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T-4 Euthanasia ProgramIn Nazi Germany, Adolf Hitler's T-4 "Euthanasia" Program was established in order to maintain the supposed purity (eugenics) of the so-called Aryan race by systematically killing children and adults born with physical deformities or suffering from mental illness. The name T-4 comes from the address of the office, Tiergartenstrae 4 in Berlin. The operation was put by Hitler under the control of the Chief of the State Chancellery Philip Bouhler and D.M. Karl Brandt. "Defective" children were removed from their families and taken to "hospitals", where the exterminations were carried out at the Hartheim and Hadamar killing centres. The program was expanded to include adults to prevent any "deficient" member of the German "Master race" from "breeding" so they could not pass on their "inferiority". One of the most important and well-known books about the Nazi Euthanasia action was written by Ernst Klee: Euthanasie im NS-Staat – Die Vernichtung lebensunwerten Lebens. Klee describes the extermination "hospitals" like Grafeneck or Hartheim, where the first gas chambers were built, before the Holocaust, and where mostly adult victims were suffocated with carbon monoxide. Klee describes further the killing of crippled children by doctors with lethal injections and the starvation of patients marked for extermination. Klee describes as well the resistance from the churches and the relatives of the victims, which led to a slowdown and greater secrecy of the operation, but did not stop it. The operation was conducted still more covertly after August 1941, when 70,000 people had already died in the gas chambers of Grafeneck, Hartheim, Hadamar, Bernburg, Brandenburg and Sonnenstein. By that time every third inmate of a psychiatric institution in Germany had already died, either by being actively killed or by starvation, leading to about 93,000 "free beds" at the end of 1941, to use the Nazi terminology. On August 18, 1941, Hitler ordered a temporary halt to T-4. Graduates of the Aktion T4 program were then transferred to the concentration camps, where they continued in their trade. Euthanasia did not end in 1941, however; it still took place in hospitals around Germany and Austria, and crept East into a few of the occupied territories. An estimated 200,000 people died under the auspices of the T-4 program. People were killed by means of starvation, deadly injections and overdosing of medicaments even after the gas chambers were put out of use, and in this phases doctors and nurses were involved with the homicides, while the original gassings had been done at the sites mentioned above by trained crews. These continued killings and intentional neglect were conducted in such ways to minimize the suspicions of the German population. No such precautions were taken when dealing with the people of the occupied territories. Acts of cruelty and violence have been reported, and were recorded, amongst other things, in the books of Klee, as mentioned above. As Klee notes, most of the persons responsible for carrying out the T-4 Euthanasia Program became active in the Holocaust as well, developing gas chamber technology and even helping to build death camps at Belzec, Treblinka or Sobibr in Operation Reinhard. Aside from the well-known Auschwitz-Birkenau these were the main centers of extermination by gas for millions of people. Along with the euthanasia program, the Nazi regime also targeted the disabled through its compulsory sterilization program. Doctors and nursing personnel involved with the euthanasia were not always brought to justice. Long after the creation of the new German states in 1949 high-ranking officials involved with the euthanasia had escaped prosecution and were still involved with the German health system. Bibliography - Henry Friedlander, The Origins of Nazi Genocide. From Euthanasia to the Final Solution, University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill & London, 1995, ISBN 0807822086.
- Ernst Klee. Euthanasie im NS-Staat. Die Vernichtung lebensunwerten Lebens, Frankfurt am Main 1983, ISBN 3596243262, in German.
- Ernst Klee. Dokumente zur Euthanasie. ISBN 3596243270, in German.
- Ernst Klee. Was sie taten. Was sie wurden. ISBN 3596243645, in German.
- Michael Burleigh, "Nazi 'Euthanasia' Programs" in Dieter Kuntz, ed. Deadly Medicine: Creating the Master Race, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum/University of North Carolina Press, 2004. ISBN 0-8078-2916-1
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