Philipp Bouhler
German general, head of Nazi Action T4 euthanasia program for children and the handicapped (1899–1945)
Philipp Bouhler (11 September 1899 – 19 May 1945) was a German senior Nazi Party functionary who was both a Reichsleiter (National Leader) and Chief of the Chancellery of the Führer of the NSDAP. He was also the SS official responsible for the Aktion T4 euthanasia program that killed more than 250,000 disabled adults and children in Nazi Germany, as well as co-initiator of Aktion 14f13, also called Sonderbehandlung ('special treatment'), that killed 15,000–20,000 concentration camp prisoners.
Bouhler was arrested on 10 May 1945 by American troops. He took his own life nine days later in the U.S. internment camp at Zell am See in Austria.
Early life
Bouhler was born in Munich; his father was a retired colonel. He spent five years in the Royal Bavarian Cadet Corps. He entered the 1st Royal Bavarian Foot Artillery Regiment in 1916 during World War I, was commissioned as a Leutnant in July 1917, and was badly wounded the next month. He was awarded the Iron Cross, 2nd class, and was hospitalized through the end of the war.
After returning to civilian life in 1919, he joined the Deutschvölkischer Schutz- und Trutzbund, the largest and most active antisemitic organization in the new Weimar Republic, and he also enrolled at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München (LMU) to study philosophy and literature. However, after four semesters, he left the university in 1920 and was employed by J.F. Lehmann's publishing house. The following year, he became a contributor to the Völkischer Beobachter, the Nazi Party's newspaper.
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This entry incorporates text from “Philipp Bouhler” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.