Action T4 - Background

Background

The T4 programme is thought to have developed from the Nazi Party's policy of "racial hygiene", the belief that the German people needed to be "cleansed" of "racially unsound" elements, which included people with disabilities. According to this view, the euthanasia programme represents an evolution in policy toward the later Holocaust of the Jews of Europe.

Racial hygienist ideas were far from unique to the Nazi movement. 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 antisocial behaviour was widely accepted, and was put into law in the United States, Sweden, Switzerland and other countries. For example, between 1935 and 1975, 63,000 people were sterilised on eugenic grounds in Sweden.

The idea of enforcing "racial hygiene" had been an essential element of Hitler's ideology from its earliest days. In his book Mein Kampf (1924), Hitler wrote:

He who is bodily and mentally not sound and deserving may not perpetuate this misfortune in the bodies of his children. The völkische state has to perform the most gigantic rearing-task here. One day, however, it will appear as a deed greater than the most victorious wars of our present bourgeois era.

The Nazi regime began to implement "racial hygienist" policies as soon as it came to power. The July 1933 "Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring" prescribed compulsory sterilisation for people with a range of conditions thought to be hereditary, such as schizophrenia, epilepsy, Huntington's chorea and "imbecility". Sterilisation was also mandated for chronic alcoholism and other forms of social deviance. This law was administered by the Interior Ministry under Wilhelm Frick through special Hereditary Health Courts (Erbgesundheitsgerichte), which examined the inmates of nursing homes, asylums, prisons, aged care homes and special schools to select those to be sterilised.

It is estimated that 360,000 people were sterilised under this law between 1933 and 1939. There were some suggestions that the programme 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 mobility impaired as a result of war wounds to his legs. After 1937, the acute shortage of labour in Germany arising from the crash rearmament programme meant that anyone capable of work was deemed to be "useful" and was exempted from the law, and the rate of sterilisation declined.

The taking of thousands of brains from euthanasia victims demonstrated the way research was connected to the medical killings.