MASS MURDER OF
PEOPLE WITH DISABILITIES AND THE HOLOCAUST
IHRA
The latest International Holocaust Remembrance Aliance (IHRA) publication “Mass Murder of People with Disabilities and the Holocaust” edited by Brigitte Bailer and Juliane Wetzel presents the results of the latest research on these murders in the German occupied territories, as discussed at an IHRA conference held in Bern in November 2017.
In Germany and annexed Austria, people with disabilities were the first to fall victim to National Socialist mass murder, propagated under the euphemistic term of “euthanasia”. For racist and economic reasons, they were deemed unfit to live. The means and methods used in these crimes were applied later during the Holocaust — perpetrators of these first murders became experts in the death camps of the so-called “Aktion Reinhardt”.
Over the course of World War II, the National Socialists aimed to exterminate people with disabilities in the occupied territories of Western Europe, and also in Eastern Europe.
‘The fact that the National Socialists tested their killing methods on people with disabilities before applying these methods to perpetrate the mass murder of European Jewry sinks easily into oblivion, given the enormity of the Holocaust. After the establishment of memorials at the former killing sites of the T4 program, such as Hadamar (Germany) or Hartheim (Austria)—to name just two—only in 2014 was a visible monument and information center opened at the historic location, Tiergartenstraße 4, where the “euthanasia” program was planned and organized under the code name “T4.” The website www.Gedenkort-T4.eu—currently only in German—provides a great deal of information on the Nazi “euthanasia” program,’ we read in the preface.