Jewish Victims. Jews in Occupied Countries. Nazi Perpetrators. Adolf Hitler. Non-Jewish Victims. Roma Gypsies. Jehovah's Witnesses.
Resistance Fighters. Mufti Haj Amin al-Husseini. World Reaction. Allied Declaration on Persecution of the Jews. Arab Middle East. Dominican Republic.
Great Britain. International Refugee Policy. United States. The Vatican. Vichy France. World Response to the Holocaust. Holocaust Denial. It usually refers to causing a painless death for a chronically or terminally ill individual who would otherwise suffer.
In the Nazi context, however, "euthanasia" was a euphemistic or indirect term for a clandestine murder program. The "euthanasia" program targeted, for systematic killing, patients with mental and physical disabilities living in institutional settings in Germany and German-annexed territories. The Euthanasia Program was the systematic murder of institutionalized patients with disabilities in Germany. It predated the genocide of European Jewry the Holocaust by approximately two years.
The program was one of many radical eugenic measures which aimed to restore the racial "integrity" of the German nation. It aimed to eliminate what eugenicists and their supporters considered "life unworthy of life": those individuals who—they believed—because of severe psychiatric, neurological, or physical disabilities represented both a genetic and a financial burden on German society and the state.
In the spring and summer months of , a number of planners began to organize a secret killing operation targeting disabled children. They were led by Philipp Bouhler, the director of Hitler's private chancellery, and Karl Brandt, Hitler's attending physician. On August 18, , the Reich Ministry of the Interior circulated a decree requiring all physicians, nurses, and midwives to report newborn infants and children under the age of three who showed signs of severe mental or physical disability.
Beginning in October , public health authorities began to encourage parents of children with disabilities to admit their young children to one of a number of specially designated pediatric clinics throughout Germany and Austria.
In reality, the clinics were children's killing wards. There, specially recruited medical staff murdered their young charges by lethal overdoses of medication or by starvation. At first, medical professionals and clinic administrators included only infants and toddlers in the operation.
As the scope of the measure widened, they included youths up to 17 years of age. Conservative estimates suggest that at least 10, physically and mentally disabled German children perished as a result of the child "euthanasia" program during the war years.
In the autumn of , Adolf Hitler signed a secret authorization in order to protect participating physicians, medical staff, and administrators from prosecution. This authorization was backdated to September 1, , to suggest that the effort was related to wartime measures. For these reasons, Hitler chose it to serve as the engine for the "euthanasia" campaign. The program's functionaries called their secret enterprise "T4. Under their leadership, T4 operatives established six gassing installations for adults as part of the "euthanasia" action.
These were:. Euthanasia Program Using a practice developed for the child "euthanasia" program, in the autumn of , T4 planners began to distribute carefully formulated questionnaires to all public health officials, public and private hospitals, mental institutions, and nursing homes for the chronically ill and aged.
The limited space and wording on the forms, as well as the instructions in the accompanying cover letter, combined to give the impression that the survey was intended simply to gather statistical data. The form's sinister purpose was suggested only by the emphasis placed upon the patient's capacity to work and by the categories of patients which the inquiry required health authorities to identify.
The categories of patients were:. Secretly recruited "medical experts," physicians—many of them of significant reputation—worked in teams of three to evaluate the forms. On the basis of their decisions beginning in January , T4 functionaries began to remove patients selected for the "euthanasia" program from their home institutions.
The patients were transported by bus or by rail to one of the central gassing installations for killing. Within hours of their arrival at such centers, the victims perished in gas chambers. The gas chambers, disguised as shower facilities, used pure, bottled carbon monoxide gas. T4 functionaries burned the bodies in crematoria attached to the gassing facilities.
Other workers took the ashes of cremated victims from a common pile and placed them in urns to send to the relatives of the victims.
The families or guardians of the victims received such an urn, along with a death certificate and other documentation, listing a fictive cause and date of death. A new bureaucracy, headed by physicians, was established with a mandate to kill anyone deemed to have a "life unworthy of living. However, the criteria for inclusion in this program were not exclusively genetic, nor were they necessarily based on infirmity. An important criterion was economic. Nazi officials assigned people to this program largely based on their economic productivity.
The Nazis referred to the program's victims as "burdensome lives" and "useless eaters. The program's directors ordered a survey of all psychiatric institutions, hospitals, and homes for chronically ill patients. At Tiergartenstrasse 4, medical experts reviewed forms sent by institutions throughout Germany but did not examine patients or read their medical records. Nevertheless, they had the power to decide life or death.
While the program's personnel killed people at first by starvation and lethal injection, they later chose asphyxiation by poison gas as the preferred killing technique. Physicians oversaw gassings in chambers disguised as showers, using lethal gas provided by chemists.
Program administrators established gas chambers at six killing centres in Germany and Austria: Hartheim, Sonnenstein, Grafeneck, Bernburg, Hadamar, and Brandenburg.
The SS Nazi paramilitary corps staff in charge of the transports donned white coats to keep up the charade of a medical procedure. Program staff informed victims' families of the transfer to the killing centres. Visits, however, were not possible.
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