The Nazi persecution of persons with disabilities in Germany during the Third Reich was one component of their radical public health policies, aimed at excluding hereditarily "unfit" Germans from the national community. All of this was part of the realization of a biomedical vision, which imagined a racially and genetically pure and productive society, an "Aryan master race", and embraced unthinkable strategies to eliminate those who did not fit within that vision.
The "Law for the Prevention of Progeny with Hereditary Diseases", proclaimed July 14, 1933, forced the sterilization of all persons who suffered from diseases considered hereditary, such as mental illness (schizophrenia and manic depression), "congenital feeble-mindedness"(retardation), physical deformity, epilepsy, blindness, deafness, and severe alcoholism, stating that “countless numbers of inferiors and those suffering from hereditary conditions are reproducing unrestrainedly while their sick and asocial offspring burden the community”. Nazi propaganda in the form of posters, news reels and films portrayed disabled people as "useless eaters" and people who had "lives unworthy of living". The propaganda stressed the high cost of supporting disabled people, and suggested that there was something unhealthy or even unnatural about society paying for this. The ideological justification conceived by medical perpetrators for their destruction was also applied to other categories of "biological enemies", most notably to Jews and homosexuals.
Under a secret plan called the “T4 Programme”, these strategies began with forced sterilization and escalated toward mass murder. The most extreme measure, Final Solution, the Euthanasia Programme, which empowered physicians to exterminate the mentally ill and the handicapped using lethal injections or poison gas, was in itself a rehearsal for Nazi Germany's broader genocidal policies. Meticulous records discovered after the war documented 70,273 deaths by gassing at the six "euthanasia" centres between January 1940 and August 1941. Hitler ordered the suspension of the programme in 1941 after opposition from groups within Germany, including Catholic churchmen. However, killings were restarted the following year in a more secretive way, and continued until the end of World War Two.
It is estimated that a total of 2,75,000 adults and children were murdered because of their disabilities!
Was there no limit to their despotism? How could anyone stoop so low as to wage war on a group of weakened and hapless people, whose only fault is that, due to some freak disease or genetic defect, they are different?
thus spake Pollyanna @ 12:09 pm
Footprints: 40
