People With Disabilities
Following a eugenics policy, the Nazis believed that the disabled were a burden to society because they needed to be cared for by others; they were also considered an affront to Nazi notions of a society peopled by a perfect, superhuman Aryan race. Around 375,000 individuals were sterilized against their will because of their disabilities.
People with disabilities were also among the first to be killed by the Nazis; the United States Holocaust Memorial museum notes that the T-4 Euthanasia Program, established in 1939, became the "model" for future exterminations by the Nazi regime, and set a precedent for their attempted Jewish genocide. The T-4 Program was established in order to maintain the "purity" of the so-called Aryan race by systematically killing children and adults born with physical deformities or suffering from mental illness; this included use of the first gas chambers. Although Hitler formally ordered a halt to the T-4 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.
Read more about this topic: Holocaust Victims
Famous quotes containing the words people with, people and/or disabilities:
“It was a weak spot in any nation to have a large body of disaffected people within its confusion.”
—Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960)
“Some people swallow the universe like a pill; they travel on through the world, like smiling images pushed from behind.”
—Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894)
“The more I read and the more I talked to other parents of children with disabilities and normal children, the more I found that feelings and emotions about children are very much the same in all families. The accident of illness or disability serves only to intensify feelings and emotions, not to change them.”
—Judith Weatherly (20th century)