Under The Disabled Offspring, By Adolf Hitler

During the Nazi Party’s reign in Germany, an estimated 360,000 people with disabilities were sterilized against their will, and more than 250,000 were murdered by cruel means (“Disabled People”). One of the many untold stories of the Holocaust belongs to those who had disabilities. Hundreds of thousands of innocent lives were taken for something that they could not control. The Nazis were known for their strong, fascist ideas of Aryan supremacy, anti-semitism, and nationalism. They were led by Adolf Hitler, who became authoritarian dictator of the country in 1933 and went on to commit many war crimes against other specific groups for 12 years (The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica). These killings of people with disabilities are on par with

One of the Nazi Party’s first steps towards their goal occurred on July 14, 1933, when the Nazi government passed the “Law for the Prevention of Genetically Diseased Offspring” (“Disabled People”). This law established the forced sterilization of people with diseases considered hereditary such as mental illnesses, learning disabilities, physical disabilities/deformities, epilepsy, blindness, deafness, and alcoholism (“People with Disabilities”). The law was coauthored by lawyer Falk Ruttle, Arthur Gütt, a physician and director of public health affairs, and Ernst Rüdin, a psychiatrist and early leader of the German racial hygiene movement (“The Nazi Euthanasia Program Deadly Medicine: Creating the Master Race”). People from prisons, nursing homes, asylums, care homes for the elderly, and special school were selected to be sterilized. Sterilization is the process of making someone unable to produce offspring. The Nazis utilized sterilizations to genetically prevent more people from inheriting any disabilities that would hinder the development of an Aryan race. Another law called the Marital Hygiene Law was passed in 1935 (“Eugenics”). It prohibited the marriage between people with a disability and someone of the Aryan race (“Eugenics”). This was done to further cut out the disabled from society. A couple of months later, plans would be discussed to organize a killing operation of disabled people. Things would escalate from a sterilization law and a marital law to an euthanasia program designed to kill. On August 18, 1939, the Reich Ministry of the Interior decreed that all physicians, nurses, and midwives were to report newborn infants and children under 3 years old who appeared to have any signs of severe mental or physical disability (“The Nazi Euthanasia Program Deadly Medicine: Creating the Master Race”).