For Educators (and all who want to be educated) : MENTALLY AND PHYSICALLY HANDICAPPED: VICTIMS OF THE NAZI ERA

Here is an effective site for educators witha pdf that can be used as a handout....

MENTALLY AND PHYSICALLY HANDICAPPED: VICTIMS OF THE NAZI ERA

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n 1935 Hitler stated privately that "in the event of war, [he] would take up the question of euthanasia and enforce it" because "such a problem would be more easily solved" during wartime. War would provide both a cover for killing and a pretext--hospital beds and medical personnel would be freed up for the war effort. The upheaval of war and the diminished value of human life during wartime would also, Hitler believed, mute expected opposition. To make the connection to the war explicit, Hitler's decree was backdated to September 1, 1939, the day Germany invaded Poland.

Fearful of public reaction, the Nazi regime never proposed a formal "euthanasia" law. Unlike the forced sterilizations, the killing of patients in mental asylums and other institutions was carried out in secrecy. The code name was "Operation T4," a reference to Tiergartenstrasse 4, the address of the Berlin Chancellery offices where the program was headquartered.

Physicians, the most highly Nazified professional group in Germany, were key to the success of "T-4," since they organized and carried out nearly, all aspects of the operation. One of Hitler's personal physicians, Dr. Karl Brandt, headed the program, along with Hitler's Chancellery chief, Philip Bouhler. T-4 targeted adult patients in all government or church-run sanatoria and nursing homes. These institutions were instructed by the Interior Ministry to collect questionnaires about the state of health and capacity for work of all their patients, ostensibly as part of a statistical survey.

The completed forms were, in turn, sent to expert assessors physicians, usually psychiatrists, who made up "review commissions." They marked each name with a "+," in red pencil, meaning death, or a "" in blue pencil, meaning life, or "?" for cases needing additional assessment. These medical experts rarely examined any of the patients and made their decisions from the questionnaires alone. At every step, the medical authorities involved were usually expected to quickly process large numbers of forms....

http://www.ushmm.org/education/resource/handic/handicapped.php

Holocaust Memorial Day: NAZI PERSECUTION OF THE DISABLED: MURDER OF “THE UNFIT”

The Nazi persecution of persons with disabilities in Germany was one component of radical public health policies aimed at excluding hereditarily “unfit” Germans from the national community. These strategies began with forced sterilization and escalated toward mass murder. The most extreme measure, the Euthanasia Program, was in itself a rehearsal for Nazi Germany’s broader genocidal policies.

The ideological justification conceived by medical perpetrators for the destruction of the “unfit” was also applied to other categories of “biological enemies,” most notably to Jews and Roma (Gypsies). Compulsory sterilization and “euthanasia,” like the “Final Solution,” were components of a biomedical vision which imagined a racially and genetically pure and productive society, and embraced unthinkable strategies to eliminate those who did not fit within that vision.....

AN OPEN SECRET

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.

The term “euthanasia” (literally, “good death”) usually refers to the inducement of a painless death for a chronically or terminally ill individual. In Nazi usage, however, “euthanasia” referred to the systematic killing of the institutionalized mentally and physically disabled. The secret operation was code-named T4, in reference to the street address (Tiergartenstrasse 4) of the program's coordinating office in Berlin.

Ashes from cremated victims were taken from a common pile and placed in urns without regard for accurate labeling. One urn was sent to each victim's family, along with a death certificate listing a fictive cause and date of death. The sudden death of thousands of institutionalized people, whose death certificates listed strangely similar causes and places of death, raised suspicions. Eventually, the Euthanasia Program became an open secret.

On August 18, 1939, the Reich Ministry of the Interior circulated a decree compelling all physicians, nurses, and midwives to report newborn infants and children under the age of three who showed signs of severe mental or physical disability. At first only infants and toddlers were incorporated in the effort, but eventually juveniles up to 17 years of age were also killed. Conservative estimates suggest that at least 5,000 physically and mentally disabled children were murdered through starvation or lethal overdose of medication.

http://www.ushmm.org/museum/exhibit/focus/disabilities/

Holocaust Memorial Day (tonight and tomorrow) is Important for anyone in the broader disability community

No nation carried sterilization as far as Hitler's Germany. Persons with disabilities - over 200,000 - are the first victims of the Holocaust. The atrocities caused by Hitler and the Nazi regime are well-known in the Jewish community. Most people think only of the great losses suffered by the Jews when the word "Holocaust" is mentioned. But the disabled were despised by Hitler and the regime because a disability of any kind was an abhorrent to the future of his dream of a perfect race. In his lunacy, Hitler believed by eradicating every disabled person, he could wipe out disability. Babies born deaf, blind or with even the slightest imperfection were immediately disposed of...

Did you know? Many organizations that support children with disabilities started after the Holocaust

in 1941, a Catholic bishop, Clemens von Galen, delivered a sermon in Munster Cathedral attacking the Nazi euthanasia program calling it "plain murder". Hitler suspended Aktion T4, which had accounted for nearly 100,000 deaths by this time. The euthanasia program quietly continued using drugs and starvation instead of gassing.

After the war in 1948, The General Assembly of the United Nations adopted the Universal Declaration Of Human Rights. This declaration was a direct result of the atrocities during W.W.II, but it was also the first formal steps to the Civil Rights movement. Many other disabled advocacy groups began soon afterwards, such as the United Cerebral Palsy Association (founded 1948), the National Association for Retarded Children (1950) and The Muscular Dystrophy Association (1950).


http://www.chairgrrl.com/DisabilityTimeline/holocaust.htm