Chapter 7
The Holocaust Begins
Mentally Handicapped Targeted
Summary Part One
In chapter 7 they talk about how the children were taught that mentally handicapped people were unfit to live productively and a waste of the government's money. The Nazi Party didn't like the fact that most of the government's money was going to the handicapped, so the Nazi's started to make propaganda against them. Soon the physically unable were being killed by the Nazi Party using Euthanasia ( An act of putting to a painless death). Doctors were killing mentally and physically disabled people,during nurses and hospitals and being cleared for war. Doctors decided who to kill, by having the fill out a report about the patient and send it to a panel of doctors where they decide. If the doctors put a red cross the patient is going to be put to sleep but if there is a blue cross they are sparing their life. This was called Artion-T4 , when this was going on parents didn't know what was happening to their children. Most parents were told that their child has been sent to a special hospital and later tell them that they died of heart failure or pneumonia.Later the Nazi's started to put them to sleep then would shoot the patient. Most people disliked the idea of killing them, but the others thought it would be okay if the parents had consent. Soon the Nazi's were trying to find other ways to get more money from the tax payers, their next target would be the elderly. Once the public found out what the Nazi's were up to they started to protest. Finally the killings stopped publicly after 100,000 children and adults died, but the killings didn't stop secretly 200,000 more people died.Ss Einsatzgruppe
Summary Part Two
In chapter seven talks about how the SS officers came in after the army to deal with polish Jews. The Ss officers killed 50,000 people in the first 6 months. The men who did this were ordinary men educated and extraordinary for the job. Also the SS killed about 34% of people during the war. Soon the Nazi's wanted a more efficient way to kill them; bullets were starting to coast to much, so consideration camps with gas chambers became more effective. When the public found out what they were doing they thought that they were lying because it was to horrid to be true. They started to send fake police to "arrest" the Jews and take them to the consideration camps. Once they got to Auschwitz men were sent to labor camps and women and children were sent to the chambers. A lot of the SS members became guards at the camps. If you did something wrong you would get a beating or death.
Vocab
Euthanasia- The act of putting to death painlessly