After a few more years, the definition of undesirables will be expanded by the Left, to those who speak ideas against them. The "right" to perform Post-birth abortion will be the next great fight of the Left. After all, the Left states, there is nothing inherently special about passing through the birth canal. A person marked for death before actual birth can just as easily be killed immediately after birth. After all, the moment of technical "birth" is further confused by the increasing use of and recommendation for C-sections, even in cases where not specifically warranted, as matters of "convenience" of scheduling and such, as well as more important liability and insurance restrictions and requirements, which have only kept increasing.
The systematic extermination of innocent people, for purely selfish reasons, has been in place for more than forty years, and is touted as being "acceptable" by many.
Undesirables, whether in body, thought or political or religious affiliation, determined solely by the faceless state and its leaders and without recourse or rights, will be subject to increasing tyranny, persecution, and eventually, extermination.
Here's where abortion's next step leads, and how you get there. It is particularly interesting to note the oppression and persecution of conservative Catholic Churches and ideals by Hitler and Nazi Germany, increasingly forcing them to obey ideals which are against the Catholic Church's teachings, in the name of conformity and adherence to State policies deemed to be for the "good of society."
Enemies of the state were easy to classify as "mentally incompetent" and those who spoke out against the political correctness of the time could easily find themselves reclassified as undesirable, and eventually marked for extermination. This is exactly how the Holocaust started.
It is important to remember it was gradual, and using the passage of laws and the legal system to advance the agenda through the society. Not in one fell swoop, but over years, in the name of a better, more equal society, and from leaders with supposedly "good" intentions who "knew better" than the people did what was good for them. Kind of like a Master knew what was best for his slaves, since they were so uneducated and wrong-thinking. Those who don't remember history are doomed to repeat it:
from wiki:
Action T4 Implementation
![[Image: Karl_Brandt_SS-Arzt.jpg]](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/79/Karl_Brandt_SS-Arzt.jpg)
Dr. Karl Brandt, Hitler's personal physician and organizer of Action T4
![[Image: 170px-Bundesarchiv_Bild_183-H13374%2C_Ph...ouhler.jpg]](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/17/Bundesarchiv_Bild_183-H13374%2C_Philipp_Bouhler.jpg/170px-Bundesarchiv_Bild_183-H13374%2C_Philipp_Bouhler.jpg)
Philipp Bouhler, Head of the T4 program
Although officially started in September 1939, Action T4 may have been initiated with a 'trial' case. In late 1938 Hitler instructed his personal physician Karl Brandt to evaluate a family's petition for the "mercy killing" of their blind, physically and developmentally disabled infant boy. The boy was eventually killed in July 1939. Hitler instructed Brandt to proceed in the same manner in similar cases. The Reich Committee for the Scientific Registering of Hereditary and Congenital Illnesses was established on 18 August 1939, three weeks after the killing of the aforementioned boy. It was to prepare and proceed with the registration of sick children or newborns identified as defective. Secret killing of infants began in 1939 and increased after the war started. By 1941 more than 5,000 children had been killed.
Hitler was in favor of killing those whom he judged to be "unworthy of life". In a 1939 conference with health minister Leonardo Conti and the head of the Reich Chancellery, Hans Lammers, a few months before the 'euthanasia' decree, Hitler gave as examples of "life unworthy of life": severely mentally ill people who he believed could only be bedded on sawdust or sand because they "perpetually dirtied themselves", or who "put their own excrement into their mouths, eating it and so on".
Both his physician, Dr. Karl Brandt, and the head of the Reich Chancellery, Hans Lammers, testified after the war that Hitler had told them as early as 1933, at the time the sterilization law was passed, that he favored killing the incurably ill, but recognized that public opinion would not accept this. In 1935 Hitler told the Reich Doctors' Leader, Dr. Gerhard Wagner, that the question could not be taken up in peacetime: "Such a problem could be more smoothly and easily carried out in war", he said. He intended, he wrote, "in the event of a war radically to solve the problem of the mental asylums". The initiation of war also provided Hitler with the possibility of carrying out a policy he had long favored.
