This piece in Catholic Culture focuses on the Nazi's treatment of the handicapped and disabled using the medical profession. But it also acknowledges that political opponents and dissidents, non-conformists, the disobedient, etc were often declared mentally ill, dangerous antisocials, and met the same fate as others with disabilities...a…
This piece in Catholic Culture focuses on the Nazi's treatment of the handicapped and disabled using the medical profession. But it also acknowledges that political opponents and dissidents, non-conformists, the disobedient, etc were often declared mentally ill, dangerous antisocials, and met the same fate as others with disabilities...and Jews and gypsies. All deemed undesirable - by eugenicists:
Useless Eaters: Disability as Genocidal Marker in Nazi Germany
"In addition, levels of socially appropriate behavior (law-abiding, self-regulating, restrained, and conformist) were judged superior to socially inappropriate behavior (criminality or antisocial behavior. These and other classifications soon precipitated both informal social changes and more formal legal measures.
...
Second, an offshoot of Darwinism, Social Darwinism, held that not only biological traits but also social characteristics and their resultant behaviors were genetically determined. Social Darwinism's ideas of difference, therefore, in the form of eugenics, appeared to have immediate and effective application for a number of societal problems, such as "hereditary" social traits (e.g., socially inappropriate or criminal behavior). Here the rationale was simple: All visible traits of human difference were genetically determined. Thus, just as eye and hair color were genetically determined, so were drunkenness, sexual promiscuity, and other socially inappropriate behaviors. A simple extension of these perceptions led to the idea that an effective way of controlling or eliminating these problems was by sterilization, incarceration, or death.
...
Also in 1933, the Nazis enacted the Law Against Dangerous Habitual Criminals, a law that further blurred the distinction between bona fide criminal behavior and inappropriate social behavior that characterized many people with disabilities. The law stipulated that these criminal asozialen (asocials) could be committed to state asylums, held in indeterminate protective custody, and, in the case of sex offenders, officially castrated.
...
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.
...
In this action, patients from several asylums were rounded up, taken to nearby woods, and individually shot in the back of the head. Between 1939 and 1944, almost 13,000 Polish psychiatric patients were killed in this way. However, in such instances, it quickly became evident that the perpetrators' close proximity to the resulting gore exacted a heavy psychological toll that could be reduced only by using less grisly methods.
The logistical necessities involved in killing large numbers of asylum inmates were also problematic within Germany itself.
...
A human experiment on the effectiveness of the gas was conducted in January 1940. A number of senior officials responsible for Aktion T-4, including many asylum directors and several others who would later make their names infamous at Auschwitz, gathered at a defunct prison near Berlin. Approximately 20 naked asylum inmates were herded into a prototypical gas chamber by psychiatric nurses. The enthusiastic onlookers watched closely as the inmates died from carbon monoxide poisoning. Eight further inmates were administered lethal injections, but when the poison had little immediate effect, these inmates were gassed as well. Buoyed by the dreadful success he had just witnessed, Viktor Brack, one of the top Aktion T-4 officials, victoriously declared the importance of using physicians to administer the gas through his oft-repeated motto: "The needle belongs in the hand of the doctor.
...
Based on the logistical experiences of killing children with disabilities, similar administrative networks for registering the adult victims and the sham system of notification of next of kin were put in place. The euphemistically named Community Foundation for the Care of Asylums was the official unit responsible for hiring the killers and building staff, acquiring the gas, and later recycling gold teeth and selling jewelry from the dead. Another sham organization, the Community Patients' Transport Service, Ltd., transported asylum inmates from other institutions to the killing centers.
,,,
Concocted causes of death included the now familiar list: communicable diseases such as meningitis, which was possible in people of all ages; pneumonia, a common cause of death secondary to other serious diseases; and cases of stroke, a favored sham diagnosis among the elderly.
...
There is little evidence that asylum directors openly opposed the killing of their patients. However, some questioned the legality of the program, and others deliberately avoided meetings that would have given them no choice but to become personally involved. Some quibbled with the accuracy and utility of the identification process. Scattered instances of delay, deliberate incompetence, and other forms of resistance also occurred. In spite of these efforts, reluctant asylum personnel were often reduced to making difficult choices of who would be taken to the killing centers and who would not.
...
