The Holocaust & People with Disabilities

When we think about the Holocaust, Holocaust is about ONLY JEWS.

However, so many disabled people were killed by Nazi.

These are informations from United States Holocaust Memorial Museum;

[On July 14, 1933, the Nazi government instituted the “Law for the Prevention of Progeny with Hereditary Diseases.” This law, one of the first steps taken by the Nazis toward their goal of creating an Aryan “master race,” called for the sterilization of all persons who suffered from diseases considered hereditary, such as mental illness, learning disabilities, physical deformity, epilepsy, blindness, deafness, and severe alcoholism. With the law’s passage the Third Reich also stepped up its propaganda against people with disabilities, regularly labeling them “life unworthy of life” or “useless eaters” and highlighting their burden upon society.

Just a few years later, the persecution of people with disabilities escalated even further. In the autumn of 1939, Adolf Hitler secretly authorized a medically administered program of “mercy death” code-named “Operation T4,” in reference to the address of the program’s Berlin headquarters at Tiergartenstrasse 4. Between 1940 and 1941 approximately 70,000 Austrian and German disabled people were killed under the T4 program, most via large-scale killing operations using poison gas. (This methodology served as the precursor to the streamlined extermination methods of the “Final Solution.”) Although Hitler formally ordered a halt to the program in late August 1941, the killings secretly continued until the war’s end, resulting in the murder of an estimated 275,000 people with disabilities. ]

Child "Euthanasia" Program

Adolf Hitler's authorization for the Euthanasia Program

In the spring and summer months of 1939, a number of planners began to organize a secret killing operation targeting disabled children. Beginning in October 1939, 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.

Conservative estimates suggest that at least 5,000 physically and mentally disabled German children perished as a result of the child "euthanasia" program during the war years.

Using a practice developed for the child "euthanasia" program, in the autumn of 1939 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. - to gather statistical data -

The categories of patients were:

- those suffering from schizophrenia, epilepsy, dementia, encephalitis, and other chronic psychiatric or neurological disorders

- those not of German or "related" blood

- the criminally insane or those committed on criminal grounds

- those who had been confined to the institution in question for more than five years

The chosen patients by doctors 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 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.

Hadamar death register

In light of the widespread public knowledge and the public and private protests, Hitler ordered a halt to the euthanasia program in late August 1941.

However, according to T4's own internal calculations, the euthanasia effort claimed the lives of 70,273 institutionalized mentally and physically disabled persons at the six gassing facilities between January 1940 and August 1941. Not only disabled people, but so many people died.

The Nazi Persecution of Deaf People (Scholarly Presentation)

The members of this panel discussed the Nazi persecution of deaf people, including Nazi policies against them, the “racial science” used by the Nazis to justify this persecution, and the experiences of deaf survivors. Each panelist made a 20-minute presentation, followed by interviews with two survivors, conducted by Dr. Simon J. Carmel, Professor of History, Rochester Institute of Technology.

Audio - https://www.ushmm.org/research/scholarly-presentations/presentations-and-panel-discussions/the-nazi-persecution-of-deaf-people

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Please refer to these sites.

+ This site is summary of Nazi persecution of disabled people.

+ This video is about ..(the methods by which the Nazis worked to eliminate the “weak” and purify the Aryan race by killing or sterilizing mentally and physically disabled people. Shows excerpts from Nazi propaganda films intended to justify and gain public support for their actions by reason of mercy, cost, or natural selection.)

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Sources : United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Euthanasia program