Thread by @marinamaral2

#OnThisDay in 1933 – The Nazi eugenics begins with the proclamation of the Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring that calls for the compulsory sterilization of any citizen who suffers from alleged genetic disorders.

"For the purposes of this law, any person will be considered as hereditarily diseased who is suffering from any one of the following diseases: –

(1) Congenital Mental Deficiency,
(2) Schizophrenia,
(3) Manic-Depressive Insanity,
(4) Hereditary Epilepsy,
(5) Hereditary Chorea

(6) Hereditary Blindness,
(7) Hereditary Deafness,
(8) Any severe hereditary deformity."

'The 1933 law created a large number of "Genetic Health Courts", consisting of a judge, a medical officer, and medical practitioner, which "shall decide at its own discretion after considering the results of the whole proceedings and the evidence tendered".

If the court decided that the person in question was to be sterilized, the decision could be appealed to "Higher Genetic Health Court". If the appeal failed, the sterilization was to be carried out, with the law specifying that "the use of force is permissible".

The image above shows Reichensperger Platz Square which includes the center of operations of the hereditary health court and the higher hereditary health court.

In the first year of the law's operation, 1934, 84,600 cases were brought to Genetic Health Courts, with 62,400 forced sterilizations.

Nearly 4,000 people appealed against the decisions of sterilization authorities; 3,559 of the appeals failed.

In 1935, it was 88,100 trials and 71,700 sterilizations.

By the end of the Nazi regime, over 200 "Genetic Health Courts" were created, and under their rulings over 400,000 people were sterilized against their will.

Propaganda for Nazi Germany's T-4 Euthanasia Program:

"This person suffering from hereditary defects costs the community 60,000 Reichsmark during his lifetime. Fellow German, that is your money, too."

Once the war began in 1939, the situation escalated and Aktion T4 - a postwar name for mass murder through involuntary euthanasia in Nazi Germany; was created.

German physicians were authorized to select patients "deemed incurably sick, after most critical medical examination" and then administer to them a "Gnadentod" (mercy death).

Children with down syndrome at the Schönbrunn Psychiatric Hospital.

Photo by SS photographer Franz Bauer.

Aktion T4 program personnel enjoy a social gathering during some time off.

Karl Brandt was selected by Philipp Bouhler, the head of Hitler's Chancellery, to administer the euthanasia program.

The killings took place from September 1939 until the end of the war in 1945.

From 275,000 to 300,000 people were killed in psychiatric hospitals in Germany and Austria, occupied Poland and the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia (now the Czech Republic).

Patient group at Katharinenhof, 1939/40. The children in the photo were almost invariably victims of the murder of patients.

The number of people killed was about 200,000 in Germany and Austria, with about 100,000 victims in other European countries.

Mass graves of victims of the Aktion T4 program killed at the Hadamar Institute. April 15, 1945.

In Am Spiegelgrund, Austria, children were killed by lethal injection, gas poisoning and physical abuse from 1940 to 1945. Children's brains were preserved in jars and stored in the basement of the clinic and in the private collection of Heinrich Gross until 2001.

The last child to be killed under Aktion T4 was Richard Jenne on 29 May 1945, in the children's ward of the Kaufbeuren-Irsee state hospital in Bavaria, Germany, more than three weeks after U.S. Army troops had occupied the town.

Aktion T4 program personnel.

Karl Brandt listens as he’s sentenced to death at the conclusion of his trial in Nuremberg on Aug. 20, 1947.

Read more: encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/art…

For me, there is no better photo to translate the coldness that existed inside these people:

SS auxiliaries pose at a resort for Auschwitz personnel, 1942.