This issue, according to the Nazi regime, assumed new urgency in wartime. People with severe disabilities, even if sterilized, still needed institutional care. They occupied places in facilities which, during war, would be needed for wounded soldiers and people evacuated from bombed cities. They were housed and fed at the expense of the state, and took up the time of doctors and nurses. The Nazis barely tolerated this support in peacetime. Few supported care for such people in wartime, especially in the last years of World War II when conditions overall were so terrible in Germany. As a leading Nazi doctor, Dr. Hermann Pfannmüller, said: "The idea is unbearable to me that the best, the flower of our youth must lose its life at the front in order that feeble-minded and irresponsible asocial elements can have a secure existence in the asylum".
Even before the Nazis came to power, the German eugenics movement had an extreme wing, led by Alfred Hoche and Karl Binding. As early as 1920, Binding had advocated killing those with lives judged to be "life unworthy of life" (lebensunwertes Leben). Germany in the years after World War I was particularly susceptible to ideas of this kind. Darwinism was interpreted by people in the movement as justifying the nation's promotion of the propagation of "beneficial" genes and prevent the propagation of "harmful" ones. Lifton notes: "The argument went that the best young men died in war, causing a loss to the Volk of the best available genes. The genes of those who did not fight (the worst genes) then proliferated freely, accelerating biological and cultural degeneration". The government, the eugenicists argued, must intervene to prevent this.
These views had gained ground after 1930, when the Depression caused sharp cuts in funding to state mental hospitals, creating squalor and overcrowding. Most German eugenicists were already strongly nationalist and anti-Semitic, and embraced the Nazi regime with enthusiasm. Many were appointed to positions in the Health Ministry and German research institutes. Their ideas were gradually adopted by the majority of the German medical profession, from which Jewish and communist doctors were soon purged.
During the 1930s the Nazi Party carried out a campaign of propaganda in favour of "euthanasia". The National Socialist Racial and Political Office (NSRPA) produced leaflets, posters and short films to be shown in cinemas, pointing out to Germans the cost of maintaining asylums for the incurably ill and insane. These films included The Inheritance (Das Erbe, 1935), The Victim of the Past (Opfer der Vergangenheit, 1937), which was given a major premiere in Berlin and was shown in all German cinemas, and I Accuse (Ich klage an, 1941), which was based on a novel by Dr Hellmuth Unger, a consultant for the child 'euthanasia' program.
Catholic institutions, which could be expected to resist the killing of their patients, were progressively closed and their inmates transferred to already-overcrowded state institutions. {Sounds eerily similar to the increasing forced compliance sought by the Left in America to remove the Catholic Church's freedom to practice its religious beliefs and resist compliance with actions it fundamentally has declared as evil for more than two thousand years.} There the squalid conditions provided further ammunition for campaigns in favor of 'euthanasia'.[citation needed]
1. Killing of children
Extermination centers were established at six existing psychiatric hospitals: Bernburg, Brandenburg, Grafeneck, Hadamar, Hartheim, and Sonnenstein. They played a crucial role
in developments leading to the Holocaust. (It did not happen all at once, but slowly.)
In mid-1939, the parents of a severely deformed child (identified in 2007 as Gerhard Kretschmar), born near Leipzig, wrote to Hitler seeking his permission for their child to be put to death. Hitler approved this and authorized the creation of the Reich Committee for the Scientific Registering of Serious Hereditary and Congenital Illnesses (Reichsausschuss zur wissenschaftlichen Erfassung erb- und anlagebedingter schwerer Leiden), headed by Karl Brandt, his personal physician, and administered by Herbert Linden of the Interior Ministry and SS-Oberführer Viktor Brack. Brandt and Bouhler were authorized to approve applications to kill children in similar circumstances, though Bouhler left the details to subordinates such as Brack and SA-Oberführer Werner Blankenburg.
This precedent was used to establish a program of killing children with severe disabilities; the 'guardian' consent element soon disappeared. From August 1939 the Interior Ministry began registering children with disabilities, requiring doctors and midwives to report all cases of newborns with severe disabilities. Those to be killed were identified as "all children under three years of age in whom any of the following 'serious hereditary diseases' were 'suspected': idiocy and Down syndrome (especially when associated with blindness and deafness); microcephaly; hydrocephaly; malformations of all kinds, especially of limbs, head, and spinal column; and paralysis, including spastic conditions". The reports were assessed by a panel of medical experts, of whom three were required to give their approval before a child could be killed.
