'I helped healthy woman die'
A maverick German politician yesterday admitted helping a healthy elderly woman to kill herself as part of a campaign to change the laws governing suicide.
Bettina S (79) had contacted Roger Kusch because she was afraid that she might have to move into a care home. Within weeks of their first meeting she was dead.
"Her last words were, 'Auf Wiedersehen'," Mr Kusch (53), a lawyer who was once an up-and-coming Christian Democrat politician, said.He said the farewell, "see you again", was spoken in jest by a woman happy to leave the world.
Now Mr Kusch wants Germany to replace Switzerland as the destination of choice for people tired of life. Encouraged by the Swiss organisation Dignitas, prospective suicides from across Europe have been travelling to Switzerland to die on their own terms.
More than half of the 141 people who killed themselves with the help of Dignitas last year came from Germany, a country where mercy killing has had a particular stigma since the days of the Nazis' forced euthanasia programme.
Speaking of the suicide mission, Mr Kusch said: "I came to her apartment in Wurzburg at about 11 o'clock last Saturday morning," Mr Kusch, who has no medical training, said.
Within half an hour she was preparing the suicide cocktail, he said. Mr Kusch then left the room. When he returned after three hours, Bettina S was dead.
The exact procedures used by Mr Kusch were important, designed to keep him within the law and to demonstrate that people could help someone to die without risking jail.
Mercy killing -- "killing on request" in the German terminology -- is punishable by between six months and five years in jail.
To be liable for prosecution the assister would have to be actively involved.(©The Times, London)
- Roger Boyes in Berlin
