Asthma

[John Kilmartin]

I was listening to an interview with director Martin Scorsese and he indicated that the reason he avoided the draft was his childhood asthma.This got me thinking as to what would happen to you if you reported on your draft notification and you were not considered fit. I mean that as the years go by it seems as the Nazis(and only)
had strict eugenecs ignoring the fact as late as the 70's some western democracies decided who was fit to procreate.
My questiion is where did the rubber meet the road in Nazi Germany ie. what disabilities allowed you to live yet disallowed your involvement in combat?
Cheers,
John K

[phylo_roadking]

Joh - I wouldn't over-exaggerate the numbers killed in the Aktion T4 programme. It wasn't as if they were snatching cripples off the street, or rounding up those who failed Wehrmacht medicals - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Action_T4# ... _of_adults - quite the reverse, "participating" doctors often fiddled the labour service medical boards to hide the mentally-able from the program! It covered the mentally- and physically-disabledand incarcerated...not round-ups of general practictioners' patients living in the community. The program is reckoned to have accounted or 275,000 deaths - but included Poland AND was spread over many years.

Don't forget that Germany - like MOST European nations - contained a LARGE number of PHAB people (Physically handicapped, able-bodied)....as a result of the Great War!

...AND that number would have spiralled again BECAUSE of WWII war casualties going back into the community!

[John Kilmartin]

In the book "the nazi war on cancer" it implied that if you were no longer useful to the Reich it was best if you just were not treated. It was my understanding that it was specifically those who suffered from what is now called post traumatic shock syndrom that 'euthanasia' was to be applied so that those who suffered most in the Great War were to be forgotten and only those 'heros' like the Fuhrer were to be rememembered.

[phylo_roadking]

In the book "the nazi war on cancer" it implied that if you were no longer useful to the Reich it was best if you just were not treated.

John, you need to put that in context; in that era there was NO other form of treatment for cancer EXCEPT medical intervention. And ask a doctor NOW what they think about that as an ONLY course for treatment ...

Now - also against that you have to set the fact that German hosptials were always at full capacity treating bombing victims as well as war casualties. there wasn't the depth of military nursing that the Allies enjoyed; post-injury nursing was ONLY to get a casualty to the point at which he could survive being freighted home to recover fully at home or in a civilian hospital. Somewhere I have a link to a 1945 report by a U.S. Army doctor who was amazed by the poor level of medical care for casualties, including the complete lack of certain procedures BASIC to Allied post-injury intervention.

It's been raised before in reply to this that Germany had a great tradition of highly-skilled medicine/surgery; but what has to be remembered is this was PRIVATE medicine, and wasn't widespread and was in private practice; the NSDAP didn't set up anything resembling the post-1948 NHS in the UK, for instance....or even the depth of healthcare in the WWII-era USSR!

So...think of it more THIS way; do you attempt to cut out a cancer from a patient with a small chance of surviving longterm anyway...from even the small % of cancer patients could be regarded as operable...or do you put the same resources into nursing X-number of war casualties back to health?