Euthanasia During The Holocaust

In the genocide we know as the Holocaust, 11,000,000 people were killed, 6,000,000 of them Jewish, but the Jewish were clearly not the only victims of the Holocaust. One of the other groups that were targeted was the disabled, making up 275,000 of the 11,000,000 dead victims. The disabled included a variety of people with differing ‘abnormalities’ that took took time to analyze from a form they filled out, which if they were deemed “‘life unworthy of life’” (People With Disabilities, USHMM), they were killed through the euthanasia program. At first, disabled children and infants were the only ones being killed, but by September 1939, disabled adults were being killed, too.
What is quite surprising is that the disabled’s killings were administered and monitored by their doctors at first. Starting in October 1939, the parents of handicapped children were encouraged to bring their disabled children that were under three to a pediatric clinic that were built throughout Germany and Austria. But these weren’t …show more content…
They also had adults in hospitals, mental institutions, and nursing homes take a form that had questions to determine if they were disabled, which would be looked over by teams of three physicians who evaluated them and decided whether they lived or died. Their bodies were burned in crematoria and their ashes were placed in urns and sent back to their families with a certificate of death with only their death date present. In August 1941, Hitler ordered a halt to the killings caused by the euthanasia program, due to protests from those who disliked the idea of killing innocent people, so the total of disabled adults had racked up to about 70,273 by