The Role of Science
A major impetus for Nazi ideology was its claim of legitimacy based on the pseudoscience of Social Darwinism, which drove perceptions of difference from benign recognition to active genocide. Not only was the pseudoscientific claimed as science (i.e., as established fact, data based, and replicated over time), but it was used as an instrument of deceit to perpetrate murder. On one hand, the appeal to "science" allowed the willing German intelligentsia to be more easily convinced to support and participate in brutality masquerading as research. On the other hand, the claims of Social Darwinism fed the public's long-held distrust of those who were different, whether racially or in terms of disability.
...
The enchantment of the intelligentsia with pseudoscience and the willingness of the public to seize pseudoscientific "facts" as legitimate knowledge remain problems in special education today, albeit in more benign forms. For example, the unfortunate history of facilitated communication (FC) eloquently demonstrates that fairly nonsensical ideas can be widely and enthusiastically embraced by people who should know better.
...
Complicity of the Medical Professions
It is important to note that the enactment of prejudice against people with disabilities in Nazi Germany could not have succeeded without the complicity of the medical and adjunct professions. Power over life and death was placed firmly in the hands of physicians who became white-coated executioners, having long abandoned the "do no harm" clause of the Hippocratic Oath. Currently [2002], there is evidence of the medical community's again being willing agents in hastening the deaths of people deemed not viable, including people with disabilities, through familiar methods for ending the lives of terminally ill people, such as starvation and death by thirst. Furthermore, there is evidence that "do no harm" is now viewed as a somewhat quaint throwback to a distant, less sophisticated era. For example, many physicians no longer take the Hippocratic Oath before beginning their careers***, and many standard hospital treatment protocols now stipulate that staff physicians may override next-of-kin requests for patient treatment if the physician decides that treatment will likely be ineffective.
Propaganda
The Nazis needed a means of influencing public opinion for more active perpetration of actions already planned. Propaganda became a useful tool. Nazi propaganda was created by many leading German artists, authors, and other creative persons impressed by the Third Reich, who lent their credibility and prestige to film, literature, and other public projects. Inexpert in matters of science, but eager to be on the cutting edge of issues of the day, many high-profile celebrities willingly embraced National Socialist dogma."
This piece in Catholic Culture focuses on the Nazi's treatment of the handicapped and disabled using the medical profession. But it also acknowledges that political opponents and dissidents, non-conformists, the disobedient, etc were often declared mentally ill, dangerous antisocials, and met the same fate as others with disabilities...and Jews and gypsies. All deemed undesirable - by eugenicists:
Useless Eaters: Disability as Genocidal Marker in Nazi Germany
Catholic Culture, 2002
https://www.catholicculture.org/culture/library/view.cfm?recnum=7019
"In addition, levels of socially appropriate behavior (law-abiding, self-regulating, restrained, and conformist) were judged superior to socially inappropriate behavior (criminality or antisocial behavior. These and other classifications soon precipitated both informal social changes and more formal legal measures.
...
Second, an offshoot of Darwinism, Social Darwinism, held that not only biological traits but also social characteristics and their resultant behaviors were genetically determined. Social Darwinism's ideas of difference, therefore, in the form of eugenics, appeared to have immediate and effective application for a number of societal problems, such as "hereditary" social traits (e.g., socially inappropriate or criminal behavior). Here the rationale was simple: All visible traits of human difference were genetically determined. Thus, just as eye and hair color were genetically determined, so were drunkenness, sexual promiscuity, and other socially inappropriate behaviors. A simple extension of these perceptions led to the idea that an effective way of controlling or eliminating these problems was by sterilization, incarceration, or death.
...
Also in 1933, the Nazis enacted the Law Against Dangerous Habitual Criminals, a law that further blurred the distinction between bona fide criminal behavior and inappropriate social behavior that characterized many people with disabilities. The law stipulated that these criminal asozialen (asocials) could be committed to state asylums, held in indeterminate protective custody, and, in the case of sex offenders, officially castrated.
...
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.
...
In this action, patients from several asylums were rounded up, taken to nearby woods, and individually shot in the back of the head. Between 1939 and 1944, almost 13,000 Polish psychiatric patients were killed in this way. However, in such instances, it quickly became evident that the perpetrators' close proximity to the resulting gore exacted a heavy psychological toll that could be reduced only by using less grisly methods.
The logistical necessities involved in killing large numbers of asylum inmates were also problematic within Germany itself.
...
