Action T4
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia This poster (from around 1938) reads: "60,000 Reichsmarks is what this person suffering from a hereditary disease costs the People's community during his lifetime. Comrade, that is your money too. Read '[A] New People', the monthly magazine of the Bureau for Race Politics of the NSDAP."
Action T4 (German: Aktion T4) was the name used after World War II[1] for the Euthanasia Program in Nazi Germany officially spanning September 1939[2][3] until August 1941 but continued unofficially[4] until the demise of the Nazi regime in 1945 and even beyond,[5] during which physicians killed thousands of people specified in Hitler's secret memo of September 1, 1939, as suffering patients "judged incurably sick, by critical medical examination".[6]
Although officially started in September 1939 it is stated that Euthanasia Program (Action T4) initated with a sort of trial balloon[7] with the instruction of Hitler to Karl Brandt in late 1938 to valuate the euthanasia petition of a little boy, who was actually killed in July 1939.[8] Hitler also instructed Brandt to proceed in the same manner in similar cases.[9] The foundation of the Committee for the Scientific Treatment of Severe, Genetically Determined Illness in order to prepare and proceed with the massive secret killing of infants took place in May 1939 and the respective secret order to start the registration of ill children, took place in 18 August 1939, three weeks after the euthanasia of the mentioned boy.[10]
From the official Nazi files, there is evidence that during the official stage 70,273 people were killed.[11] The Nuremberg Trials found evidence that German and Austrian physicians continued the extermination of patients after October 1941 and evidence that about 275,000 people were killed under T4.[12] More recent research based on files that were recovered after 1990 gives a figure of at least 200,000 physically or mentally handicapped people that were killed by medication, starvation, or in the gas chambers between 1939 and 1945.[13]
The name T4 was an abbreviation of "Tiergartenstraße 4", the address of a villa in the Berlin borough of Tiergarten which was the headquarters of the Gemeinnützige Stiftung für Heil- und Anstaltspflege, bearing the euphemistic name literally translating into English: as Charitable Foundation for Cure and Institutional Care.[14] This body operated under the direction of Philipp Bouhler, the head of Hitler's private chancellery,[15] and Dr. Karl Brandt, Hitler's personal physician. This villa no longer exists, but a plaque set in the pavement on Tiergartenstraße marks its location. The "euthanasia decree", written on Adolf Hitler's personal stationery and dated 1 September 1939, reads as follows:
Reich Leader Bouhler and Dr. Brandt are charged with the responsibility for expanding the authority of physicians, to be designated by name, to the end that patients considered incurable according to the best available human judgment [menschlichem Ermessen] of their state of health, can be granted a mercy death [Gnadentod].[16]
Thank you for that refresher course in history. And we now know that baby who was killed in July 1939 was named Gerhard Kretschmar. The neo-eugenicists are trying very hard to repeat that atrocity here and now. That’s why they scream in pain at the good fortune of Baby Joseph, who escaped their clutches. They so wanted him to be the modern day version of Baby Gerhard Kretschmar, and usher in a new era of killing.