Author: Tracey Young. (September 28, 2021). Analysis Part 1: Are Governments in Canada Ushering in a 21st Century Aktion T4 Program: Social Exclusion, Persecution, and Targeting of People with Disabilities? Canadian Advocacy Centre for Health, Safety and Justice. Retrieved from: https://canadianadvocacycentre.blogspot.com/2021/09/analysis-part-1-are-governments-in.html.
Disclaimer: I feel compelled to provide a trigger warning for this article, because some of what I will cover may be very shocking and distressing to some people. I refuse to refer to the T4 Program using the euphemism of "euthanasia," which is how it is described in many of the records that now exist. We must not soften what this Nazi program entailed – the intentional targeting, persecution, human experimentation, torture, and murder of thousands of children and adults with disabilities and health conditions by the Nazis.
Introduction
The early stages of the Nazi holocaust of the Third Reich carried out by Adolf Hitler, and his mass murdering minions does not appear to be widely known about. Sadly, as the old saying goes, "those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” The quote, attributed to American philosopher George Santayana, reveals an astute and prescient thinker. Because there is so much to cover, I will be breaking down the content into three parts.
In Part 1, I present the following:
◼ The ideological and philosophical foundations of the Nazis and Adolph Hitler's obsession with eugenics, which included his ideas of "genetic and racial purity"
◼ Information about the Aktion T4 Program that was used to commit Crimes Against Humanity and genocide of people with disabilities and health conditions
◼ Ideology in action: How the T4 Program worked to target, exclude, persecute, and remove people with developmental, mental health and physical disabilities from participation in society under the Nazi regime
◼ The Doctors, and Nurses of T4: The Instrumental Role of Health Care Professionals in Eugenics, Torture, and Murder of people with disabilities
◼ How T4 was used to conduct human experimentation, torture, and murder the first group and class of people to be sent to the gas chambers by the Nazis -- people with disabilities and those who were not view as economically productive members of society
Eugenics: Genetic and Racial Purity as Government, Social and Public Health Policy under the Nazis
The ideological and philosophical foundation of Adolph Hitler and the Nazi Party was that of eugenics, which dictated the healthiest, fittest, and most "racially" pure should be allowed to have children to pass on their genes, and to live.
The core belief of eugenics was that human populations could be improved by "purifying" their genetic make-up. This included the removal of "unhealthy" or ‘undesirable’ genetic elements, such as disability. Eugenics-based policies and human rights atrocities such as the sterilization of Indigenous peoples, people with disabilities, and others have been carried out in Canada, the United States, Australia, France, Sweden, and Japan prior to, and after the Nazis made this state policy (Llewellyn et al., 2020).
Hitler and his regime were obsessed with eugenics and "purity," which took various forms. "Racial purity," was idealized as those who had Aryan features -- blond hair, blue eyes, and white skin. Nazi racial policies divided people into those who were considered "racially pure" and who could prove this "Aryan purity" through state-certified Aryan certificates and papers which "proved" their lineage going back several generations. This is where the infamous, "your papers, please" is said to have begun.
Credit 2: Jens Liebenau (2008). Geneological table for evidence of Aryan ancestry for five generations, used for Adolf Hitler’s Holocaust (persecution of Jews)
The Aktion T4 Program: Eugenics, Crimes Against Humanity and The Genocide of People with Disabilities & Health Conditions
Llewellyn et al. (2020) wrote:
"Nazi theorists saw German society as a sick organism, its bloodstream contaminated by degenerate and undesirable elements. Among those ‘contaminating’ Germany were the racially impure, physically disabled, mentally infirm, the criminally minded and the sexually aberrant.
The Nazis believed the state should intervene to improve the health of German society. The first step was to identify its contaminating elements, the second to restrict their growth, the third to eliminate them. This required difficult and unpalatable policies, which the Nazis justified with eugenics theories and references to social Darwinism (the ‘survival of the fittest’)."
In 1933, when Hitler became Chancellor of Germany, he created the first eugenics-based policy, the Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily-Diseased Offspring. This policy "required German doctors to register all genetically-related illnesses or defects in all patients other than women over 45.
Examples of reportable problems were mental retardation, schizophrenia, manic-depression, blindness and deafness, or other severe physical deformities. Even chronic alcoholism could be considered a genetic disorder, at the doctor’s discretion.