A human experiment on the effectiveness of the gas was conducted in January 1940. A number of senior officials responsible for Aktion T-4, including many asylum directors and several others who would later make their names infamous at Auschwitz, gathered at a defunct prison near Berlin. Approximately 20 naked asylum inmates were herded into a prototypical gas chamber by psychiatric nurses. The enthusiastic onlookers watched closely as the inmates died from carbon monoxide poisoning. Eight further inmates were administered lethal injections, but when the poison had little immediate effect, these inmates were gassed as well. Buoyed by the dreadful success he had just witnessed, Viktor Brack, one of the top Aktion T-4 officials, victoriously declared the importance of using physicians to administer the gas through his oft-repeated motto: "The needle belongs in the hand of the doctor.
...
Based on the logistical experiences of killing children with disabilities, similar administrative networks for registering the adult victims and the sham system of notification of next of kin were put in place. The euphemistically named Community Foundation for the Care of Asylums was the official unit responsible for hiring the killers and building staff, acquiring the gas, and later recycling gold teeth and selling jewelry from the dead. Another sham organization, the Community Patients' Transport Service, Ltd., transported asylum inmates from other institutions to the killing centers.
,,,
Concocted causes of death included the now familiar list: communicable diseases such as meningitis, which was possible in people of all ages; pneumonia, a common cause of death secondary to other serious diseases; and cases of stroke, a favored sham diagnosis among the elderly.
...
There is little evidence that asylum directors openly opposed the killing of their patients. However, some questioned the legality of the program, and others deliberately avoided meetings that would have given them no choice but to become personally involved. Some quibbled with the accuracy and utility of the identification process. Scattered instances of delay, deliberate incompetence, and other forms of resistance also occurred. In spite of these efforts, reluctant asylum personnel were often reduced to making difficult choices of who would be taken to the killing centers and who would not.
...
The Role of Science
A major impetus for Nazi ideology was its claim of legitimacy based on the pseudoscience of Social Darwinism, which drove perceptions of difference from benign recognition to active genocide. Not only was the pseudoscientific claimed as science (i.e., as established fact, data based, and replicated over time), but it was used as an instrument of deceit to perpetrate murder. On one hand, the appeal to "science" allowed the willing German intelligentsia to be more easily convinced to support and participate in brutality masquerading as research. On the other hand, the claims of Social Darwinism fed the public's long-held distrust of those who were different, whether racially or in terms of disability.
...
The enchantment of the intelligentsia with pseudoscience and the willingness of the public to seize pseudoscientific "facts" as legitimate knowledge remain problems in special education today, albeit in more benign forms. For example, the unfortunate history of facilitated communication (FC) eloquently demonstrates that fairly nonsensical ideas can be widely and enthusiastically embraced by people who should know better.
...
Complicity of the Medical Professions
It is important to note that the enactment of prejudice against people with disabilities in Nazi Germany could not have succeeded without the complicity of the medical and adjunct professions. Power over life and death was placed firmly in the hands of physicians who became white-coated executioners, having long abandoned the "do no harm" clause of the Hippocratic Oath. Currently [2002], there is evidence of the medical community's again being willing agents in hastening the deaths of people deemed not viable, including people with disabilities, through familiar methods for ending the lives of terminally ill people, such as starvation and death by thirst. Furthermore, there is evidence that "do no harm" is now viewed as a somewhat quaint throwback to a distant, less sophisticated era. For example, many physicians no longer take the Hippocratic Oath before beginning their careers***, and many standard hospital treatment protocols now stipulate that staff physicians may override next-of-kin requests for patient treatment if the physician decides that treatment will likely be ineffective.
Propaganda
The Nazis needed a means of influencing public opinion for more active perpetration of actions already planned. Propaganda became a useful tool. Nazi propaganda was created by many leading German artists, authors, and other creative persons impressed by the Third Reich, who lent their credibility and prestige to film, literature, and other public projects. Inexpert in matters of science, but eager to be on the cutting edge of issues of the day, many high-profile celebrities willingly embraced National Socialist dogma."
***As of 2016 only 14% took the Oath:
https://www.discovery.org/b/culture-of-death/
And many of those scientists came to America after the war 😖
Operation Paperclip...the Vatican helped.
And G H W Bush and his father, Prescott, helped to establish the operation. I've also read that later on, G Bush became 4th fuehrer of 4th reich...
War criminals...each and every one of them.
Yes - and beyond evil.