![]() Įuthanasia was initiated in 1939 when a German couple called Knauer petitioned Hitler for permission for their deformed infant to be administered a 'mercy death.' At the beginning of October 1939, Hitler signed a private note, symbolically backdated to 1 st September 1939, authorizing officials of Hitler's Chancellery to prepare plans for the killing of incurably ill adult mental patients. Gypsies (Sinti and Roma), were also declared to be racially 'unclean' and in the concentration camps were among the most mistreated of inmates. These were the physically handicapped and the 'hereditarily diseased,' the so-called 'asocials,' the 'work shy,' habitual criminals, prostitutes, and homosexuals, who incurred the particular wrath of the Nazis. ![]() It was an essential feature of the progressive development of the racial state that outsiders, other than Jews or political dissidents, were excluded from the Nazi Volksgemeinschaft and were persecuted, eventually to the point of extinction. With Hitler at the centre, the Nazi leaders vied with one another in pushing policies to extremes, secure in the knowledge that this was what their Führer wanted and at the same time maintaining their standing in his eyes. It must have been chaos for good government, particularly with regard to the racial policies of the Third Reich. This policy by Hitler led to confusion and internecine squabbles between the political satraps surrounding him, and of course, their rival empires. Hitler had failed to abolish the Weimar Constitution and ignored all advice by such bureaucratically-minded Nazis as Hans-Heinrich Lammers, the head of the Reich Chancellery, and Reich Interior Minister Wilhelm Frick, to formulate a Reich Constitution. It was to become a dress rehearsal for the much larger-scale genocide of the Jews and others that was to emerge in late 1941.Įven in the totally controlled and manipulated Third Reich, legislation to enact the extermination policy was deliberately avoided because of the publicity it would arouse which, in turn, would have seriously inhibited the visionary concepts of the Nazi ideologists. The authority for the implementation of this operation depended entirely on the personal authority given by Hitler to others. It was their fate to be exterminated in the shooting pits and gas chambers 'in the East.' Two groups, however, were treated quite separately, regardless of their potential usefulness, racial, physical or mental health - the Jews and Gypsies. All manner of groups within Germany proper were identified and gradually brought within the criteria of euthanasia: the elderly, tubercular patients, vagrants, and those designated as 'work shy.' In short, what had started out as the extermination of the medically 'incurable' concluded with those who, for whatever reason, were unable to contribute to the economic well being of the Reich. The extermination of the Jews 'in the East' was an extension of this nefarious policy and should be treated as such. Įuthanasia was widespread and fully engaged the principal protagonists of the high-ranking T4 leadership. The period of reorientation that followed resulted in an ever-increasing number of groups being included for extermination. The suspension should be more accurately called a pause for reorganization. This was a deception devised to deflect criticism from the Catholic Church. To speak of the 'suspension' of the euthanasia program in August 1941 is misleading as children were exempted from this pause. Euthanasia made it possible for the initial crimes against German mental patients to become the model for far more extensive mass murder when in 1941-2, T4 supplied 100 experts of the Final Solution of the Jewish Question to serve and administer the death camps in the East.Īccording to Raul Hilberg, ∾uthanasia' was conceptual as well as technological, which represented an administrative pre-figuration of the 'Final Solution' in the death camps. In Nazi terms, euthanasia was merely a euphemism for 'murder.' The Nazis killed, not to relieve suffering but for racial and eugenic reasons. ![]() ![]() ![]() Belzec: Stepping Stone to Genocide - Chapter 2ĬHAPTER 2 Euthanasia precursor to genocide ![]()
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