"On August 18, 1939, the Reich Ministry of the Interior circulated a decree requiring all physicians, nurses, and midwives to report newborn infants and children under the age of three who showed signs of severe mental or physical disability."

"Beginning in October 1939, public health authorities began to encourage parents of children with disabilities to admit their young children to one of a number of specially designated pediatric clinics"

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"In reality, the clinics were children's killing wards. There, specially recruited medical staff murdered their young charges by lethal overdoses of medication or by starvation."
"At first, medical professionals and clinic administrators included only infants and toddlers in the operation. As the scope of the measure widened, they included youths up to 17 years of age."

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"'Euthanasia' planners quickly envisioned extending the killing program to adult disabled patients living in institutional settings."

"In the autumn of 1939, Adolf Hitler signed a secret authorization in order to protect participating physicians, medical staff, and administrators from prosecution. This authorization was backdated to September 1, 1939, to suggest that the effort was related to wartime measures."

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"The Führer Chancellery was compact and separate from state, government, or Nazi Party apparatuses. For these reasons, Hitler chose it to serve as the engine for the "euthanasia" campaign. The program's functionaries called their secret enterprise "T4." This code-name came from the street address of the program's coordinating office in Berlin: Tiergartenstrasse 4."

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" T4 operatives established six gassing installations for adults as part of the 'euthanasia' action. These were:
- #Brandenburg, on the Havel River near Berlin,
- #Grafeneck, in southwestern Germany,
- #Bernburg, in Saxony,
- #Sonnenstein, also in Saxony,
- #Hartheim, near Linz on the Danube in Austria,
- #Hadamar, in Hessen

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"Secretly recruited 'medical experts,' physicians—many of them of significant reputation—worked in teams of three to evaluate the forms. On the basis of their decisions beginning in January 1940, T4 functionaries began to remove patients selected for the "euthanasia" program from their home institutions. The patients were transported by bus or by rail to one of the central gassing installations for killing."

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"Within hours of their arrival at such centers, the victims perished in gas chambers. The gas chambers, disguised as shower facilities, used pure, bottled carbon monoxide gas. T4 functionaries burned the bodies in crematoria attached to the gassing facilities. [...]
The families or guardians of the victims received such an urn, along with a death certificate and other documentation, listing a fictive cause and date of death."

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"Because the program was secret, T-4 planners and functionaries took elaborate measures to conceal its deadly designs. Even though physicians and institutional administrators falsified official records in every case to indicate that the victims died of natural causes, the "euthanasia" program quickly became an open secret.
There was widespread public knowledge of the measure. "

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"Private and public protests concerning the killings took place, especially from members of the German clergy."
"In light of the widespread public knowledge and the public and private protests, Hitler ordered a halt to the Euthanasia Program in late August 1941."

"Hitler's call for a halt to the T4 action did not mean an end to the "euthanasia" killing operation. Child "euthanasia" continued as before."

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"Moreover, in August 1942, German medical professionals and healthcare workers resumed the killings, although in a more carefully concealed manner than before. More decentralized than the initial gassing phase, the renewed effort relied closely upon regional exigencies, with local authorities determining the pace of the killing."

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"The Euthanasia Program continued until the last days of World War II, expanding to include an ever wider range of victims, including geriatric patients, bombing victims, and foreign forced laborers."

"Historians estimate that the Euthanasia Program, in all its phases, claimed the lives of 250,000 individuals."

Source: encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content…

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Euthanasia Program and Aktion T4

The Nazi Euthanasia Program, codenamed Aktion "T4," was the systematic murder of institutionalized people with disabilities. Read about Nazi “euthanasia.”

^{encyclopedia.ushmm.org}

"Aktion T4 essentially expanded the compulsory sterilization of those deemed “unfit” provided by the Nuremberg laws, which had been in operation since the early days of the Reich. In the six-year period between 1933 and 1939, approximately 360,000 people were sterilized."
"The methods and technologies employed in the T4 program to murder the handicapped would become a precursor to the atrocities committed in the death camps"

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"Indeed, some of the same personnel who performed well in the #AktionT4 program went on to great ['glory'] at the extermination centers.

Given Hitler’s overarching concern for racial purity, it [was] a short step to extend the ideological justification for murdering the unfit to other categories of perceived biological enemies of the state: Jews and Roma and Sinti, homosexuals, criminals, alcoholics, and malcontents."

Source: digital.kenyon.edu/bulmash_eut…

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