Assisted suicide of healthy 79-year-old upsets Germany

Roger Kusch in Hamburg, Germany, with a video of Bettina Schardt, 79,

whom he assisted with suicide.

From the NY Times international desk July 3:

FRANKFURT — When Roger Kusch helped Bettina Schardt kill herself at home on Saturday, the grim, carefully choreographed ritual was like that in many cases of assisted suicide, with one exception.

Ms. Schardt, 79, a retired X-ray technician from the Bavarian city of Würzburg, was neither sick nor dying. She simply did not want to move into a nursing home, and rather than face that prospect, she asked Mr. Kusch, a prominent German campaigner for assisted suicide, for a way out.

Her last words, after swallowing a deadly cocktail of the anti-malaria drug chloroquine and the sedative diazepam, were “auf Wiedersehen,” Mr. Kusch recounted at a news conference on Monday.

It was hardly the last word on her case, however. Ms. Schardt’s suicide — and Mr. Kusch’s energetic publicizing of it — have set off a national furor over the limits on the right to die, in a country that has struggled with this issue more than most because of the Nazi’s euthanizing of at least 100,000 mentally disabled and incurably ill people.

“What Mr. Kusch did was particularly awful,” Beate Merk, the justice minister of Bavaria, said in an interview. “This woman had nothing wrong other than her fear. He didn’t offer her any other options.”

Germany’s conservative chancellor, Angela Merkel, declared on a German news channel on Wednesday, “I am absolutely against any form of assisted suicide, in whatever guise it comes.”

On Friday, Bavaria and four other German states will push for new laws to ban commercial ventures that help people kill themselves. Suicide itself is not a crime, nor is aiding a suicide, provided it does not cross the line into euthanasia, or mercy
killing.

But many here do not want Germany to follow the example of Switzerland, where
liberal laws on euthanasia have led to a bustling trade in assisted suicide. In the last decade, nearly 500 Germans have crossed the border to end their lives with the help of a Swiss group that facilitates suicides.