Karl Brandt is alive and well and writing for the BMJ

It’s good to see that Dr Karl Brandt has been reincarnated as an attractive young research associate at Oxford University, and is now known as Francesca Minerva. All too often the leading Nazis were reincarnated as very lowly life-forms, such as moss or krill. Reinhard Heydrich, for example, was reborn as Chlamydia and is now living inside a Slovakian woman called Svetlana. Dr Brandt, then, has lucked out.

Karl spent many years supplementing his important work as Hitler’s personal physician by running the Action T4 programme, under which disabled people were killed because they had supposedly miserable lives and were a burden on the state. His conviction has survived transportation on the astral plane, luckily.

‘Francesca Minerva’, writing in the Journal of Medical Ethics, has suggested that, if it’s OK to abort babies before they’re born, it should also be OK for new-born disabled babies to be killed if their mums are agreeable to the idea. She argues that, even though disabled babies ‘are often reported to be happy’, ‘to bring up such children might be an unbearable burden on the family and on society as a whole’. Ms Minerva even suggests that healthy babies could be killed if their mums can’t afford to look after them. Sadly, Minerva/Brandt does not suggest how the children should be murdered.