Before the Nazis Killed Jews, They Euthanized Hundreds of Thousands of Disabled People

Life News ^ | 09.13.19 | Dave Andrusko

[Coleus]

It can’t be said too often that too often we know too little about history–and what we do know often is either wrong or incomplete.  Over the years we’ve posted many stories that buttress and support what remains to many, many people an unknown historical truth–the Nazis “refined” their murderous system with their notorious Aktion T-4 euthanasia program.

As Peter Saunders has so eloquently written, “The horrific genocide of six million Jews was in fact only the final chapter in the Nazi holocaust story.”  Beginning in 1939, 300,000 disabled people “were gassed or given a lethal injection and cremated in six killing facilities in Germany and Austria,” writes Michael Cook. “This helped the Nazi regime to refine its system for processing millions, rather than ‘just’ thousands, of victims.”  One of the best articles I ever read appeared in the New York Times under the headline, “The Nazis’ First Victims Were the Disabled,” by Kenny Fries. Fries is himself Jewish and disabled, wrote about the connection between Aktion T4, the Nazi “euthanasia” program, and the extermination of the disabled, explaining

I first discovered that people with disabilities were sterilized and killed by the Nazis when I was a teenager, watching the TV mini-series “Holocaust” in 1978. But it would be years before I understood the connections between the killing of the disabled and the killing of Jews and other “undesirables,” all of whom were, in one way or another, deemed “unfit.”

The [German] neurologist [to whom Fries is explaining his research] does not know much about what I’m telling him. While he does know that approximately 300,000 disabled people were killed in T4 and its aftermath, he doesn’t know about the direct connection between T4 and the Holocaust. He doesn’t know that it was at Brandenburg, the first T4 site, where methods of mass killing were tested, that the first victims of Nazi mass killings were the disabled, and that its personnel went on to establish and run the extermination camps at Treblinka, Belzec and Sobibor.

Saunders added

The detail of how it happened, and particularly the role of doctors in the process, is not at all well known.  What ended in the 1940s in the gas chambers of Auschwitz, Dachau, and Treblinka had much more humble beginnings in the 1930s in nursing homes, geriatric hospitals and psychiatric institutions all over Germany. When the Nazis arrived, the medical profession was ready and waiting.

Fries cites the hugely influential 1920 book, “Permitting the Destruction of Unworthy Life” by Alfred Hoche, a psychiatrist, and Karl Binding, a distinguished lawyer, “which became the blueprint for the exterminations of the disabled carried out by the Third Reich.” But he quite rightly hears ominous contemporary echoes.

A reading of Hoche and Binding, Fries remarks,

shows the similarity between what they said and what exponents of practical ethics, such as Peter Singer, say about the disabled today. As recently as 2015, Singer, talking with the radio host Aaron Klein on his show, said, “I don’t want my health insurance premiums to be higher so that infants who can experience zero quality of life can have expensive treatments.”

Fries ends with this inquiry with an admonition and warning:

What kind of society do we want to be? Those of us who live with disabilities are at the forefront of the larger discussion of what constitutes a valued life. What is a life worth living? Too often, the lives of those of us who live with disabilities are not valued, and feared.  At the root of this fear is misunderstanding, misrepresentation, and a lack of knowledge of disability history and, thus, disabled lives.  LifeNews.com Note: Dave Andrusko is the editor of National Right to Life News and an author and editor of several books on abortion topics. This post originally appeared in at National Right to Life News Today —- an online column on pro-life issues.

[Coleus]

very sad, there is so much evil in this world. Hitler and the Nazis were evil and ruthless satanic animals.>>>>

On July 14, 1933, the German government instituted the “Law for the Prevention of Progeny with Hereditary Diseases.” This law called for the sterilization of all persons who suffered from diseases considered hereditary, including mental illness, learning disabilities, physical deformity, epilepsy, blindness, deafness, and severe alcoholism. With the law’s passage the Third Reich also stepped up its propaganda against the disabled, regularly labeling them “life unworthy of life” or “useless eaters” and highlighting their burden upon society.

