Victor R. Claveau, MJ
Guided by the over-riding principles of racial hygiene, racial purity, and national health, the Nazi regime was committed to the removal of those unfit to live and who produce inferior offspring. In 1935, the Nuremberg Laws provided for the forced sterilization of the unfit. Not only did Hitler have in mind such “inferior races” as Jews and Gypsies, he also included unfit Aryans—the mentally defective, severely handicapped, the incurably insane and the incurably sick.
To implement the euthanasia program, special carbon-monoxide chambers were constructed. “Between December 1939 and August 1941, about 50,000 to 60,000 Germans—children and adults—were secretly killed by lethal injections or in gassing installations designed to look like shower stalls. It was a foretaste of Auschwitz. The victims were taken from the medical institution and put to death….”[1]
“Of the number of people killed in the T4 and other projects, the following statistics are usually given: adult mental patients from institutions, 80,000 to 100,000; children in institutions, 5,000; special action against Jews in institutions, 1,000; concentration camp inmates transported to killing centers, 20,000. It was estimated that by the end of 1941, some 93,521 ‘beds’ had been emptied for other uses. 70,000 patients had been gassed, plus over 20,000 dead through starvation and medication—in other words approximately one-third of the places for the mentally ill. But these figures may well be too low; twice these numbers of people may have perished. The fact is that we do not know and shall probably never know. Elements of deception, imposed chaos, and the destruction of many records make anything like an accurate estimate impossible.
During 1940, four euthanasia institutions went into operation: Grafeneck, in January, Brandenburg, in February, Hartheim, in May and Sonnenstein, in June. In the first half of the year, 8,765 persons were gassed in these four institutions, three-quarters of them in May and June, a time when world attention was focused on the Battle of France. By the end of 1940, a total of 26,459 patients had been put to death, and in the first eight months of 1941, an additional 35,049 were “disinfected.” These were the figures given by the accounting section of T4’s head office.[2]
The euthanasia program proved to be a valuable precursor to the atrocities which were to come in connection with the Final Solution.
[1] Meltzer,Milton, Never to Forget, (New York: Harper Collins, 1976), p. 131.
[2] The Euthanasia Program in The Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, Vol. II, pp. 452-454.