Our friend L. Scott Lissner, the excellent ADA Coordinator at The Ohio State University today sent the following information to a broad audience of e-mail recipients. We in turn pass this along with all due prayerful introspection and memorial thoughts.
S.K.
What became known as the T4 Program, and arguably the Nazi Holocaust began 70 years ago today. Hitler’s euthanasia decree, dated September 1, 1939, read as follows:
“Reich Leader Bouhler and Dr. Brandt are charged with the responsibility for expanding the authority of physicians, to be designated by name, to the end that patients considered incurable according to the best available human judgment [menschlichem Ermessen] of their state of health, can be granted a mercy death [Gnadentod].”
This effort began with the 1933 less than six months after Hitler became chancellor with the “Law for the Prevention of Progeny with Hereditary Diseases” This law established a policy mandating the sterilization of anyone with suffering from diseases considered hereditary including mental illness, cognitive disabilities, physical deformity, epilepsy, blindness, deafness, and severe alcoholism. The scientific and social basis for Nazi eugenics program was largely imported from the eugenics movement in the United States where laws in twenty-nine states forced sterilizations on more than 30,000 people between 1907 and 1939.
Forced sterilization and the systematic killing of the disabled where Germany’s first steps in the Holocaust The T4 euthanasia program was both a rehearsal and justification for Nazi Germany’s subsequent genocidal policies. Extended the ideological justification for eliminating the “unfit” from society to other categories of perceived “genetic” threat to society. The gas chambers and accompanying crematorium designed for the T4 campaign where later utilized to murder Jews, Roma, Sinti and other undesirable and the architects of the T4 program became key figures at among killing centers of Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka
Further Information:
A Teachers Guide to the Holocaust Includes a section on Handicapped: Victims of the Nazi Era, 1933-1945
The Holocaust History Project Includes the entire text of The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide Robert Jay Lifton
The Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies including The exhibition of the “Hospital” in Hadamar,
Crying Hands: Eugenics and Deaf People in Nazi Germany Horst Biesold
Resistance and Resistance on the Plinth Liz Crow, Roaring Girl Productions
People with Disabilities and the Nazi T4 Program: A Partial Bibliography Brenda Brueggemann
Planet of the Blind 