Germany did not become a "racial state" all at once. The change took place step-by-step, decree-by-decree. Each new policy went a little further than those enacted earlier. At each step, the German people had to make choices.

In November of 1940, Else von Löwis, a Nazi supporter, was troubled when she learned that the government was murdering the inmates at a nearby mental institution. She expressed her concerns in a letter to a friend, the wife of the chief justice of Germany's Supreme Court:

Undoubtedly you know about the measure now used by us to dispose of incurable insane persons; still, perhaps you do not fully realize the manner and scope of this, nor the horror it creates in people's minds! … On the occasion of our last business meeting at the Gau School in Stuttgart, about the middle of October, I was still told by a "well-informed" person that this involved only idiots, strictly speaking, and that application of "euthanasia" applied only to cases which have been thoroughly tested. It is entirely impossible now to make anybody believe that version, and individual cases established with absolute certainty spring up like mushrooms. …

The most awful thing in the present case is "the public secret" which creates a feeling of uneasiness. … Those who are responsible for those measures, have no concept of the measure of confidence they have thereby destroyed. Everybody must at once ask: What then can still be believed? Where is this path taking us and where should the boundary line be established?²

The judge's wife gave the letter to her husband, who forwarded it to the Nazi leadership with assurances of von Löwis's loyalty. In response, the facility near von Löwis's home was closed, but the murders continued elsewhere. In May 1941 Clemens Graf von Galen, the Catholic bishop of Munster, spoke out against euthanasia for the first time.

Else von Löwis and the bishop were not the only Germans who faced difficult choices in regard to the mass murder of the disabled, Jews, and others considered a threat to the Hitler's "racial state."

Click here to view other choices German individuals made.