Aktion T Four: Program for Killing Undesirables

“life unworthy of life.”. 

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Before the Jew’s were slaughtered in the Gas chambers of The Third Reich, The Killing programs were implemented quietly in Germany. Sort of a practice run if you will.

 With the form of socialist medicine that Germany had it was easy to start the wave of slaughter by killing innocent babies and children who were considered defective in some way. Doctors and mid-wives were instructed to report all defective infants to the Ministry of interior. Then Three physicians would evaluate each case and, generally without seeing the infant , they would decide who was to be killed. The parents were then deceived by falsified causes of death issued by the government officials. This “program quickly evolved to the killing of those designated as juvenile delinquents. Jewish children could be included primarily because they were Jewish; and at one of the institutions, a special department was set up for juvenile “Jewish-Aryan half-breeds”. Eventually the program began to include adults deemed ” unworthy of life such as the chronically ill or what is considered mentally ill. Eventually it moved into the “nursing homes and on to those unable to contribute to society.

Mandatory  reporting was implemented of any patients suffering from schizophrenia, epilepsy, senility , paralysis and venerial diseases, retardation, encephalitis, Huntington’s chorea and other neurological or chronic conditions, also any patients who had been  in institutions for at least 5 years, or were considered criminally insane, did not posses German citizenship or were not of German or related  Aryan blood, including Jews, Blacks, and Gypsies. This moved on to the prison system as well.

This “Euthanasia” program was National Socialist Germany’s first program of mass murder. It helped de-sensitize people before leading up to the Holocaust in which millions of people were slaughtered in the name of ethnic cleansing. Under Socialized Health Care it was actually quite easy to pull off.  This “mercy killing was placed under the National health office of The General Foundation for Welfare and Institutional Care. This gave the Government easy access to hospitalized or institutionalized people.

At first patients were killed by lethal injection, the method established for killing children, but the inefficiency of this method for killing adults, who needed larger doses of expensive drugs and who were more likely to resist and need to be restrained, soon became apparent. Hitler then recommended  that carbon monoxide gas be used. Thus the gas chambers were initiated. As we all know that led to the annihilation of  more the 10 million people including the Jewish and the ” gypsies” along with any of those who tried to help them.

This program  was definitely  not motivated by concern for the welfare of the people or by a desire to release them from suffering since most of those killed were not suffering.  It was about ethnic cleansing to satisfy an  ideology, and also to reduce the cost to the state of maintaining people with disabilities.

This should give us all something to think about as the push for legalizing Euthanasia continues along side the fervent efforts by President Obama and the senate and house to implement a “national health care system.”

We need to keep a wary eye on what the government is doing at all times. Only ” we the people” can prevent radical ideology from running amuck.