[aristeides]

Don't know whether there's any truth in this story, but Nazi genocide did start with the killings of the mentally ill. The same personnel were later used for the genocidal program. The story is told in Henry Friedlander, The Origins of Nazi Genocide: From Euthanasia to the Final Solution.

[Al B.]

Don't know whether there's any truth in this story, but Nazi genocide did start with the killings of the mentally ill.

And the Nazi euthanasia program had its roots in the American eugenics movement, as detailed in the following book passage and elsewhere:

And then Nazi Germany took eugenic treatment of the mentally ill to its ultimate end.

Eugenic attitudes toward the mentally ill -- that they were a drain on society and a threat to its "germ plasm" -- inevitably raised the possibility of a more extreme measure.  Should a state simply kill its insane?  This question was first raised in the United States in 1911, when Charles Davenport published Heredity in Relation to Eugenics.  Although he generally argued against killing the unfit, he wrote that if a society had to choose between allowing "mental defectives" to procreate and killing them, the latter would be the preferable alternative.  "Though capital punishment is a crude method of grappling with the difficulty [of defectives]," he concluded, it is definitely superior to that of training the feeble-minded and criminalistic and then letting them loose upon society and permitting them to perpetuate in their offspring these animal traits.⁶³  Five years later, Madison Grant, a wealthy New York lawyer and a founder of the American Eugenics Society, pushed this notion a step further in his book The Passing of the Great Race.  "The Laws of Nature require the obliteration of the unfit, and human life is valuable only when it is of use to the community or race," he argued.  "A great injury is done to the community by the perpetuation of worthless types."⁶⁴

The idea that the mentally ill, and other misfits, were "useless eaters" was now alive and loose in the Western world.  Grant's best-selling book went through four editions and was translated into French, Norwegian and German.  Hitler, according to German historian Stefan Kühl, later wrote Grant a fan letter, telling him the "book was his Bible."⁶⁵

-- Robert Whitaker, "Mad in America: Bad Medicine, Bad Science, and the Enduring Mistreatment of the Mentally Ill," pp.64-65

Like you, I can't tell how factual this story is, but the attitude is still there, decades after the defeat of Hitler.  You can check out FReeper comments on this thread to see what I mean: Hurdling Toward Eugenics...Again.

Friedlander's book on the Nazi euthanasia program is terrific.....the best historical reference I've seen.