This law also set up ‘hereditary health courts’ comprised of two physicians and a lawyer. These courts examined individual cases and ruled whether patients should be “rendered incapable of procreation” (surgically sterilised)."
Over 200, 000 "useless feeders" were sterilized by the Nazi regime in the first three years of the program. "The vast majority of sterilised patients were suffering from mental illness or deformity. Of the patients sterilised in 1934, 53 per cent were intellectually disabled or ‘feeble-minded’, 25 per cent schizophrenics and 14 per cent epileptics. In total, the Nazi ‘health courts’ approved the forced sterilisation of more than 300,000 people between 1934 and 1945" (Llewellyn et al.).
"In October 1935, a month after the passing of the Nuremberg Laws, the Nazis introduced the Law for the Protection of the Genetic Health of the German People." The goal and objective of these policies were to facilitate the "Nazi bureaucracy to collect a considerable amount of information about the racial and genetic make-up of its citizens. Its long-term plan was to compile a racial and genetic blueprint of the entire nation." (Llewellyn et al.).
Aktion T4 Program
In September 1939 the Aktion T4 Program was put in place with the signing of a memo by Hitler. This was the initial genocide program that was used by the Nazis.
This program included the following elements:
➤ It targeted and persecuted the most vulnerable, marginalized, and often "invisible people" in society. This included infants and adults who were confined to facilities due to developmental disabilities, mental, physical, and "invisible" disabilities, and chronic health conditions.
➤ T4 also targeted and persecuted those who were not seen as economically "productive." Nazi propaganda used persecutory terms, such as people living “burdensome lives” and being “useless eaters.”
➤ Specially-appointed doctors were assigned to identify and assess “incurable” patients who were "eligible" for a "mercy death" post-diagnosis.
➤ The goals and objectives of emptying hospitals and freeing up resources by killing the mentally disabled.
➤ Inferiority and impurity were also ascribed to those who experienced "incurable" disabilities, because they were seen as genetically "impure."
➤ Families were convinced and manipulated by the Nazis that relinquishing their loved ones would offer them "protection and safety," and it was "in their best interests." "It's for your safety" became a key propaganda term. Of course, nothing could have been further from the truth.
Ideology in Action: Strategic Activities and Fact Patterns of the T4 Program Carried Out By Key Actors
The ideological foundations and key fact patterns of the Aktion T4 program included the following:
➤ The creation and use of influential, "trusted" state leaders communicating with the public to "normalize" state policies, laws, principles, and propaganda to publicly advance discrimination, oppression, persecution, and carrying out the different aspects of the CAH and genocide plans for each targeted group.
➤ Extensive use of state media and propaganda to communicate, normalize and socialize citizens to encourage and support discrimination, persecution, oppression, and the targeting of the disabled. The Nazis created "a vigorous propaganda campaign to prepare the public and lessen sympathy for its victims. Posters depicted cripples and lunatics as burdens on their family and a drain on the state. They took up valuable resources...Each disabled person, Nazi posters claimed, cost the state 60,000 Reichmarks, a burden carried by the German taxpayer."
➤ This propaganda was ubiquitous and appeared everywhere, including in childrens' school lessons. These messages powerfully conveyed persecution and eugenics-driven hatred and loathing of people with disabilities of having 'a life unworthy of life' and of being 'useless feeders.' (Ausmed).
➤ Once these discriminatory and hateful beliefs were well established, "good people," Ie. Good Nazis, and those "faithful and loyal" to the regime, would ignore the atrocities occurring. Later, many would go on to report their neighbours to the authorities. Turning away from the crimes against humanity and genocide taking place -- even in their own backyards in the hospitals where T4 programs were operating.
➤ Institutionalizing and separating PWD's and HC's from their families where they had no way to escape the atrocities the state carried out toward them.
➤ Isolating, alienating, and preventing PWD's and HC's from having contact with loved ones and the outside world once admitted to facilities. And, preventing family members from being able to have contact with them.
➤ The participation of doctors, nurses, and scientists, and use of their professional and societal status to abuse, experiment on, torture, and mass murder PWD's and HC's for years. This will be discussed more below.
➤ Using PWD's and HC's for human experimentation and torturing them in the names of "medicine" and "science."
