Aktion T4: the holocaust of disabled people
Hitler's Forgotten Victims: The Holocaust and the Disabled provides a good survey of the subject.
Disabled people were the first to die; the people on whom gas chambers were tested. They were still being killed shortly after the war - institutions didn't stop the killing simply because the war was over (it's unclear how long this lasted for). They weren't recognised as 'proper' victims of the Nazis; survivors who had been sterilised had their cases for compensation thrown out of court. Their sterilisations were all legal and proper, of course, and they were only sterilised because they had heritable diseases, so that made it ok. Most of the doctors involved never came to trial, and some of them went on to become professors of psychiatry or paediatrics, after having murdered their psychiatric or paediatric patients in the 30s and 40s.
It's frightening how close contemporary rhetoric on denying people with disabilities proper benefits comes to the "useless eaters" rhetoric used in this context.
Wikipedia on Aktion T4
Disabled people were the first to die; the people on whom gas chambers were tested. They were still being killed shortly after the war - institutions didn't stop the killing simply because the war was over (it's unclear how long this lasted for). They weren't recognised as 'proper' victims of the Nazis; survivors who had been sterilised had their cases for compensation thrown out of court. Their sterilisations were all legal and proper, of course, and they were only sterilised because they had heritable diseases, so that made it ok. Most of the doctors involved never came to trial, and some of them went on to become professors of psychiatry or paediatrics, after having murdered their psychiatric or paediatric patients in the 30s and 40s.
It's frightening how close contemporary rhetoric on denying people with disabilities proper benefits comes to the "useless eaters" rhetoric used in this context.
Wikipedia on Aktion T4