Disability History Exhibit
Excerpt:
Medical Viewpoint - Beginning in the 1930s, Nazi Germany targeted people with disabilities and the elderly as a drain on public resources.
Medical Viewpoint - During the 1930s, people with disabilities in Germany are referred to as “useless eaters.”
Medical Viewpoint - In Nazi Germany, 908 patients were transferred from Schoenbrunn, an institution for retarded and chronically ill patients, to the euthanasia "installation" at Eglfing-Haar to be gassed. A monument to the victims now stands in the courtyard at Schoenbrunn. At the outbreak of World War II, Hitler ordered widespread "mercy killing" of the sick and disabled. The Nazi euthanasia program, codenamed Aktion T4, was instituted to eliminate "life unworthy of life."
Nazis sterilized 400,000 Germans and exterminated over 200,000 persons with disabilities.
Medical Viewpoint - At Hadamar Hospital in Germany, more than 10,000 people with disabilities were killed between January and August of 1941.
Medical Viewpoint - The first killings were by starvation, then by lethal injection. Gas chambers soon became the preferred method of execution. After being gassed, the bodies were cremated.
Medical Viewpoint - Doctors, not soldiers, were put in charge of killing the elderly and people with disabilities.
In Nazi Germany a Catholic bishop, Clemens von Galen, delivered a sermon in Munster Cathedral attacking the Nazi euthanasia program calling it "plain murder." In 1941, Hitler suspended Aktion T4, which had accounted for nearly a hundred thousand deaths by this time. The euthanasia program quietly continued using drugs and starvation instead of gassings.
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