The Ministry used various deceptions to gain consent from parents or guardians,
particularly in Catholic areas, where parents were generally uncooperative. Parents were told that their children were being sent to "Special Sections" for children, where they would receive improved treatment. The children sent to these centers were kept for "assessment" for a few weeks and then killed by injection of toxic chemicals, typically phenol; their deaths were recorded as "pneumonia". Autopsies were usually performed, and brain samples were taken to be used for "medical research". This apparently helped to ease the consciences of many of those involved, since it gave them the feeling that the children had not died in vain, and that the whole program had a genuine medical purpose.
Once war broke out in September 1939, the program adopted less rigorous standards of assessment and a quicker approval process. It expanded to include older children and adolescents. The conditions covered also expanded and came to include
"various borderline or limited impairments in children of different ages, culminating in the killing of those designated as juvenile delinquents. Jewish children could be placed in the net primarily because they were Jewish; and at one of the institutions, a special department was set up for 'minor Jewish-Aryan half-breeds'".
At the same time, increased pressure was placed on parents to agree to their children being sent away. Many parents suspected what was really happening, especially when it became apparent that institutions for children with disabilities were being systematically cleared of their charges, and refused consent. The parents were warned that they could lose custody of all their children, and if that did not suffice, the parents could be threatened with call-up for "labor duty". By 1941 more than 5,000 children had been killed. The last child to be killed under Action T4 was Richard Jenne on 29 May 1945 in the children's ward of the Kaufbeuren-Irsee state hospital in Bavaria, Germany, more than three weeks after troops from the U.S. had occupied the town.
Identification of victims and "peer review" for the Nazi's post-birth abortions:
The key document was a circular from the Reich Minister of the Interior of 18 August 1939, Ref: IVb 3088/39 - 1079 Mi, which was marked "Strictly Confidential" and specified the groups to be included and how they were to be assembled. After that, doctors and midwives together with maternity hospitals, obstetric departments and children's hospitals, except where a senior doctor was not present or did not get the instruction, were required to report in writing to the appropriate health authorities:
"if the newborn child is suspected of being afflicted with the following congenital disorders:
1) Idiocy and mongolism (especially cases combined with blindness and deafness),
2) Microcephaly
3) Hydrocephalus, to a severe or advanced degree
4) Malformations of all kinds, particularly the absence of limbs, severe midline defects of the head and spine, etc.
5) Paralysis, including cerebral palsy.
A template of a reporting form was enclosed with the circular, which had to be sent by public health authorities as required to their higher administrative authority. This form was withdrawn by a decree of 7 June 1940 and replaced by an improved one. Uniquely, a reward of 2 RM for each report was given to the midwives affected "for professional services rendered".
Initially only children under the age of 3 were to be reported. The prescribed registration form gave the impression that registration was only being sought with the aim of providing special medical care. The district doctors sent the completed registration form to the National Committee where Office IIb of the KdF with its two medical laymen, Hefelmann and Hegener, screened out cases that they considered should not be sent to a "Special Children's Ward", i.e. which meant that they were not eligible for euthanasia. Of approximately 100,000 registration forms received up to 1945, about 80,000 were screened out. For the professional assessment of the remaining 20,000, three experts were appointed from the National Committee who had been heavily involved in the preparatory committee, namely Werner Catel, Hans Heinze and Ernst Wentzler.
As early as the first half of 1941 the age of the children was specified as up to 16 years in order to prevent mentally or physically disabled young people being gassed as victims of a "summary method" within the framework of the Action T4. The circle of those affected was widened more and more. In addition to the mentally and physically handicapped all so-called psychopaths were subsequently registered. In the Kalmenhof therapy center, those "unfit for society" (that is, pupils with behavioral problems) were sent to the Nazi euthanasia center of Hadamar to be gassed or, after Action T4 was stopped, to be killed by the administering of lethal drugs. Hadamar established its own "nurturing home" for this purpose. At least 40 to 45 of the inmates were killed using drug overdoses here, a method practiced in the adult euthanasia program.
2. Killing of adults
Brandt and Bouhler soon developed plans to expand the program of euthanasia to adults. In July 1939 they held a meeting attended by Dr. Leonardo Conti, Reich Health Leader and state secretary for health in the Interior Ministry, and Professor Werner Heyde, head of the SS medical department. This meeting agreed to arranging a national register of all institutionalized people with mental illnesses or physical disabilities.
