ipl-logo

How To Kill Disabled Germans

996 Words4 Pages

“By the end of 1938, the regime was receiving requests from the families of newborn or very young children with severe deformities and brain damage for the grant of a “mercy killing”(“Introduction to Nazi Euthanasia”). Why were parents asking the Nazis to kill their own children? As a result, disabled Germans were subjected to starvation, sterilization, and ultimately mass murder based on the Nazi 's propaganda campaign and their belief that these individuals were inferior. The Nazi’s main goal of the Holocaust was to create a master race. In school curriculums and propaganda, they promoted the idea that the disabled German’s diseases were dangerous to future generations and therefore needed to be sterilized and murdered in order to create …show more content…

To apply or be applied, a German had to fit in one of these categories: Congenital mental deficiency, schizophrenia, manic-depression, hereditary epilepsy, hereditary St. Vitus’ Dance (Huntington’s Chorea), hereditary blindness, hereditary deafness, serious hereditary physical deformity, and alcoholism (“Law for the Prevention of Offspring with Hereditary Diseases (July 14, 1933)”). The disabled Germans were sent off to one of six T4 locations: Brandenburg, Grafeneck, Bernburg, Sonnenstein, Hartheim, and Hadamar (“Euthanasia Program”). These programs had gas chambers disguised as showers and crematoriums where they burned the dead bodies (“Hadamar Euthanasia”). The Jews faced very similar policies and were also gassed and burned in crematoriums because the gas chambers and crematoriums were ideas used from the T4 programs (“Final Solutions: Murderous Racial Hygiene, 1939-1945”). The Jews did have some different aspects that made their experience different from the disabled Germans. During their experience, the Jews were tattooed and their identities were lost. Also, the Jews faced selection processes when they arrived at camps. From the book Night, the author recalls his selection process: "He was holding a conductor 's baton and was surrounded by officers. The baton was moving …show more content…

The primary parallel between the disabled German and Jew experience is that the Nazis intended to annihilate all people considered inferior to the master race. To the Nazis, disabled Germans were burdens to the state in both the health and finance aspects (Bareth, Karl and Alfred Vogel). They were also considered less valuable due to their genetic illnesses. According to the Euthanasia Propaganda Posters, “This hereditary ill person will cost national community 60,000 Reichmarks over the course of his lifetime” (Vogel, Alfred). The Jews were considered “bloodsuckers” and “parasites”, and they were too different genetically, physically, and spiritually (Bareth, Karl and Alfred Vogel). The Nazis built camps for both groups and made it their priority to kill as many individuals from each group as they could. The primary difference between the disabled Germans and the Jews was that the disabled Germans were first only subjected to sterilization, while the Jews were murdered. In the beginning, the disabled Germans were sterilized in order to prevent them having children and passing down the less valuable traits ("Law for the Prevention of Offspring with Hereditary Diseases (July 14, 1933)." The Nazis transferred to mass murder when parents of disabled German children asked for euthanasia instead of sterilization (“Introduction to Nazi Euthanasia”). Finally, Holocaust

Show More
Related
679 Words | 3 Pages

Many lives were lost during the German’s attempt to wipe out all Jews, and those who lived lost a part of their life during this time. The young boys lost their childhood and ‘innocences’. They witness more death and suffering than anywhere in the country. Today, there is still death and violence against others.

Read More
640 Words | 3 Pages

Dehumanization made people feel like they are worthless. When they came to the camp, they were dehumanized by giving less food and crammed them into barracks which had little space to sleep, they also stripped them and cut their hair. Nazi generals took their belongings and valuables from Jews. Jews and other targeted groups were tattooed numbers to get registered. On Eliezer’s first day of the camp, “Never shall I forget the small faces of the children whose bodies I saw transformed into smoke under a silent sky”(Wiesel 34).

Read More
3286 Words | 14 Pages

He encouraged all Germans to keep their bodies pure of any intoxicating or unclean substance. A main Nazi concept was the notion of racial hygiene. New laws banned marriage between non-Jewish and Jewish Germans, and deprived "non-Aryans" of the benefits of German citizenship. Hitler's early “selective breeding” policies targeted children with physical and developmental disabilities, and later authorized an euthanasia program for disabled

Read More
450 Words | 2 Pages

The first dehumanizing act the Nazis perpetrate on the Jews is removing the normality from their everyday life. In Spring 1941, “German Army vehicles made their appearance” (Wiesel 9) on the streets of Sighet, yet the Jews showed no anguish. However, the harmony is short-lived; “the race toward death had begun” (Wiesel 10). The Nazis enforce rules that strip the Jews of their humanity: “jews were prohibited from

Read More
1164 Words | 5 Pages

“At every step, somebody fell down and ceased to suffer.” This quote by Elie Wiesel explains the people that were Giving up after hunger and loss of family and he noticed these things everyday at the camps and lived to tell the tragic story in his book Night. Dehumanization was a major occurrence in the concentration camps which killed off over six million Jews. Lack of food, cramped and exhausting ways of transportation and separation of families during the Holocaust was the worst ways of dehumanizing the Jews and it was going on for years with no help. Food was scarce for the Jews in some areas around World War Two, so every little thing mattered evento the point of killing others.

