How To Kill Disabled Germans

“By the end of 1938, the regime was receiving requests from the families of newborn or very young children with severe deformities and brain damage for the grant of a “mercy killing”(“Introduction to Nazi Euthanasia”). Why were parents asking the Nazis to kill their own children? As a result, disabled Germans were subjected to starvation, sterilization, and ultimately mass murder based on the Nazi 's propaganda campaign and their belief that these individuals were inferior. The Nazi’s main goal of the Holocaust was to create a master race. In school curriculums and propaganda, they promoted the idea that the disabled German’s diseases were dangerous to future generations and therefore needed to be sterilized and murdered in order to create

To apply or be applied, a German had to fit in one of these categories: Congenital mental deficiency, schizophrenia, manic-depression, hereditary epilepsy, hereditary St. Vitus’ Dance (Huntington’s Chorea), hereditary blindness, hereditary deafness, serious hereditary physical deformity, and alcoholism (“Law for the Prevention of Offspring with Hereditary Diseases (July 14, 1933)”). The disabled Germans were sent off to one of six T4 locations: Brandenburg, Grafeneck, Bernburg, Sonnenstein, Hartheim, and Hadamar (“Euthanasia Program”). These programs had gas chambers disguised as showers and crematoriums where they burned the dead bodies (“Hadamar Euthanasia”). The Jews faced very similar policies and were also gassed and burned in crematoriums because the gas chambers and crematoriums were ideas used from the T4 programs (“Final Solutions: Murderous Racial Hygiene, 1939-1945”). The Jews did have some different aspects that made their experience different from the disabled Germans. During their experience, the Jews were tattooed and their identities were lost. Also, the Jews faced selection processes when they arrived at camps. From the book Night, the author recalls his selection process: "He was holding a conductor 's baton and was surrounded by officers. The baton was moving

The primary parallel between the disabled German and Jew experience is that the Nazis intended to annihilate all people considered inferior to the master race. To the Nazis, disabled Germans were burdens to the state in both the health and finance aspects (Bareth, Karl and Alfred Vogel). They were also considered less valuable due to their genetic illnesses. According to the Euthanasia Propaganda Posters, “This hereditary ill person will cost national community 60,000 Reichmarks over the course of his lifetime” (Vogel, Alfred). The Jews were considered “bloodsuckers” and “parasites”, and they were too different genetically, physically, and spiritually (Bareth, Karl and Alfred Vogel). The Nazis built camps for both groups and made it their priority to kill as many individuals from each group as they could. The primary difference between the disabled Germans and the Jews was that the disabled Germans were first only subjected to sterilization, while the Jews were murdered. In the beginning, the disabled Germans were sterilized in order to prevent them having children and passing down the less valuable traits ("Law for the Prevention of Offspring with Hereditary Diseases (July 14, 1933)." The Nazis transferred to mass murder when parents of disabled German children asked for euthanasia instead of sterilization (“Introduction to Nazi Euthanasia”). Finally, Holocaust