![[Image: 170px-Bundesarchiv_Bild_183-P0220-303%2C...restes.jpg]](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/47/Bundesarchiv_Bild_183-P0220-303%2C_Olga_Benario-Prestes.jpg/170px-Bundesarchiv_Bild_183-P0220-303%2C_Olga_Benario-Prestes.jpg)
Olga Benário Prestes in 1928, later gassed at Bernburg Euthanasia Center
The first adults with disabilities to be killed by the Nazi regime were not Germans, but Poles. The SS men of Einsatzkommando 16 cleared the hospitals and mental asylums of the Wartheland, a region of western Poland which was earmarked for incorporation into Germany and resettlement by ethnic Germans following the German conquest of Poland. In the Danzig (now Gdańsk) area, some 7,000 Polish inmates of various institutions were shot, while 10,000 were killed in the Gdynia area. Similar measures were taken in other areas of Poland destined for incorporation into Germany. At Posen (occupied Poznań), hundreds of patients were killed by means of carbon monoxide gas in an improvised gas chamber developed by Dr Albert Widmann, chief chemist of the German Criminal Police (Kripo). In December 1939 Reichsführer of the SS, Heinrich Himmler, witnessed one of these gassings, ensuring that this invention would later be put to much wider uses.
The idea of killing "useless" mental patients soon spread from occupied Poland to adjoining areas of Germany, probably because Nazi Party and SS officers in these areas were most familiar with what was happening in Poland. These were also the areas where Germans wounded from the Polish campaign were expected to be accommodated, which created a demand for hospital space. The Gauleiter of Pomerania, Franz Schwede-Coburg, dispatched 1,400 patients from five Pomeranian hospitals to Poland, where they were shot. The Gauleiter of East Prussia, Erich Koch, likewise had 1,600 patients killed. In all, more than 8,000 Germans were killed in this initial wave of killings. These were carried out on the initiative of local officials, although Himmler certainly knew and approved of them.
![[Image: Jan_Kowalski-arcybiskup_%281926-27%29.jpg]](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/39/Jan_Kowalski-arcybiskup_%281926-27%29.jpg)
Catholic Bishop Jan Maria Michał Kowalski killed at Hartheim Euthanasia Centre.
The official program for killing adults with mental or physical disabilities began with a letter from Hitler issued in October 1939. The letter charged Bouhler and Brandt with "enlarging the authority of certain physicians, to be designated by name, in such a manner that persons who, according to human judgement, are incurable, can, upon a most careful diagnosis of their condition of sickness, be accorded a mercy death." The letter was backdated to 1 September to provide legality to the killings already carried out, and to link the program more definitely to the war, giving it a rationale of wartime necessity. This letter, which provided the sole legal basis for the program, was not a formal "Führer decree", which in Nazi Germany had the force of law. Hitler deliberately bypassed Health Minister Conti and his department, who were held to be insufficiently imbued with National Socialist ruthlessness and who might have raised awkward questions about the legality of the program. He entrusted it to his personal agents Bouhler and Brandt.
![[Image: 250px-Alkoven_Schloss_Hartheim_2005-08-18_3589.jpg]](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/19/Alkoven_Schloss_Hartheim_2005-08-18_3589.jpg/250px-Alkoven_Schloss_Hartheim_2005-08-18_3589.jpg)
Hartheim Euthanasia Center, where over 18,000 people were killed.
The program was administered by Viktor Brack and his staff from Tiergartenstraße 4, under the guise of the "Charitable Foundation for Cure and Institutional Care", and supervised by Bouhler and Brandt. Others closely involved included Dr Herbert Linden, who had been heavily involved in the children's program; Dr Ernst-Robert Grawitz, chief physician of the SS; and August Becker, an SS chemist. These officials chose the doctors who were to carry out the operational part of the program. They were chosen for their political reliability, professional reputation, and known sympathy for radical eugenics. They included several who had proved their worth in the child-killing program, such as Unger, Heinze, and Hermann Pfannmüller. The new recruits were mostly psychiatrists, notably Professor Carl Schneider of Heidelberg, Professor Max de Crinis of Berlin and Professor Paul Nitsche from the Sonnenstein state institution. Heyde became the operational leader of the program, succeeded later by Nitsche.
In early October all hospitals, nursing homes, old-age homes and sanatoria were required to report all patients who had been institutionalized for five years or more, who had been committed as "criminally insane", who were of "non-Aryan race", or who had been diagnosed with any of a list of specified conditions. These included schizophrenia, epilepsy, Huntington's chorea, advanced syphilis, senile dementia, paralysis, encephalitis and "terminal neurological conditions generally". Many doctors and administrators assumed that the purpose of the reports was to identify inmates who were capable of being drafted for "labor service". They tended to overstate the degree of incapacity of their patients, to protect them from labor conscription – with fatal consequences. When some institutions refused to co-operate, such as Catholic ones, teams of T4 doctors (or in some cases Nazi medical students) visited them and compiled their own lists, sometimes in a very haphazard and ideologically motivated way. At the same time, during 1940 all Jewish patients were removed from institutions and killed.
