Here's a little piece of history I am sure many people did not know about, myself included: before murdering the Jews, Nazis also euthanized hundreds of thousands of disabled people.
Sound familiar? It's almost like the left murdering unborn babies who may have down syndrome, or aborting those babies who "might" have a tough life. Who are they to decide to who gets to live or die?
Turns out, the Nazis had an Aktion T-4 euthanasia program, which killed 300,000 disabled men, women, and children. Starting in 1939, they were rounded up and "gassed or given a lethal injection and cremated in six killing facilities in Germany and Austria,” historian Michael Cook said, “This helped the Nazi regime to refine its system for processing millions, rather than ‘just’ thousands, of victims."
“The horrific genocide of six million Jews was in fact only the final chapter in the Nazi holocaust story.” -Social researcher, Peter Saunders
Kenny Fries, author of "The Nazis' First Victims Were the Disabled," wrote about the horrific truth that many of us have been unaware of. Fries, who is a disabled Jewish man himself, explained the true horror of his findings: "I first discovered that people with disabilities were sterilized and killed by the Nazis when I was a teenager, watching the TV mini-series “Holocaust” in 1978."
He continued, "But it would be years before I understood the connections between the killing of the disabled and the killing of Jews and other “undesirables,” all of whom were, in one way or another, deemed 'unfit.'"
"The [German] neurologist [to whom Fries is explaining his research] does not know much about what I’m telling him. While he does know that approximately 300,000 disabled people were killed in T4 and its aftermath, he doesn’t know about the direct connection between T4 and the Holocaust." Fries added, "He doesn’t know that it was at Brandenburg, the first T4 site, where methods of mass killing were tested, that the first victims of Nazi mass killings were the disabled, and that its personnel went on to establish and run the extermination camps at Treblinka, Belzec and Sobibor."
The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum reports:
On July 14, 1933, the Nazi government instituted the “Law for the Prevention of Progeny with Hereditary Diseases.” This law, one of the first steps taken by the Nazis toward their goal of creating an Aryan “master race,” called for the sterilization of all persons who suffered from diseases considered hereditary, such as mental illness, learning disabilities, physical deformity, epilepsy, blindness, deafness, and severe alcoholism. With the law’s passage the Third Reich also stepped up its propaganda against people with disabilities, regularly labeling them “life unworthy of life” or “useless eaters” and highlighting their burden upon society.
Just a few years later, the persecution of people with disabilities escalated even further. In the autumn of 1939, Adolf Hitler secretly authorized a medically administered program of “mercy death” code-named “Operation T4,” in reference to the address of the program’s Berlin headquarters at Tiergartenstrasse 4. Between 1940 and 1941 approximately 70,000 Austrian and German disabled people were killed under the T4 program, most via large-scale killing operations using poison gas. (This methodology served as the precursor to the streamlined extermination methods of the “Final Solution.”) Although Hitler formally ordered a halt to the program in late August 1941, the killings secretly continued until the war’s end, resulting in the murder of an estimated 275,000 people with disabilities.
Something I never thought possible, the Holocaust is even worse than we thought. What an ugly, atrocious stain on the history of the world. We cannot ever allow something so terrible to happen again.
