DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH & HUMAN SERVICES

Public Health Service


Office of the Assistant Secretary
for Health
Washington DC 20201

November 5, 1981

Honorable Carl Levin
United States Senate
Washington, D.C. 20510

Dear Senator Levin:

I have been traveling on official business and, hence, did not see your
letter of November 2 until I arrived back in Washington on the morning
of November 5.  I called your ofice in order to answer as promptly as
possible your urgent request concerning statements I had made at a
meeting of the Medical Society of New Jersey.

The statement you quoted in youn letter is very easily documented. Such
documentation should first go back to 1920 when Karl Binding and Alfred
Hoche wrote a book entitled, The Release of the Destruction of Life Devoid
of Value.  This was the "Bible" for the euthanasia movement and, as you can
see by the date, preceded anything to do with the Nazis.

A book published shortly after World War II by Wertham entitled, The Sign of
Cain, further documents what I had to say about the involvement of the
medical profession in developing euthanasia.  Wertham makes it clear that'
after the medical consent was obtained, the Supreme Court of Germany had to
legalize euthanasia in order that the programmatic destruction of certain
classes of people could be carried out.

Another book which is vital to the continuation of this story is one by
Richard L. Rubinstein, published by Harper and Row in 1975 entitled,
The Cunning of History--Mass Death and the American Future.

Finally, Leo Alexander, a marvelous gentleman and a competent psychiatrist
still living in the Boston suburbs, was the representative of the United States
Army and the American Psychiatric Association at the Nuremburg trials.
Because Dr. Alexander was Austrian, he could speak with all of the war
criminals in their native tongue, and his 40 or so volumes of testimony are
now the property of the Tufts Medical School Library in Boston. His paper
entitled, "Medical Science Under Dictatorship," published in the New England
Journal of Medicine on July 14, 1949 is a classic in its field and depicts
the entire course of events as I outlined in the paragraph you quoted.


Page 2--Honorable Carl Levin

I trust this information is convincing enough to you to believe that I
was not speaking without firm understanding of the historical importance
of a planned system of medical euthanasia, first aimed at the senile, the
infirm, the insane, and the retarded, which eventually escaped those
bounds and became what we think of as the Holocaust.

I would be more than pleased to discuss this with you at any time that
you see fit.

C. Everett Koop, M.D.
Deputy Assistant Secretary for Health