Posted on 03/19/2005 1:58:53 PM PST by M. Espinola
Wartime, Adolf Hitler suggested, "was the best time for the elimination of the incurably ill." Many Germans did not want to be reminded of individuals who did not measure up to their concept of a "master race." The physically and mentally handicapped were viewed as "useless" to society, a threat to Aryan genetic purity, and, ultimately, unworthy of life.
At the beginning of World War II, individuals who were mentally retarded, physically handicapped, or mentally ill were targeted for murder in what the Nazis called the "T-4," or "euthanasia," program.

The "euthanasia" program required the cooperation of many German doctors, who reviewed the medical files of patients in institutions to determine which handicapped or mentally ill individuals should be killed. The doctors also supervised the actual killings.
Doomed patients were transferred to six institutions in Germany and Austria, where they were killed in specially constructed gas chambers. Handicapped infants and small children were also killed by injection with a deadly dose of drugs or by starvation.
The bodies of the victims were burned in large ovens called crematoria.
Despite public protests in 1941, the Nazi leadership continued this program in secret throughout the war. More than 200,000 handicapped people were murdered between 1940 and 1945.

The T-4 program became the model for the mass murder of Jews, Roma (Gypsies), and others in camps equipped with gas chambers that the Nazis would open in 1941 and 1942. The program also served as a training ground for SS members who manned these camps.
All graphics added
This Nazi poster reads: "This person suffering from hereditary defects costs the people 60,000 Reichmarks during his lifetime. People, that is your money. Read 'New People'."
Hitler would be in awe and envious of what we have been doing since Roe vs. Wade. Hitler was an amateur.
And so it begins...again.
As I said on an earlier thread, I guess we owe the Nazi doctors executed after the war an apology. They were just ahead of their time, true visionaries. How much better a place the world would have been by now if we'd followed their policies for the past 60 years instead of demonizing them! /sarcasm
It is important to remember that the idea of killing off the "unworthy to live" got started in Germany before WWI, and it got going in practice under the Weimar Republic in 1930. All the Nazis really did was carry it to its logical conclusion.
Very fitting w/ all that's going on down in FL.
well except in fact it has been discovered that many of the children the Nazi killed were not even handicapped, many of them were normal, in these so called programs
however allowing someone who is 98 per cent dead to die is much differently then murdering someone who is handicapped or else we'd all be upset about the Holocaust of dogs and cats
oh please..
They just practiced what the celebrated Margaret Sanger preached.
Yep.

Very fitting indeed. Right down to the starvation techniques.
Actually, just about all the ancient classical peoples practiced exposure of sickly, female or unwanted infants. The Jews were considered extremely weird by their neighbors for not practicing this. Historians of the time commented on it.
Generally, the father of the family made this decision for all females in the household, including slaves, etc.
The Spartans were unique in having a state agency make the decision.
Sad to say, it wasn't just the Nazis:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics
Thank you for the post. it's the knowledge of the T-4 program and how it started with the mentally disabled and children that makes me crazy with the Terri case. Thank you for posting...More should have this information! And Hitler used laws and judges and courts and doctors for his murders!
Are we heading down the same road as Nazi Germany with 'judges' such as Roland Freisler?

In February 1943, Freisler presides over the political trial of the Munich students who belong to the dissident anti-nazi White Rose movement. Barely in their twenties, he sentences all of them to death by the guillotine.
Freisler's brief moment of fame in history comes in the wake of the failed July 20, 1944 coup attempt against the Nazi regime. Throughout the second half of 1944 he presides over the show trials of many of the July 20th conspirators, including Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

As though by divine justice, the malevolent judge Roland Freisler is killed in February 1945 when a bomb from an Allied air-raid scores a direct hit on the court house. At that exact moment, conspirator Lieutenant Fabian von Schlabrendorff is inside the court room waiting for his turn to be convicted and sentenced to death. Freisler is discovered crushed to death by a massive column that has fallen on top of him, his hands still clutching a folder that contains Schlabrendorff's file. Freisler's successor quickly acquits Schlabrendorff after determining lack of sufficient evidence. 
Actually it is a cross of Nazism and Slavery.
bttt
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