Aktion T4: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 19:47, 10 February 2007

Revision as of 19:10, 17 February 2007

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It is estimated that 360,000 people were sterilised under this law between 1933 and 1939. The law was used punitively in some cases, against women convicted of prostitution, for example. Some people with non-hereditary disabilities were also affected, despite the lack of logic this entailed. There were some suggestions that the program should be extended to people with physical disabilities, but such ideas had to be expressed carefully given that one of the most powerful figures of the regime, [[Joseph Goebbels]], suffered from congenital [[club foot]]. [[Philipp Bouhler]] himself was very lame as a result of war wounds to his legs. After 1937 the acute shortage of labour in Germany arising from the crash rearmament program meant that anyone capable of work was deemed to be “useful” and was exempted from the law, and the rate of sterilisation declined.<ref>Richard J. Evans, ''The Third Reich in Power'', Allen Lane 2005, 508</ref>

It may be noted that racial hygienist ideas were far from unique to the Nazi movement, although Hitler expressed them in an extreme form. The ideas of [[social Darwinism]] were widespread in all western countries in the early 20th century, and the [[eugenics]] movement had many followers among educated people, being particularly strong in the [[United States]]. The idea of sterilising those carrying hereditary defects or exhibiting what was thought to be hereditary anti-social behaviour was widely accepted, and was put into law in the [[United States]], [[Sweden]], [[Switzerland]] and other countries. Between 1935 and 1975, for example, 63,000 people were sterilised on eugenicist grounds in Sweden.<ref>Evans, 514</ref>

==Towards a policy of killing==