[NativeSon]

Wasn’t the eugenics movement started here, in the US?

Sterilization & lobotomies were all the rage.

[P.O.E.]

Now they abort the “undesirables”. Just done under a different disguise, but evil nonetheless.

[lightman]

Beware the actuaries.

[the_daug]

What a piker. Jo Stalin already killed his millions.

[NativeSon]

California, apparently, lead the way in sterilization of “undesirables”.

https://www.uvm.edu/~lkaelber/eugenics/CA/CA.html

[luvbach1]

Another Nazi-regime atrocity one doesn’t hear too much about is the starvation and murder of hundreds of thousands of Russian POWs and Commisars. The Nazis considered them untermenchen (subhumans). The “prison camps” were little miore than open fields surrounded by barbed wire.

[seowulf]

The story I heard from my Dad about his family, is that some people came up the mountain and wanted to sterilize Grandma. Grandpa and his twelve sons didn't think much of that idea and "gently" escorted them down the hill.

http://www.appalachianhistory.net/2019/03/better-race-of-men.html

[NativeSon]

They were at it until 1979.

The Nazi’s just rushed things.

[Telepathic Intruder]

The Nazis believed in a sort of social Darwinism in which the strong (namely themselves) helps society along by eliminating the weaker groups in society (namely everyone else but especially the physically handicapped, the Jews, and anyone not racially German living in Germany).

[ifinnegan]

This poster (from around 1938) reads: "60,000 Reichsmark is what this person suffering from a hereditary defect costs the People's community during his lifetime. Fellow citizen, that is your money too. Read '[A] New People', the monthly magazine of the NSDAP Office of Racial Policy."

Aktion T4, Wikipedia

[LouAvul]

The horrific genocide of six million Jews was in fact only the final chapter in the Nazi holocaust story

Not to mention the fact that they also killed 5 million other ethnic minorities along with the Jews.

That fact often gets left out.

[setter]

I remember growing up in the 70’s seeing people with Down Syndrome out and about.

Have not seen any in ages.

They have all been aborted off via genetic testing.

[dfwgator]

Sterilization & lobotomies were all the rage.

See Rosemary Kennedy

[huldah1776]

Always think of this whenever I hear about the disabled being murdered, and today it is before they draw their first breath.

Jeremiah 31

7For thus says the Lord,
“Sing aloud with gladness for Jacob,
And shout among the chief of the nations;
Proclaim, give praise and say,
‘O Lord, save Your people,
The remnant of Israel.’
8
“Behold, I am bringing them from the north country,
And I will gather them from the remote parts of the earth,
Among them the blind and the lame,
The woman with child and she who is in labor with child, together;
A great company, they will return here.
9
“With weeping they will come,
And by supplication I will lead them;
I will make them walk by streams of waters,
On a straight path in which they will not stumble;
For I am a father to Israel,
And Ephraim is My firstborn.”

10
Hear the word of the Lord, O nations,
And declare in the coastlands afar off,
And say, “He who scattered Israel will gather him
And keep him as a shepherd keeps his flock.”
11
For the Lord has ransomed Jacob
And redeemed him from the hand of him who was stronger than he.

[FreedomPoster]

Interesting story and link.

[griswold3]

In socialism, people become either assets or liabilities.

[Spacetrucker]

Knew about Aktion T4 some years ago, my daughter and I are both avid history nuts. There’s a documentary on Netflix about it - the most vile things imaginable (and some not even imaginable) were done to those less capable among the population back then.

[rdcbn]

The Nazis systematically murdered 13+ million people in the death camps of which an estimated 6-7 million were of actual or suspected Jewish ancestry. Many were Christians, who the Nazis wanted to eliminate nearly as much as Jewish people

The groundwork is being laid and a new generation is being demonized and dehumanized in much the same way as the Jewish people were in 1930s Germany

One of the most fascinating dynamics is the way that the much of the leadership, financiers and intellectuals of the Democrat Party and the Progressive Left is made up of secular individuals of Jewish ancestry while much of the grass roots radical base of the Democrats and the Left are virulent anti semites who hate the Jewish people with a passion