FINAL SOLUTIONS: MURDEROUS RACIAL HYGIENE, 1939-1945 |
||||
|
World War II provided both pretext and cover to new programs for killing “undesirables” regarded as burdens on national resources. Using arguments advanced by some physicians and jurists in the 1920s, the Nazis justified murder in the name of euthanasia—“mercy death”—and enlisted hundreds of asylum directors, pediatricians, psychiatrists, family doctors, and nurses. Many of those who had earlier rejected euthanasia as a eugenics measure came to support murder “for the good of the Fatherland.” The first victims were German infants and children. The Reich Ministry of the Interior instructed midwives and physicians to register all children born with severe birth defects. Three expert physicians evaluated each case and, usually without seeing the potential victims, selected those to be killed. Officials deceived the children’s families by providing falsified causes of death. From 1939 to 1945, more than 5,000 boys and girls were killed in some 30 special children’s wards established at state hospitals and clinics. |
MASS GASSINGS: OPERATION T-4 RACIAL HYGIENE IN OCCUPIED POLAND |
Germans held Polish and other eastern Jews in special contempt, as “subhumans.” From the fall of 1939 to the summer of 1941, the Nazis concentrated some two million Jews in towns and cities and then segregated them into marked-off sections or ghettos. Some of the push to create sealed ghettos in Warsaw and other cities came from German public health officials who falsely linked Jews to the spread of typhus and other diseases. |
MASS GASSINGS OF JEWS Nearly two million people, mostly Polish Jews, were transported for murder to Chelmno and to Sobibor, Treblinka, and Belzec (isolated SS camps in annexed and occupied Poland) where redeployed T-4 staff manned the gassing installations and crematoria. At Auschwitz-Birkenau, more than one million Jews deported from German-controlled countries perished. Nazi doctors selected “fitter” adults for forced labor, a temporary reprieve, and used both adults and children as guinea pigs in eugenic sterilization experiments and genetic research conducted at the camp. After the war, few of the biomedical experts who helped, in varying degrees, implement and legitimize Nazi racial hygiene policies were ever indicted or brought to a moral accounting of any kind for their actions. Many continued their professional careers. |
|
|