The Nazis did not even call them people, but parasites. "Sterilization will make the nation strong," they initially insisted. But they did not intend to limit themselves to the castration of the disabled. Their goal was to exterminate tens of thousands of Germans physically.
The leaders of the Nazi party, including Adolf Hitler, believed that the state, in order to "breed" the most perfect human species, should significantly influence the procreation of its citizens. Although this concept, implementing the postulates of eugenics, was nothing new, in the Third Reich it was taken to an insane extreme, allowing the possibility of physical elimination of individuals considered to be defective.
It did not only refer to racial ideology; Absolutely understood economic considerations were also of great importance. Parasites, as they were called, benefited from state funds, also occupied hospital beds and absorbed personnel whose involvement could be used, for example, in the treatment of wounded Wehrmacht soldiers.
400,000 sterilized
Immediately after Hitler took power, in July 1933, the law on compulsory sterilization of people diagnosed with a hereditary disease that could cause mental or physical defects in their offspring was passed. The criteria according to which men and women were qualified for the procedures were, however, so unclear that they could be interpreted quite freely and sterilized, for example, for people who had problems with alcohol abuse or suffering from depression. In the name of the slogan "thanks to sterilization the nation will be strong" by 1944 about 400,000 people were deprived of their reproductive capacity. people.
As soon as Hitler came to power, the National Socialists passed a law intended to "cleanse" the nation.
At the same time, preliminary steps were also taken towards a more radical action, namely the scheduled killing of the sick. First, the ground had been prepared for this by launching a hideous propaganda campaign. In the newsreels, specially selected disabled people were shown, with the greatest possible degree of deformation, and the shots were framed in such a way as to evoke a sense of terror in the viewers. In this way, efforts were made to alienate "degenerates" from society.
T4. Plan of mass murder of the disabled
The "euthanasia" action was given the code name "T4", from the headquarters at Tiergartenstrasse 4 in Berlin. The term "euthanasia" in this case is an obvious euphemism. The whole enterprise had nothing to do with mercy - it was a mass genocide planned in cold blood. It is shocking that this grim crime was the work of people claiming to be proud doctors, and therefore bound by the Hippocratic Oath, which required that they always try to heal and save the sick. One of the main ruthless murderers' doctors was Hitler's personal medic, Dr. Karl Brandt.
Initially, in August 1939, only sick German children were included in the action. They were either put to death in special hospital wards by administering phenobarbital or starved to death. By the end of the war, at least 5,000 people were killed in this way. little patients. Their corpses were used by German scientists for scientific research.
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Then, in accordance with Hitler's decree of September 1, 1939, the extermination of the adult sick began. Six extermination centers were prepared for them in the territory of the Reich, located on the grounds of psychiatric hospitals or care facilities. They were "disinfected", that is, they were killed there in gas chambers with carbon monoxide.
The murdered were robbed of their most valuable personal belongings. Their gold teeth were also pulled out, and then their bodies were burned in the crematorium. The unburned parts of the skeleton were ground in electric grinders. The ashes were buried or thrown into the river. The entire procedure, from the moment the patient arrived until his corpse was "processed" into bone meal, lasted only a few hours. The family was not informed about the death until some time later, so that they could provide more money to support the patient.
Tuberculosis, not genocide
In order to blur the traces and obscure the image of this criminal activity, the documents on deaths were prepared accordingly. They contained false data as to the cause and place of death. One of the more "popular" diseases that patients allegedly died from was tuberculosis. The place of death often mentioned in documents was the insane asylum in Chełm, a town on the eastern edge of the General Government.
Initially, only sick children were murdered under the Aktion T4. The photo shows little patients of the Schönbrunn Psychiatric Hospital.
The mass extermination system developed and tested during the elimination of the disabled was later successfully used in German death camps in Poland. It was during Operation T4 that criminals such as Christian Wirth, the later commandant of the Bełżec camp, or Franz Stangl, the commandant of the death camps in Sobibór and Treblinka gained their first skills.
Until August 21, 1941, when Operation T4 was officially completed, over 70,000 people were murdered. Reich citizens with disabilities. However, they were actually killed until the end of the war, only the ways and places where they were killed have changed.
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Bibliography:
The article was based on the sources collected by the author during the work on the book "Bilans harm. What did the German occupation of Poland really look like "