➤ Abusing, harming, and murdering PWD's and HC's in various ways, including through the use of intentional starvation, vaccines and gas chambers.
Videos on the Aktion T4 Programs Mass Murder of People with Disabilities & Health Conditions
Aktion T4 Introduction
Aktion T4. (2014). Youtube. Retrieved from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9zBVVpCdASk
Note: Blogger will not allow me to embed this video in this post. All other videos for this presenter have been removed from Youtube.
Hitler's Secret Nazi Program that killed thousands of disabled people
Rome Reports in English. Youtube. Retrieved from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ulIjZ7Hbi7Y.
Note: Blogger will not allow me to embed this video in this post.Aktion T4 | Wikipedia audio article
Subhajit Sahu (Dec. 5, 2018). Youtube. Retrieved on Sept. 26, 2021 from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D8K9he3s9vE.
The Doctors, and Nurses of T4: The Instrumental Role of Health Care Professionals in Eugenics, Torture, and Murder
Doctors and nurses were central and instrumental to the eugenics, human experimentation, torture, and mass murder of PWD's under the Aktion T4 program.
With their zeal for creating organizational systems that were efficient, standardized, and well organized, the T4 Program enabled the Nazi regime to systematize the clinical assessment, identification, and decision-making process of which individuals amongst those with disabilities and health conditions would be allowed to live, and those who would be selected to be experimented on, tortured, and murdered.
Nurses and doctors, like all other German citizens, were bombarded with eugenics-related hate-fueled and persecutory propaganda. They too came to internalize the beliefs that people with disabilities were burdens on society. Many came to also believe that Germany would be a better place without PWD's -- the justification for carrying out these murderous policies. Nurses who participated in the Aktion T4 Program did so willingly and voluntarily. Those who did not agree with these policies, and those who did not want to participate in this "nursing work" were moved into other areas of work (Ausmed).
How Aktion T4 was Used to Conduct Human Experimentation, Torture, and Murder People with Disabilities
Torture is defined in the following ways:
1. the infliction of intense pain (as from burning, crushing, or wounding) to punish, coerce, or afford sadistic pleasure
2. something that causes agony or pain
3. anguish of body or mind (Merriam-Webster).
The Aktion T4 Process of Torture and Murder
Doctors in the community were required under the law to refer patients with disabilities to the specially-designated doctors who would complete standardized assessment questionnaires to identify which patients they decided should live or die.
While doctors selected the patients who would be die, nurses killed the
patients in in the following ways:
➤ Giving them lethal injections of intravenous drugs, such as phenobarbitone.
➤ Placing them on a “hunger diet” where patients would be starved to death.
➤ Torturing them by exposing patients to hypothermia so they would die from exposure (Ausmed).
Non-Consenting Human Experimentation on PWD's
Human Experimentation was also part of of the grisly, sadistic, and gross mistreatment PWD's and others' were subjected to by Nazi doctors, scientists, and nurses. These were some of the Nazi experiments that were conducted on people with disabilities:
- Subjecting child and adult victims to electric shocks and burns in order to examine the wounds inflicted on human skin by burns and electrocution
- Starvation and "hunger diets as noted above
- "Cold experiments," which included exposing victims to cold conditions, such as forcibly submersing them in cold water, and studying the effects of hypothermia on their bodies, including how long it took to die
- Experiments involving exposure to toxic nerve agents and chemical gases which were used to kill people in the gas chambers
- Other experiments included the injection of chemicals into different areas of victims' bodies and the injection of known pathogens and diseases
It may seem obvious that victims were "non-consenting" to the torture and experiments that they were used as test subjects for, but this specific issue -- consent is one of the most important things that arose out of the atrocities committed by the Nazis -- the right to Informed Consent regarding participation in research, or experiments conducted with human beings.
This is what led to the Nuremberg Code, which was drafted in response to the testimony heard at the Nuremberg Trials about cruel and inhumane human experimentation, torture and murders committed by the Nazis in the name of "scientific research" and "medicine.". A simple presentation of the principles of the Code is presented below.
The Nuremberg Code came to be embodied in Informed Consent laws, principles, professional ethics, and bioethics created in Canada, and elsewhere. These enduring laws and ethical principles are related to health care decision-making, consent, and non-consent, and the right to autonomy and self-determination in the participation in medical and health interventions, measures, and treatments.
