T-4 Killing Program
Nicholas Theriot 5
The Holocaust
The Holocaust. A time of turmoil. A time of suffering for everyone. Especially for the Jewish people. The people who where captured were either sent to concentration camps, or killed in their T-4 killing program. This was also known as the Euthanasia project.
The Euthanasia Project
The term "euthanasia" means "good death." It was used to give people the Nazis captured a painless death. It was the Nazis first form of mass murder during the Holocaust. The program, at first, was aimed toward disabled patients, mainly children at first, but was later changed to all ages. Of course all ages of people who are disabled mentally or physically.
The Euthanasia Project in Action
In the spring and summer of 1939, Nazi planners organized the secret killing program, euthanasia project, targeted at disabled children. The leaders were Hitlers private chancellery, Philipp Bouhler, and his attending physician, Karl Brandt. In the beginning of October 1939, public heath authorities began to tell parents of disabled children to send them to their health clinics, which in reality, was their killing wards. There the nurses murdered the children with overdoses of medicine and starvation.
At first the medical professionals and clinic administrators would only incorporate toddlers or infants. As the program grew they expanded to people up to 17 years of age. Estimates have been made that over 5,000 disabled German children have fallen victim as a result of the child "euthanasia" program during the war.
Expanding The Euthanasia Project
Euthanasia planners quickly started expanding the killing project to adult disabled patients living in their institution. In the fall of 1939, Adolf Hitler signed a secret authorization in order to protect participating physicians, administrators, and medical staff from prosecution. This was later backdated to September 1, 1939.
According to Hitlers directive, Fuhrer Chancellery director Phillip Bouhler and physician Karl Brandt undertook leadership of the killing project.
Fun Yet Awful Facts
- approximately 270,000 people lost their their life to the program
- patients were killed either by lethal injections, gassing, gas trucks, shooting or starvation
- approximately 400 people were apart of the operation
- In August of 1941 Hitler decided to terminate the program, which had become a public secret
- many historians see the operation as an experimental "rehearsal" before the final solution
The Nazi Euthanasia (T4) Programme