The result was a letter, signed by the Nazi Führer on his personal, not his official, stationery and backdated to the opening day of World War II, directing the leader of his personal medical staff, Karl Brandt, and the head of the personal Chancellery, Philipp Bouhler, to expand the practice of granting a “mercy death” to irreversibly disabled people in state institutions. This written instruction, unlike any document ever discovered about the Holocaust, connects Hitler directly and in writing to a murder operation, the so-called Euthanasia Action.
