This account of how the two major Churches responded to the Nazi ‘euthanasia’ programme, namely the mass murder of the mentally ill and mentally or physically deficient between 1939 and 1945, deals with the responses of their hierarchies and the stratagems adopted by the asylums which were part of their respective charitable networks. It is based upon both original archival sources and a large variety of secondary literature dealing with the two Churches and the individual asylums. Before considering how the Churches conducted themselves during the Nazi period, it is necessary to establish the broader context of their response to eugenics in general.

The Inner Mission was the principal Protestant health and welfare umbrella organisation. It disposed of several hundred institutions for the mentally or physically disabled, the mentally ill, epileptics and geriatric patients. Although many of these institutions affected the name ‘Heil- und Pflegeanstalt’, in practice, church-run asylums specialised in the low-cost maintenance, as opposed to the treatment, of ‘incurables’. Nor was the Inner Mission impervious to international ‘progressive’ scientific fashions or to local anxieties regarding qualitative and quantitative demographic decline. In late January 1931, the Inner Mission's Standing Conference on Eugenics convened for the first time in Treysa under the chairmanship of Hans Harmsen. Stressing the impossibility of rising social costs during a major economic crisis, Harmsen called for the introduction of differential provision for those who could be returned to the productive process and the eugenic sterilisation of the ‘less valuable’.