euthanasia program (1939 to 1941)
The Euthanasia Program was Nazi Germany's first act of genocide, one of many attempts to "purify" the German race. The program focused on discretely eliminating mentally and physically disabled children living in Germany or other areas controlled by the Nazis. Surprisingly, the German public was unaware of what was being done to these disabled children for many years, and the program operated on a large scale without problems. It began on August 18, 1939. Medical personal were ordered by the government to report children under the age of three who showed signs of severe disability. In October of the same year, public health authorities began to encourage parents of disabled children to admit their children to specially-built "clinics". Disabled children were driven to such clinics in buses with barricaded windows so that people passing by couldn't see inside. When the children arrived, they would be locked into a room and killed by starvation or drug overdose. Eventually the program included older children and adolescents up to age seventeen. Estimates suggest that up to 5,000 German children died during the war years as a result of the Euthanasia Program.
Planners of the Euthanasia program quickly took to the idea of extending the program to include disabled adults. This new operation was named "T4" after the street address of the program's coordinating office in Berlin. Fuhrer Chancellery director Phillip Bouhler and physician Karl Brandt lead the operation and built six gassing installations used for the extermination of disabled adults. The Fuehrer secretly circulated an order similar to that of before, asking all medical personal to fill out specialized disability forms that would determine the fate of a patient; if the report came back positive, the patient would be sent to one of six gassing installations to be killed. Afterwards their body would be burned in an attached crematory. The adult euthanasia program's overall death toll was 70,237.
In all, an estimated 200,000 individuals lost their lives to the Euthanasia program.
In all, an estimated 200,000 individuals lost their lives to the Euthanasia program.