80 Yrs Ago Nazi 'T4' Program Euthanized Germans W Disabilities 1939-45: 'Sacrifice the Weak' Slogan
Last edited Tue Oct 27, 2020, 07:09 PM - Edit history (5)
- '80 years ago, lethal Nazi T4 center began euthanizing Germans with disabilities.'- After implementing tens of thousands ‘merciful deaths,’ Hartheim Castle’s crematoria personnel were sent to build Holocaust death camps in occupied Poland. Times of Israel. *May 9, 2020.
- Most of these children from the Protestant Katharinenhof institution were euthanized at Sonnenstein.
Eighty years ago this week, the most lethal “T4” euthanasia center began implementing “merciful deaths” for physically and mentally disabled Germans. Hartheim Castle was not far from Austria’s Linz, where Adolf Hitler grew up. With Renaissance roots, the sprawling castle’s colonnaded courtyard was used by the Nazis for one of Hartheim’s 2 crematoria.The plan for so-called “useless eaters” to be killed came from Nazi theories of eugenics, “racial hygiene,” and social Darwinism.
By the end of the war, an estimated 230,000 people with physical or mental disabilities were murdered in “T4” and its successor program, sometimes called “wild euthanasia.”
After “T4” was supposedly halted in 1941, dozens of the Hartheim staff made their way to occupied Poland. At Chelmno, Sobibor, and Treblinka, they applied their know-how from the euthanasia centers to set up the first death camps for Jews. “The death camps that followed took the technology to a new level,” said historian Michael Berenbaum. “The extermination camps could kill thousands at one time and burn their bodies within hours.” At Hartheim Castle, 18,000 people were murdered “on the books” during “T4,” while an additional 12,000 victims were sent to their deaths after the 1941 halt order. These included Jewish inmates from Mauthausen, sick women from Ravensbruck, and political prisoners including priests.
Of 6 euthanasia centers set up by the Nazis, Hartheim had the highest victim count. Soon after liberation, a document called “The Hartheim Statistics” was discovered on-site.
It was an accounting of money saved by “disinfecting” 70,273* asylum patients in terms of what they would have cost to maintain for one decade.
- Hartheim Castle, site of a ‘T4’ euthanasia center from May 1940 though 1944, Alkoven, Austria.
- German Nazi propaganda poster on the ‘cost’ of keeping disabled people alive.
To give quasi-scientific cover to the killings, thousands of victims’ brains were extracted and sent to German physicians to study “congenital idiocy” and other conditions. Simultaneously, the ashes of victims were sent to families at random, along with a condolence note about their relative’s untimely death from “pneumonia” or the highly contagious “pulmonary tuberculosis.” According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the “T4” program “represented in many ways a rehearsal for Nazi Germany’s subsequent genocidal policies,” complete with bogus medical terminology, “selection” of victims for the gas chambers, and destruction of corpses by fire.
Hitler’s 1939 decree had specified doctors should determine who receives “merciful deaths,” so the “T4” operation had to be given a medical appearance. Not only did doctors determine who died, but they usually operated the carbon monoxide gas tap at killings. Within days of Hitler’s “merciful death” order, a euthanasia apparatus was set up to eliminate thousands of asylum patients across Germany. Operations staff were housed in Berlin at Tiergartenstrasse 4 — hence the nickname “T4” — in a house confiscated from a Jewish family. Not only did doctors determine who died, but they usually operated the carbon monoxide gas tap at killings.
Inside headquarters, committees reviewed patient information cards for people suffering conditions such as schizophrenia, epilepsy, dementia, or other chronic disorders. Also examined were cards for the criminally insane and people who had been confined to an institution for more than 5 years.
By virtue of how many hours a patient was capable of working each week, as well as by how many visitors he or she received, the committee determined life or death...
More, https://www.timesofisrael.com/80-years-ago-lethal-nazi-t4-center-began-euthanizing-germans-with-disabilities
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aktion_T4
Aktion T4. The killings took place from September 1939 until the end of the war in 1945; from *275,000 to 300,000 people were killed in psychiatric hospitals in Germany and Austria, occupied Poland and the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia (now the Czech Republic). The number of victims was originally recorded as *70,273 but this number has been increased by the discovery of victims listed in the archives of the former East Germany. About half of those killed were taken from church-run asylums, often with the approval of the Protestant or Catholic authorities of the institutions.
The Holy See announced on 2 December 1940 that the policy was contrary to divine law and that "the direct killing of an innocent person because of mental or physical defects is not allowed" but the declaration was not upheld by some Catholic authorities in Germany. In the summer of 1941, protests were led in Germany by the Bishop of Münster, Clemens von Galen, whose intervention led to "the strongest, most explicit and most widespread protest movement against any policy since the beginning of the Third Reich", according to Richard J. Evans.
Several reasons have been suggested for the killings, including eugenics, racial hygiene, and saving money. Physicians in German and Austrian asylums continued many of the practices of Aktion T4 until the defeat of Germany in 1945, in spite of its official cessation in Aug. 1941. The informal continuation of the policy led to 93,521 "beds emptied" by the end of 1941...
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- DW, 'Remembering the Forgotten Victims of Nazi Euthanasia Murders,' 2017
https://www.dw.com/en/remembering-the-forgotten-victims-of-nazi-euthanasia-murders/a-37286088
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."
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.
- Bruckberg, Germany, victims of the Nazis' 'T4' euthanasia program are transported to killing centers. The “Charitable Patient Transport Company” was set up to transfer victims from their asylums to 6 new centers, including Hartheim.
- Hartheim Castle with cremtoria smoke, Austria, 1941.
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- 'Sacrifice the Weak' sign at Covid 'ReOpen Tennessee' Rally, April, 2020.
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/sacrifice-the-weak-sign-real/
= new reply since forum marked as read
- DW 'Remembering the Forgotten Victims of Nazi Euthanasia Murders,' 2017
https://www.dw.com/en/remembering-the-forgotten-victims-of-nazi-euthanasia-murders/a-37286088
1933: 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."
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...
- The Nazi euthanasia program began with children.
we, as a race, are capable of. And, apparently, we have learned nothing from this lesson. The photo I referred to in your OP was the one showing a reporter and, behind her, a woman holding up a sign about sacrificing the weak (in order to open TN). The most damning thing was that this woman had no problem showing her true colors by holding up that grotesque sign. My mind still can't seem to wrap itself around the idea that there are people who can still feel this way. I guess I'm just naive. 
my life lulled into believing the worst impulses of humanity had been neutralized or at least mitigated. It appears that those human impulses have re-surged and have found a comfortable home in the GOP. I can only say that this will be the defining election of my lifetime, because 4 more years of an unleashed tRump and his enablers means the end of our democratic experiment IMO.
