the Humanist Society, an organization that had been devoted largely to reform of the country's birth control laws. Mitchell offered to bankroll Potter's expenses setting up a similar organization aimed at the legalization of euthanasia. Potter agreed, and the result was the ESA. See Eleanor Dwight Jones to Inez Philbrick, n.d., ICP, Folder #3.
93. see also Mitchell to Millard, 31 March 1939, 27 September 1939, 17 December 1939, 2 April 1940, 7 May 1940, 20 October 1941, 14 June 1942, 4 July 1942, 18 August 1942, CMAC/SAWES/A. 19-20/Box 3. For more on Mitchell, see Kuepper, 'Euthanasia in America', op. cit., 108.
94. C. Killick Millard to Ann Mitchell, 26 October 1939; Millard to Mitchell, 3 December 1940, CID, Box C-3.
95. After disinheriting her two sons, Mitchell bequeathed her estate to the VELS in the event of the ESA's ceasing to exist. See Eleanor Dwight Jones to Millard, 24 November 1942, CID, Box E-1.
96. C. Killick Millard, 'The Dr Hermann Sander Case in [the] USA: Repercussions in Britain', n.d, CID, Box C-3. Millard followed the Sander trial very closely and even wrote to the New Hampshire physician. Millard to Mrs Edwards, 16 January 1950, CID, Box C-3.
97. House of Lords, Parliamentary Debates (Hansard) (London), vol. 169, no. 12, 28 November 1950, 552-98.
98. C. Killick Millard, 'What Do You Think of "Mercy-Killing"?', Everybody's Weekly, 18 March 1950.
99. Ramsauer had been married, but his wife divorced him after the war. According to court documents, she had even been willing to testify against him.
100. Millard to Denman, 26 October 1950, 'Correspondence Relating to the Case of Dr Ramsauer', CMAC/SA/VES/Box 7, C. II.
101. Public Records Office (PRO), WO 310, #142;
102. see also WO 235, #578. As Michael Kater and others have pointed out, there was a 'remarkable attraction between doctors and SS'. As a profession, doctors were second only to lawyers in being over-represented within SS ranks. The exact motives behind each physician's decision to join the SS are difficult to discern, ranging from prestige and power to actual ideological commitment. What is unquestionable, however, was the peculiar and unsettling symbolism of death for SS physicians. Death meant something different to SS doctors from its meaning to civilian or even military doctors. Whereas the latter types of doctors were respected for their healing powers, SS doctors were recognized as wielding the power of death as well, of being capable of both averting and inflicting death. In other words, to a certain extent civilian physicians were at the mercy of their patients, while patients were very much at the mercy of SS doctors. Given this state of affairs, the place of euthanasia within the SS code of medical activity becomes all the clearer. Michael H. Kater, Doctors Under Hitler, op. cit., esp. 70-1.
103. For excerpts from Pernkopf's speech, see Gerald Weissmann, 'Springtime for Pernkopf, Hospital Practice, 20 (1985), 142-68.
104. For more on Pernkopf and the history of the Viennese medical school, see Edzard Ernst, 'A Leading Medical School Seriously Damaged: Vienna 1938', Annals of Internal Medicine, 122 (1995), 789-94;
105. Peter Malina, 'Edouard Pernkopf's Atlas of Anatomy, or the Fiction of "Pure Science"', Wiener klinische Wochenschrift, 110/4-5: 193-201. I wish to thank William E. Seidelman, MD, for bringing these publications to my attention.
106. For an English translation of Binding and Hoche's treatise, see 'Permitting the Destruction of Unworthy Life: Its Extent and Form', Issues in Law and Medicine, 8 (1992), 231-65.
107. Burleigh, Death and Deliverance, esp. 130-3
108. In his testimony to the court Ramsauer (340-414) stated that his unit in Poland had only been engaged in tactical and operational training and denied emphatically that it had anything to do with atrocities or war crimes. PRO, WO 310, #142.
109. Up to the end of 1944 prisoners at Mauthausen who were deemed by SS physicians to be physically unable to work were sent to the nearby gassing centre at Hartheim, which had remained operational after Hitler had ordered the nazi T-4 euthanasia programme for the handicapped to stop in 1941. When in December 1944 it was decided to demolish the gassing facilities at Hartheim, prisoners from Mauthausen did the job, Friedlander estimates that some 5500 inmates from Mauthausen and Gusen, its largest subsidiary camp, were gassed at Hartheim, Friedlander, The Origins of Nazi Genocide, op. cit., 149-50.
110. Derek Humphrey and Ann Wickett, The Right to Die: Understanding Euthanasia (London 1986), 137, 138.
111. see also Otlowski, Voluntary Euthanasia and the Common Law, op. cit., 258, 271-2.
112. For the text of the VES's 1969 bill and its reply to the British Medical Association's 1971 Report on Euthanasia, see Hugh Trowell, The Unfinished Debate on Euthanasia (London 1973), 159-76.
113. See Kuhl, The Nazi Connection, op. cit.
114. For a good description of this kind of twentieth-century reformer who blamed virtually all human unhappiness on the prejudice, superstition and ignorance of organized religion, see James Jones, Alfred C. Kinsey: A Public/Private Life (New York 1997). As Jones writes, Kinsey and his 'generation of scientist-reformers... believed strongly in the possibility of human progress and had absolute faith in the power of education to uplift society. As men of science, they never doubted that scholarly research could uncover fundamental truths about human nature and that these discoveries, in turn, could be used to fashion rational social policy. They believed that once science learned the facts about human sexual behavior the public could be educated to reject harmful attitudes and behavior and to think and act in ways that would be socially beneficial.' Ibid., 751.