As with the child inmates, the adult cases were assessed by a panel of experts, working at the Tiergartenstraße offices. The experts were required to make their judgments solely on the basis of the reports, rather than on detailed medical histories, let alone examinations. Sometimes they dealt with hundreds of reports at a time. On each they marked a + (meaning death), a - (meaning life), or occasionally a ? meaning that they were unable to decide. Three "death" verdicts condemned the person concerned. As with reviews of children, over time these processes became less rigorous, the range of conditions considered "unsustainable" grew broader, and zealous Nazis further down the chain of command increasingly made decisions on their own initiative.
Gassing
At first patients were killed by lethal injection, the method established for killing children. The method was soon considered too slow and inefficient for killing adults, who needed larger doses of increasingly scarce and expensive drugs and were more likely to need restraint. Hitler recommended to Brandt that carbon monoxide gas be used. At his trial Brandt described this as a "major advance in medical history". The first gassings took place at Brandenburg Euthanasia Center in January 1940, under the supervision of Widmann, Becker, and Christian Wirth, a Kripo (criminal police) officer who was later to play a prominent role in the "final solution" extermination of the Jews. Viktor Brack was head of these operations.
Once the efficacy of this method was established, it became standardized and was instituted at a number of centers across Germany. In addition to Brandenburg, these included Grafeneck Castle in Baden-Württemberg (10,824 dead), Schloss Hartheim near Linz in Austria (over 8,000 dead), Sonnenstein Euthanasia Center in Saxony (15,000 dead), Bernburg Euthanasia Center in Saxony-Anhalt and Hadamar Euthanasia Center in Hesse (14,494 dead). These centers were also used to kill prisoners transferred from concentration camps in Germany and Austria.
Patients were transferred from their institutions to the killing centers in buses, called the Community Patients Transports Service, operated by teams of SS men wearing white coats, to give an air of medical care. To prevent the families and doctors of the patients from tracing them, the patients were often first sent to transit centers in major hospitals where they were supposedly assessed. They were moved again to "special treatment" (Sonderbehandlung) centers. Families were sent letters explaining that owing to wartime regulations, it was not possible for them to visit relatives in the seer. Most of these patients were killed within 24 hours of arriving at the centers, and their bodies cremated. For every person killed, a death certificate was prepared, giving a false but plausible cause of death. This was sent to the family along with an urn of ashes (random ashes, since the victims were cremated en masse). The preparation of thousands of falsified death certificates took up most of the working day of the doctors who operated the centers.
During 1940 the centers at Brandenburg, Grafeneck and Hartheim killed nearly 10,000 people each, while another 6,000 were killed at Sonnenstein. In all, about 35,000 people were killed in T4 operations that year. Operations at Brandenburg and Grafeneck were wound up at the end of the year, partly because the areas they served had been cleared and partly because of public opposition. In 1941, however, the centers at Bernburg and Sonnenstein increased their operations, while Hartheim (where Wirth and Franz Stangl were successively commandants) continued as before. As a result, another 35,000 people were killed before August 1941, when the T4 program was officially shut down by Hitler. Even after that date, however, the centers continued to be used to kill concentration camp inmates: eventually some 20,000 people in this category were killed.
In 1971 the Austrian-born journalist Gitta Sereny conducted a series of interviews with Franz Stangl, who was in prison in Düsseldorf after having been convicted of co-responsibility for killing 900,000 people as commandant of the Sobibor and Treblinka extermination camps in Poland. Stangl gave Sereny a detailed account of the operations of the T4 program based on his time as commandant of the killing facility at the Hartheim institute. He described how the inmates of various asylums were removed and transported by bus to Hartheim. Some were in no mental state to know what was happening to them, but many were perfectly sane, and for them various forms of deception were used. They were told they were at a special clinic where they would receive improved treatment, and were given a brief medical examination on arrival. They were induced to enter what appeared to be a shower block, where they were gassed with carbon monoxide (this ruse was later used on a much larger scale at the extermination camps).
