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Friday, March 2, 2018

We Must Never Forget, the Disabled Were the Nazis’ First Victims

“The horrific genocide of six million Jews 
was in fact only the final chapter in the Nazi holocaust story.”


By Dave Andrusko
Life News

It can’t be said too often that we know very little about history–and what we do know often is either wrong or incomplete.

Over the years we’ve posted many stories that buttress and support what remain to many, many people an unknown historical truth–that “The Nazis’ First Victims Were the Disabled,” as an article published in the New York Times thoughtfully illuminates.

Kenny Fries, who is himself Jewish and disabled, writes about the connection between Aktion T4 [in which 70,000 people were selectively murdered], the Nazi “euthanasia” program, and the extermination of the disabled, explaining

I first discovered that people with disabilities were sterilized and killed by the Nazis when I was a teenager, watching the TV mini-series “Holocaust” in 1978. But it would be years before I understood the connections between the killing of the disabled and the killing of Jews and other “undesirables,” all of whom were, in one way or another, deemed “unfit.”

The [German] neurologist [to whom Fries is explaining his research] does not know much about what I’m telling him. While he does know that approximately 300,000 disabled people were killed in T4 and its aftermath, he doesn’t know about the direct connection between T4 and the Holocaust. He doesn’t know that it was at Brandenburg, the first T4 site, where methods of mass killing were tested, that the first victims of Nazi mass killings were the disabled, and that its personnel went on to establish and run the extermination camps at Treblinka, Belzec and Sobibor. 
As Peter Saunders has so eloquently written,
“The horrific genocide of six million Jews was in fact only the final chapter in the Nazi holocaust story.”
The detail of how it happened, and particularly the role of doctors in the process, is not at all well known.

What ended in the 1940s in the gas chambers of Auschwitz, Dachau and Treblinka had much more humble beginnings in the 1930s in nursing homes, geriatric hospitals and psychiatric institutions all over Germany.

When the Nazis arrived, the medical profession was ready and waiting.


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