Monument Seeks to End Silence on Killings of the Disabled by the Nazis

[KamaAina]

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/03/world/europe/monument-seeks-to-end-silence-on-killings-of-the-disabled-by-the-nazis.html

The first to be singled out for systematic murder by the Nazis were the mentally ill and intellectually disabled. By the end of World War II, an estimated 300,000 of them had been gassed or starved, their fates hidden by phony death certificates and then largely overlooked among the many atrocities that were to be perpetrated in Nazi Germany in the years to follow.

Now, they are among the last to have their suffering publicly acknowledged. On Tuesday, the victims of the direct medical killings by the Nazis were given their own memorial in the heart of Berlin.

A 79-foot-long wall of blue tinted glass now stands at Tiergartenstrasse 4, the site where dozens of doctors plotted and carried out the killings of patients arranged through medical channels under a program known as “operation T4.” Before the program was halted in 1941, some 70,000 people had been killed in the first gas chambers at six sites across Germany. The Nazis’ early success paved the way for mass slaughter that would later be carried out on an even larger scale against Jews, Roma and others in the death camps....

But for those families whose relatives were singled out for death because doctors said they could not contribute to the Nazi war machine, the newest monument rights two wrongs: the crimes committed against the ill and defenseless, and the long postwar silence about their slaughter. Few of the doctors involved in the operation were convicted, and families have never been eligible for any form of postwar compensation.

Never again!

[polly7]

1. The evil committed against all of these people is almost unimaginable.

Horrifically sad.

[Behind the Aegis]

2. While the overtures against the Jews were open and obvious, though little cared....

...if one is really familiar with the Holocaust and its beginnings, then it is well known the mentally and physically challenged were among the first to used as guinea pigs in medical experiments, sterilization, and starved to death. Some of the experiments started as early as 1936. Depression could have used as an excuse for sterilization. It is has been forever and day since I have studied the Holocaust in depth, with certain exceptions, but I seem to recall the medical experiments didn't start or originate in Berlin, but in another large city, I just can't remember which one.