The T-4 Program and the Disabled

Overview

Eugenics is the belief and erroneous science (based on Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection applied to human populations) that if all humans with physical and mental flaws are killed, then a superior race (in Nazi Germany, Aryans) could be created. Nazis wanted Aryan, intelligent, athletic, and genetically healthy parents to breed so as to create to create genetically superior children. While Nazi Germany was the only place where eugenics was taken to its logical extreme (namely, forcing “lesser” races into servitude or annihilating them), it was by no means an exclusively German phenomenon as eugenics was taught in universities across Europe and America. On July 14, 1933, the Nazis created a law for the prevention of “progeny with hereditary diseases.” The Nazi regime began forcibly sterilizing Jewish, Romani, disabled, and mentally infirm “useless eaters” so they would be unable to have children. The women that were sterilized were most commonly people that qualified as being feeble minded and also people who were schizophrenic or epileptic. Between 300,000 and 400,000 women were sterilized. In 1935, the Lebensborn program was created so as to increase the Aryan population. The Nazis kidnapped “Aryan looking children” and gave them to women to raise as their own. As part of the Lebensborn program, it was legal to get an abortion for a child with a disease in order to make the Nazis the dominant race and free of disease and disability. Additionally, brothels were established so that SS men could impregnate Aryan single women to increase the population. In 1939, under the cover of war, the T-4 program (named after the address, Tiergartenstrasse 4, at which the offices of the T-4 program were located) shifted from sterilizing the disabled to mass murder so as to keep the “useless eaters” from using up resources. The Nazis killed approximately 70,000 disabled people. In 1941 Hitler announced the formal end of this program but secretly kept the T-4 program running until the end of the war resulting in the murder of around 250,000 people.

The T-4 program was operated by physicians selecting ill patients to be murdered. The patients were never examined. The physicians had the power to decide life and death. They would then tell the relatives of those they killed that their family had died of natural causes.At first, the main strategies of killing were starvation and lethal injections but later moved to death by gas as the optimal way to murder patients deemed unworthy of life. It was the policy that all psychopaths, mentally ill, and other “inferior” people were to be killed. To not raise suspicion, patients were transported to the killing centers in special buses that had tinted windows, so that people that outside would not be able to see that the people occupying the bus were all handicapped. Many physicians involved in the T-4 program, such as Christian Wirth, later were moved to the East where they took the methodology and perfected it during the Final Solution. After the War ended in 1945, the leading doctors were put on trial at the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials. However, few of these doctors faced jail time because the judges did not view the killing of the disabled as a great crime.

The T-4 program served as a rehearsal for the Holocaust. Personnel involved in the program were later moved to killing centers or Death Camps established in Poland and the small gas chambers were enlarged to allow for the mass murder of Jews. When word of the killings spread among the German population, there were private and public protests, largely from the clergy, and Hitler was forced, at least publicly, to stop the killings in late August 1941. However, the killings continued in secret till the end of the war. Protests around the T-4 program and the protest at Rosenstrasse were the two major protests that took place in Germany. In both cases, Hitler and the regime, at least on the surface, “pulled back.” Thus an important question is raised: If there had been more protests by the German people, could more people have been saved?

Vocabulary

Euthanasia: Today, euthanasia means the painless killing of a patient or animal suffering from an incurable and painful disease or in an irreversible coma. It is used on patients and animals who are dying and suffering. However, the Nazi T-4 program was not euthanasia, it was mass murder. No consent or mercy was shown to the victims.

Sterilization: a surgery/procedure to make a person or animal unable to produce offspring.

T-4 Program: a codename for the movement created by Hitler and the Nazis to sterilize and eventually kill incurably ill, physically or mentally disabled, emotionally distraught, and elderly people. They also killed children of criminals, criminals, and people considered to be “idiots.” No one was safe from this program, even Germans--if you were a burden on society, you were not allowed to live in it.

Map

This map shows the locations of centers to kill disabled people

https://thenuremberglaws1935.weebly.com/t4.html

Photographs

Here is an example of Nazi propaganda showing disabled children, considered to be “burdens on the rest.”

Here is a picture of a 23-year-old girl who was sterilized: Elizabeth Killiam. She was sterilized at a health care facility in Weilburg.

Hartheim castle, a killing center where people with physical and mental disabilities were killed by gassing and lethal injection. Hartheim, Austria, date uncertain.

https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/pa7141

Links

Click on these links for interviews of victims of the T-4 program:

https://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/media_oi.php?ModuleId=0&MediaId=1208

https://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/media_oi.php?ModuleId=10007146&MediaId=5090

Here is an article about eugenics and Nazi Racial hygiene.

Click on this link for information about the doctors in the T-4 program:

http://www.nytimes.com/1986/09/21/magazine/german-doctors-and-the-final-solution.html?pagewanted=all

http://www.life.org.nz/euthanasia/abouteuthanasia/history-euthanasia6