Nothing could be further from the truth, and it's appalling that somebody with the name "Winstonchurchill" could put forth such a false notion. The REAL Winston Churchill was an accomplished historian, and he knew full-well of the Nazi operation that sent tens of thousands of mentally and physically handicapped citizens to "special" hospitals, where they were 'treated' by being sterilized or KILLED, just as Ghoul Greer is doing to Terri Schiavo.
During 1935-1938 the mentally and physically disabled in Nazi Germany were being systematically sterilized or killed, by the tens of thousands, to foster Hitler's 'perfect race'. The ultimate goal, as Hitler expressed in his writings, was to exterminate all of them, including those suffering with physical disabilities like multiple schlerosis or polio; and those with mental handicaps such as schizophrenics, and even people with alcoholism and repeat criminals.
HILTER'S PROPAGANDA MACHINE MARGINALIZED PEOPLE WITH DISABILITIES OR DEFECTS TO FOSTER A NATIONAL CONSENSUS THAT THEY WERE USELESS TO SOCIETY, AND HENCE COULD EVENTUALLY BE "LEGALLY" KILLED BY GOVERNMENT. .
Here are some relevent excerpts from an article in the "Journal Of Special Education", (Fall, 2002). Please pay particular attention paragraph 3, (the last one).
"To this point, while Nazi law had become increasingly segregationist and isolationist for people with disabilities, it had not yet sanctioned murder, even though it is clear that as early as 1935 Hitler voiced thoughts that he would use the cover of war to murder psychiatric patients in fulfillment of a long-held belief that he had articulated in Mein Kampf (Yahil, 1987). However, Hitler understood that state-sanctioned homicide would depend on other factors to severely curb public outrage until war became reality. The war, Hitler reasoned, would provide both a distraction and an excuse for officially killing those deemed undesirable. One such factor was the use of propaganda to convince the public of the desirability of some lives over others.
Marker 4: Disability Propagandized as Life Unworthy of Living
By 1938 the tide of public and official benevolence toward people with disabilities had begun to turn. The public mind now characterized people with disabilities as a separate, different, often criminalized group of less economic value than their counterparts without disabilities. German literature and art soon depicted lives unworthy of living in a host of propagandistic projects (Lifton, 1986; Michalczyk, 1994). For example, two 1935 silent documentaries produced largely for distribution among Nazi Party functionaries and sympathizers depicted persons with severe physical and intellectual disabilities in staged scenes to show them to their greatest disadvantage (Burleigh, 1994; Lifton, 1986). Other films were produced for wider audiences. A 1935 propaganda sound film, Das Erbe (The Inheritance), depicted, in a pseudoscientific format, the medical, social, and economic consequences of hereditary disabilities. Other films soon followed. The 1937 film Opfer der Vergangenheit (The Victim of the Past) went much further, comparing healthy, ideal German citizens with institutionalized people with severe disabilities and adding that Jewish mental patients were creations in violation of natural law. The film proposed the solution of compulsory sterilization.
Propaganda was not limited to film, however, but also appeared in German literature. An exemplar of this work is the novel Sendung und Gewissen (Mission and Conscience), which was turned into a very popular film, Ich Klage an! (I Accuse!). In the story, a beautiful young woman suffering from multiple sclerosis decides that her life is no longer worth living and requests a "merciful death" at the hand of her husband, a physician. In the film's death scene climax, he administers the fatal injection to his wife, who dies peacefully to the strains of soothing piano music played by a friend in the next room. At his trial, the doctor heroically refuses to allow his colleagues to invent an alibi for the murder and challenges the court by asking, "Would you, if you were a cripple, want to vegetate forever?" Predictably, the court acquits the physician because his actions were merciful, not murderous, a notion reinforced in the closing scenes, where the words of the Renaissance physician Paracelsus are recalled, that "medicine is love" (Proctor, 1988).
ping to self read post 118