What has become known to history as the “Nuremberg Trial” began on November 20th, 1945. An indictment was lodged against twenty-four former Nazi leaders, charging them with numerous crimes against peace, conventional war crimes, and crimes against humanity. The chief crime was the killing of millions of innocent human beings, not only Jews (the largest number) but also gypsies (the most exterminated group), Slavs, political prisoners and undesirable civilians – this included the handicapped (physical and mental), the old and anybody who came under the heading of what Hitler dubbed, “.useless eaters”. In a word, those who failed the “Quality of Life” test!
Who carried out these killings? They were not what we would term “madmen” in the ordinary sense of the word. No, in general they were normal, average, bourgeois, working class, professional, men and women who had been brainwashed by a totally materialistic philosophy. Neither was this mass killing a disorderly orgy of primitive violence but a mass action lasting for years and carried out with pedantic orderliness.
Perhaps the most interesting moment in the Trial, at least for those of us who are pro-life, was seen when the Nazi defendants were asked if they had anything to say in their defence. One of them stood up and said, “Your Honour, we never thought it would go that far”. United States Justice Robert H. Jackson replied, “It went that far the first time you condemned an innocent human being to death”. That is the foundation of the Pro-Life Movement. The right to life of every innocent human being – born or unborn. Once we decide to play God and condemn any innocent human being to death, everybody becomes vulnerable.
After the War some German doctors looked back in horror on the Hitler Regime and were genuinely puzzled. They asked themselves, “How did it all begin?” It began before Hitler came to power. The German psychiatrists had paved the way for the Fuhrer. In 1931 a group of Bavarian psychiatrists advocated the sterilization of the chronically mentally ill. This step was followed by an insidious corrosion of medical thinking and, logically, of medical ethics. If we can sterilize persons without their consent, we have relegated them to the status of animals. One downward step leads to another and soon the doctors were deciding who should live and who should die and so on down the “Slippery Slope”.
Could anything like this happen in Canada? Not only could it happen but it has happened and it is happening every day in our midst. Doctors sit on the “Throne of God” and sign the death warrants of those who are not considered fit to be born because they may cause embarrassment and inconvenience to their families and friends.
God grant that the day may come soon when Canadian doctors will look back on the horror story of nearly one million Canadian babies killed in ten years and not only ask themselves, ” How did it all begin?” but follow it with the more important question, “When is it going to end?”
