Dutch Legalize Euthanasia and Assisted Suicide.(Netherlands)(Statistical Data Included)

Sixty years ago the footsteps of Nazi soldiers drummed through the streets of the Netherlands and swastikas blazed from windows like furious eyes. Hitler's Aktion T4 program, designed to eliminate "life unworthy of life" through euthanasia, was in full swing. Designed to purge the "Aryan race" of congenital defects, it required that hospitals and institutions to report patients with disabling or incurable conditions. Across Nazi Europe, physicians killed nearly 100,000 of them.

Evil reigned, but courage lived. In the face of the enemy, Dutch doctors alone, in contrast to every other occupied country, refused to recommend or participate in a single case of euthanasia during World War II. Even Nazi orders not to treat the old or those with little chance of recovery were disobeyed, according to a famous New England Journal of Medicine article written in 1949 by Dr. Leo Alexander.

How times have changed.

On April 10, as an estimated 10,000 Dutch people stood in protest outside The Hague, the Senate voted 46 to 28 to legalize euthanasia. The bill passed the lower house last November and now awaits only the formality of the signature of Queen Beatrix to become law. (Like the Queen of England, the monarch of the Netherlands in practice has no discretion to veto laws.)

News of the vote immediately shot across the globe, igniting heated debate on the international scene, but nowhere was the expression of horror more intense than in Germany. The New York Times reported, "Front-page newspaper editorials, statements from ministers and criticism from doctors all took the view that, in the words of George Paul Hefty in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung... the Dutch had `breached a dike' with dangerous consequences."

Die Welt, a German daily, compared the old Aktion T4 program with the new Dutch law. Under Hitler, "The government thugs that went into institutions for the handicapped to select who was unworthy for life were very careful not to broadcast their intentions. At some level, the old scruples linked to the commandment against killing were present.... The scandal in The Hague is that a parliament has imposed a state norm in place of the freedom to uphold such scruples."

The German outcry included those with the most experience in dealing with pain and suffering. The New York Times wrote, "German doctors seemed unanimous today in seeing sinister trends behind the Dutch law."