Video: Caring Corrupted -- The Killing Nurses of the Third Reich
Cizik School of Nursing. (Feb. 24, 2017). Youtube. Retrieved on Sept. 26, 2021 from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rz8ge4aw8Ws.
Note: Blogger will not allow me to embed this video in this post.
Video: Disability Awareness Month: The Nazis' Nameless Victims
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. (Oct. 30, 2020. Youtube. Retrieved on Sept. 26, 2021 from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uvrwnJ6hQ9s.
Note: Blogger will not allow me to embed this video in this post.
Video: History of Nazi human experimentation, Medical experiments by Nazi
physicians
Study IQ Education. (April 10, 2020). Youtube. Retrieved from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uHvSz16lcXs.
Credit: Memorial to the Children Victims of the War, Lidice, Czech Republic
Conclusion: It Didn't Start with Gas Chamber
Peeling off the layers of history, we are able to see the Nazi Holocaust that saw over 6 million Jewish people murdered also took the lives of millions of others. Some scholars estimate that between 10 and 17 million people were murdered by the Nazis (Historyplex).
Between 1940 and 1941, approximately 70,023 patients detained in six psychiatric facilities were murdered under the Aktion T4 Program (Berenbaum, 2001).
Berenbaum (2001) wrote:
"On August 24, 1941, almost two
years after the T4 Program was initiated, it appeared to cease. In fact, it had
gone underground and continued covertly during the war years. While the program
claimed over 70,000 victims during its two years of open operation, the killing
centres murdered even more victims between the official conclusion of the
program and the fall of the Nazi regime in 1945.
The total number killed under the T4 Program,
including this covert phase, may have reached 200,000 or more. The official
conclusion of the T4 Program in 1941 also coincided with the escalation of the
Holocaust, the culmination of Nazi programs to eliminate those deemed an
embarrassment to the “master race.”
An estimated 200,000 patients in psychiatric
hospitals in Germany were murdered, albeit more covertly during World War II
and after the closure of the T4 program in 1941. This was referred to as the “Wild Euthanasia,” in which medical
professionals committed human experimentation and torture of psychiatric
patients through starvation and intentional drug overdoses.
The Nazi regime found their human
experimentation, torture, toxic gas experiments and gas chambers so
“successful” in murdering people with disabilities, they decided to use the gas
chambers for their ‘Final Solution’ – the murders of millions of others,
including over 6 million Jewish people, and millions of others, including gay
and lesbian people, and others in the death camps.
In Part 2 of this series, I will present information about the oppression, persecution, and use of Indigenous peoples in Canada, the United States and Black people as non-consenting human experiments and victims of state-sponsored eugenics and torture programs whose roots clearly built on the Aktion T4 program of the Nazis.
References
Ausmed. The Killing Nurses of the Third Reich. Retrieved on Sept. 26th, 2021 from: https://www.ausmed.com/cpd/articles/killing-nurses-third-reich.
Berenbaum, M. (2001). T4 Program: Nazi policy. Encyclopedia Britannica. Retrieved on September 28, 2021 from: https://www.britannica.com/event/T4-Program.
Elhassan, K. (2018). 10 Nazi War Criminals Who Escaped Justice Because They Were Useful to the US. History Collection. Retrieved on September 28, 2021 from: https://historycollection.com/10-nazi-war-criminals-who-escaped-justice-because-they-were-useful-to-the-us/3/.
Ghooi, R. B. (2011). The Nuremberg Code–A critique. Perspectives in Clinical Research, April-June 2011, Vol 2, (2): 72-76. Retrieved on September 28, 2021 from: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3121268/pdf/PCR-2-72.pdf.
Historyplex. How many people died in the Holocaust: The Sad and Shocking Truth. Retrieved on September 28, 2021 from: https://historyplex.com/how-many-people-died-in-holocaust.
Llewellyn, J. Southey, J. and Thompson, S. (2020). Alpha History. Retrieved on September 27, 2021 from: https://alphahistory.com/nazigermany/nazi-eugenics/.
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Eugenics. Retrieved on September 27, 2021 from: https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/eugenics.
Wikipedia. Nazi Eugenics. Retrieved on September 27, 2021 from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_eugenics
Copyright © 2021.Tracey Young/Canadian Advocacy Centre for Health, Safety and Justice. All Rights Reserved.
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