Ballast

[Alfred] Hoche [1865 - 1943, Professor of psychiatry at the University of Freiburg], in his section, insisted that such a policy of killing was compassionate and consistent with medical ethics; he pointed to situations in which doctors were obliged to destroy life (such as killing a live baby at the moment of birth, or interrupting a pregnancy to save the mother). He went on to invoke a concept of "mental death" in various forms of psychiatric disturbance, brain damage, and retardation. He characterized these people as "human ballast" (Ballastexistenzen) and "empty shells of human beings" - terms that were to reverberate in Nazi Germany. Putting such people to death, Hoche wrote, "is not to be equated with other types of killing. . . but [is] an allowable, useful act" He was saying that these people are already dead.

--Robert Jay Lifton, "The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing And The Psychology Of Genocide", p. 47