Disabled Adults, Children 'Unworthy of Life' 1st Nazi Murder Victims 1939, Jews, Gypsys, Gays, JehovWit

Last edited Sun Oct 27, 2024, 08:55 PM - Edit history (1)

USHMM. Holocaust Encyl. Nazi "Euthanasia" Program. Euthanasia Prog. & Aktion T4. -Edit.

The goal of the Nazi Euthanasia Program was to kill people with mental and physical disabilities. In the Nazi view, this would cleanse the “Aryan” race of people considered genetically defective and a financial burden to society. KEY FACTS

1. The term "euthanasia" means literally "good death". It usually refers to causing a painless death for a chronically or terminally ill individual who would otherwise suffer. 2. In the Nazi context, however, "euthanasia" was a euphemistic or indirect term for a clandestine murder program. 3. The "euthanasia" program targeted, for systematic killing, patients with mental and physical disabilities living in institutional settings in Germany and German-annexed territories.
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* Program to Murder People with Disabilities *
The Euthanasia Program was the systematic murder of institutionalized patients with disabilities in Germany. It started in 1939, about 2 years before the Nazis began systematically murdering Europe's Jews as part of the "Final Solution." 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.

- Child "Euthanasia" Program. In the spring and summer months of 1939, a number of planners began to organize a secret killing operation targeting disabled children.. On Aug.18, 1939, 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. In Oct. 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...
https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/euthanasia-program
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-- 'Disabled people were Holocaust victims, too: they were excluded from German society and murdered by Nazi programs,' The Conversation, Jan. 26, 2023.

.. Disabled people were the first victims of the Holocaust. They were murdered in a number of Nazi programs specifically targeting them, as well as those that targeted Jews, Sinti, and Roma. In 2023, International Holocaust Remembrance Day marks 90 years since the Nazis assumed power, and immediately began their persecution of everyone they thought of as “inferior”.

The Nazis frequently described disabled people as “useless eaters”, “empty human shells”, and “life unworthy of life”. They chose these labels to evoke images of people who were incapable of doing anything, and so needed to be kept in institutions for their entire lives, wasting the tax dollars of non-disabled people...
https://theconversation.com/disabled-people-were-holocaust-victims-too-they-were-excluded-from-german-society-and-murdered-by-nazi-programs-198298

- Jehovah's Witnesses suffered religious persecution in Nazi Germany 1933- 1945 after refusing to perform military service, join Nazi organizations, or give allegiance to the Hitler regime...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persecution_of_Jehovah%27s_Witnesses_in_Nazi_Germany

- The Americans with Disabilities Act, Ada.gov
https://www.ada.gov/