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In reply to the discussion: Fox News now openly calling for new Holocaust [View all]MayReasonRule
(3,823 posts)Involuntary.
Lethal.
Injection.
This is literally the T4 Euthanasia Program in Nazi Germany that targeted disabled and institutionalized patients, deeming them to be "life unworthy of life".
It was named "T4" for the coordinating office's address at Tiergartenstrasse 4 in Berlin.
This secret operation, authorized by Adolf Hitler in 1939, killed an estimated 250,000 to 300,000 victims before the war ended. The methods and personnel of the T4 program were later instrumental in the organization and implementation of the Holocaust.
The T4 program was part of the Nazi regime's broader policy of "racial hygiene" and eugenics, which sought to "purify" the German population.
The Nazis promoted the idea of a genetically "pure" Aryan race and targeted people with hereditary conditions or disabilities as genetically defective.
Propaganda portrayed people with disabilities as a financial drain on the state, referring to them as "burdensome lives" and "useless eaters". The program's administrators calculated the money saved by exterminating patients.
Hitler justified the killings by saying that "wartime is the best time for the elimination of the incurably ill".
To carry out the murders, T4 administrators created a secret bureaucratic structure.
Officials distributed questionnaires to public health authorities, hospitals, and nursing homes to identify patients fitting the criteria. The forms gave the misleading impression of a data-gathering exercise.
T4 staff established six killing centers in Germany and Austria: Bernburg, Brandenburg, Grafeneck, Hadamar, Hartheim, and Sonnenstein.
Victims were transported to these centers in buses with blacked-out windows under the pretense of receiving special care. There, they were led to gas chambers disguised as showers and killed with carbon monoxide.
Families received fake death certificates citing a fabricated cause of death and urns with ashes that were randomly chosen from the bodies of cremated victims.
Before the gas chambers were set up for adults, the regime killed disabled children with lethal drug overdoses and starvation in designated "children's killing wards". After the centralized gas killings ceased, lethal injections and starvation continued in a more decentralized way across institutions until 1945.
Despite the Nazis' attempts at secrecy, the program became an "open secret" within Germany, leading to public resistance.
Bishop von Galen: In August 1941, Catholic Bishop Clemens August Graf von Galen gave sermons publicly denouncing the killings, which led to a widespread protest movement.
Due to the protests, Hitler officially called a halt to the centralized T4 gassings in August 1941.
Despite the official cancellation, killings of people with disabilities continued covertly and became more decentralized in clinics and hospitals, utilizing lethal injection and starvation.
The infrastructure and personnel of the T4 program were later used to develop and staff the extermination camps of Operation Reinhard and the wider Holocaust. Many of the same medical professionals who oversaw the T4 killings were transferred to oversee the genocide of the Jews.
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