Nazi Euthanasia In The 1920's

Nazi Euthanasia program was a secretive murder program, which targeted for systematic killing mentally and physically disabled patients living in unappealing settings in Germany as well as German territories. This was Germanys first attempt at mass murder, before the Holocaust, starting in 1933. The Nazi euthanasia program Action T4 ordered by Hitler to widespread’ mercy killing’ to eliminate anyone ‘life unworthy of life’ focusing on newborn and very young children. During the Nazi rule 19000 doctors were required to register children up to the age of three who showed any symptoms of mental retardation, physical deformity, and many provided by the Reich health ministry questionnaire. Nazism arose out of theories like social Darwinism and racial

They were purely the ideas of the Nazi’s. Before Adolf Hitler came to power and implemented the T-4 program, which came from Tiergartenstrasse 4, Berlin the ideological ground had been already prepared. 1920, the growing popularity of eugenics, as Detlev Peukert has argued “between reformist optimism and potentially murderous schemas of eugenic classification and special treatment (sonderbehandlung). (The politics of German Child Welfare from the Empire to the Federal Republic, 1996, Dickinson Ross, p.143) two eminent German academics, Karl Binding a law professor and Alfred Hoche a doctor published their work “Permission to destroy life unworthy of life” they portrayed that it is acceptable for an outside agency to determine what individual life was worthless and an individual had to justify his existence according to criteria imposed from outside. The cultural factors In Germany during the time had a direct influence in the medical establishment and the social sciences. This was the foundation of the coercive and homicidal policies of the national socialist regime. There was an intellectual ideological tension between the social reform advocates and medical reformers. The doctors closed natures of profession have advocated the

Hitler’s government relied upon Darwinism “Survival of the fittest”, developing and implementing the policy designed to protect the ‘superior race’, required preventing the inferior races from interbreeding with thee superior to be able to reduce a latter ‘gene pool.’ Hitler believed humans are as animals and the breeding livestock laws could be applied. He believed that the first step is to advance the human race and isolate the inferiors. The Nazis believed that they were implementing facts, proven by science .the Nazi party was to accept this and “the core idea of Darwinism was not evolution, but selection” (Stein, Ref. 2010, pg53). Darwin occurs ‘mainly as a result of the elimination of the weak in the struggle for survival’. (Darwinism and the Nazi Race Holocaust, 1999). Darwinism inspired eugenics and played a significant role on encouraging the Nazis views on both race and war. Darwin’s theory ‘contributed to the death of over nine million people in concentration camps and about 40 million other humans in war”(Darwinism and the Nazi Race Holocaust, 1999). Nazism has reached towards the holocaust through the acceptance of social Darwinism by the scientific and education. Social Darwinism claims that human behavior and moral character were the forces of inheritance. Natural selection drives the mechanism of inheritance and the struggle for