Read More
1102 Words | 5 Pages

Schindler’s List displays this by showing how the Jews were sent to forced labour camps such as the Plaszow. When they arrived to these labour and concentration camps, they were separated by gender as told “men to the left, women to the right”, this separated families causing more effective discomfort to the Jews. In the labour camps, many Jews were shot often resulting in death because they were not working to the satisfaction of the Nazis or SS officers who were in charge of that labour camp. If any Jews were seen as unhealthy they were sent to death camps. During this stage of the holocaust many Jews were

Read More
1194 Words | 5 Pages

The oppression began with health policies aimed towards the removal of “unfit” persons. Over time, the Nazi strategies intensified; beginning at forced sterilization, and then transitioning into mass murder. Forced sterilization was a government policy that coerced the Disabled into surgical treatments in an attempt to cure them. The most extreme method of manslaughter, known as the “Euthanasia Program”, was a trial run for the Final Solution to the Jewish Question (“Euthanasia Program”). The word “Euthanasia” is translated into “good death”, but to the Nazis, it was a term that implied the systematic mass murders of thousands.

Read More
182 Words | 1 Pages

During the holocaust, The Nazis used a form of treatment towards the Jews to make them feel less and less human it was called dehumanization. This means to deprive someone of their human like qualities and merely make them feel like a “thing” that gets in peoples way. They used this method to make it seem like the Nazis were doing them a favor, they were killing the jews to “purify” germany in their eyes. To begin, some inmates at the concentration camps (mostly the newer ones) were usually told that if they were fifteen, “No. you're eighteen” (Wiesel 133).

Read More
845 Words | 4 Pages

The creator of Night, a novel recording the horrendous and frightful occasions of the holocaust, Elie Wiesel communicates his encounters and perceptions in which he and his kindred Jews were dehumanized while living in inhumane imprisonments (a terrible). All Jews, as a race were brutalized by the Nazis amid this time; lessening them to no not as much as articles, positions which made no difference to them, things that were an aggravation. Nazis would accumulate each Jew that they could discover and convey them to these infernos, isolating the men and ladies. Families, not knowing it could never observe each other again. People inside the classifications were separated much more, in view of their well being, quality, and age.

Read More
1093 Words | 5 Pages

From then on the Nazi’s treated their prisoners like objects rather than people. They dehumanized and desensitized them, thinking of them as machines that could only complete simple tasks and required a small bowl of broth with a single slice of bread to function. The Nazi’s took the victims of the Holocaust and stripped them of their identities, violated them beyond their breaking point, and wiped them clean of all emotion. First of all, the SS dehumanized the prisoners of the concentration camps by stripping them of their identities. The Nazi’s infringed upon people’s everyday lives and deprived them of their originality.

Read More
593 Words | 3 Pages

Dehumanization is the process of depriving a person, or group of people, of their unalienable rights such as life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. From the beginning of the Holocaust, the Jews were the target of inequitable treatment from their German and allied persecutors. They were segregated from other races, seen more like animals than people, and tormented a great deal. In 1944, Wiesel describes his first sight of German soldiers in Sighet; he insisted that despite the Jewish people’s expectations, “first impressions of the Germans were most reassuring.”

Read More
903 Words | 4 Pages

( Wiesel 37). The Nazis made sure to continue dehumanizing the Jews even after putting them into concentration camps. Once someone was allowed to live, they were tattooed with a number, so that the SS wouldn’t have to use their names. In Night, Wiesel shows this, writing“I became A-7713. From then on, I had no other name” (42).

Read More
261 Words | 2 Pages

Unspoken Victims of The Holocaust Of the countless victims of Adolf Hitler’s brutal genocide none were persecuted more than the Jews, however, among the large death toll many others were mercilessly punished for their race, beliefs, or occupation. A major target for Hitler’s “Final Solution” was the mentally and physically disabled. In their article on the mentally and physically handicapped the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum wrote “The Law for the Prevention of Progeny with Hereditary Diseases, proclaimed July 14, 1933, forced the sterilization of all persons who suffered from diseases considered hereditary, such as mental illness (schizophrenia and manic depression), retardation (congenital feeble-mindedness), physical deformity,

Read More
714 Words | 3 Pages

In Night one of the ways that the Jews were dehumanized was by abuse. There were beatings, “I never felt anything except the lashes of the whip... Only the first really hurt.” (Wiesel, 57) “They were forced to dig huge trenches. When they had finished their work, the men from the Gestapo began theirs.

Read More
600 Words | 3 Pages

In many ways, Nazis had physically, mentally, and emotionally dehumanized their victims. The Jews were treated so badly by the Nazis that they felt as if they weren’t even humans; they felt like animals. For example, the Jewish prisoners were always being yelled at with harsh tones. Eliezer only remembers one time when a Polish

Read More

More about How To Kill Disabled Germans

Related Topics

Open Document