Forgotten Victims Of Nazi Euthanasia Murders: Prelude To Holocaust, Mass Murder
Jan. 26, 2017, DW, 'Remembering the 'forgotten victims' of Nazi 'euthanasia' murders.'
On Friday, January 27, the Bundestag will honor the hundreds of thousands of victims of Nazi "euthanasia" programs.
The killing of those deemed genetically unsuitable was a prelude to the genocide of Jews and others.
The mass murder of the supposed physically and mentally unfit was a project central to Hitler's thinking and the ideology of National Socialism. The Nazi leader translated ideas from the international eugenics and Social Darwinist movements of the early 20th century into a homicidal urge to cleanse the corpus of the German people from ailments and weaknesses. This obsession would cost the lives of more than 70,000 people in Germany and many, many more in countries occupied by the Third Reich. But those murders would not have been possible without the active participation of doctors, judges, administrators, scientists and others.
"So-called racial hygienists, for example, what we would call geneticists, were a point of interface between science and politics," Maike Rotzoll, Deputy Director of the Institute for the History and Ethics of Medicine in Halle, told Deutsche Welle. "They tried to turn their ideas into political reality. And they were very successful." Hitler and the Nazis began pushing their eugenic agenda almost immediately after coming to power on January 30, 1933. By July of that year, the Hitler cabinet had approved the Law for the Prevention of Genetically Diseased Offspring. It mandated the compulsory sterilization of anyone deemed likely to have children who would suffer from a broad range of conditions, including manic depression, deafness, alcoholism and "congenital imbecility."
- The German Nazi euthanasia program began with children.
Imbecility, in particular, was an extremely flexible concept, and German courts were very receptive to applications made by doctors and health officials for the compulsory sterilization of others. Three-member panels at special Hereditary Health Courts approved 90 percent of such requests. 300,000 to 400,000 people, mostly from German mental institutions, were sterilized before World War II - about half on the grounds of "feeblemindedness." Some of them were later put to death. Historian Hans-Ulrich Wehler called sterilization a "dry run" for the Nazi euthanasia campaigns.
- From sterilization to murder: The start of World War II on September 1, 1939, added vicious momentum to an already horrendous attempt to weed out the allegedly unfit from the genetic pool. Those deemed ill no longer merely represented obstacles to the abstract idea of genetic "health." They also consumed resources potentially needed for the war effort. School mathematics textbooks began asking questions like: "The construction of a lunatic asylum costs 6 million marks. How many houses at 15,000 marks each could have been built for that amount?" The murder of the sick began during the war," Rotzoll said. "That wasn't accidental. In war, human lives are worth less." In October 1939, doctors and nurses were told to transfer children they diagnosed with serious genetic ailments to special clinics that were, in reality, killing facilities. Led by Philipp Bouhler, the director of Hitler's private chancellery, and Karl Brandt, one of Hitler's personal physicians, this initiative was soon extended to adults. It was later called the "Action T-4," after Tiergartenstrasse 4 in Berlin, the address of the office that recruited and paid those who participated in the murders.
By 1940, six euthanasia centers had been set up in various parts of Germany. 70,273 people were killed in them. The victims were poisoned, starved to death and in the later stages of Action T-4, killed in gas chambers that preceded the ones in Auschwitz and the other concentration camps. For that reason, the euthanasia program is often characterized as a "trial run" or "dress rehearsal" for the Holocaust...
More, https://www.dw.com/en/remembering-the-forgotten-victims-of-nazi-euthanasia-murders/a-37286088
- 'Life Unworthy Of Life,' ('Useless Eaters'), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_unworthy_of_life
- Aktion T-4 Program, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aktion_T4 Listing of targets from hospital records: Hartheim Euthanasia Centre, where over 18,000 people were killed. In early October, all hospitals, nursing homes, old-age homes and sanatoria were required to report all patients who had been institutionalised for five years or more, who had been committed as "criminally insane", who were of "non-Aryan race" or who had been diagnosed with any on a list of conditions. The conditions included schizophrenia, epilepsy, Huntington's chorea, advanced syphilis, senile dementia, paralysis, encephalitis and "terminal neurological conditions generally"...
As with child inmates, adults were assessed by a panel of experts, working at the Tiergartenstraße offices. The experts were required to make their judgements on the reports, not medical histories or examinations. Sometimes they dealt with hundreds of reports at a time. On each they marked a + (death), a - (life), or occasionally a ? meaning that they were unable to decide. Three "death" verdicts condemned the person and as with reviews of children, the process became less rigorous, the range of conditions considered "unsustainable" grew broader and zealous Nazis further down the chain of command increasingly made decisions on their own initiative.
- Gassing- The first gassings in Germany proper took place in January 1940 at the Brandenburg Euthanasia Centre. The operation was headed by Brack, who said "the needle belongs in the hand of the doctor". Bottled pure carbon monoxide gas was used. At trials, Brandt described the process as a "major advance in medical history"...
- Nazi propaganda poster telling how much it costs in Reichsmarks to keep this person alive, c. 1938.
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