how children were mentally made to accept that what was happening in Germany is happening right?
Answers
n this particular case, the parents submitted a request that their severely disabled child be granted a "mercy killing", the application being received at an unverifiable time before the middle of 1939 at the Office of the Führer (KDF), also known as Hitler's Chancellery. This office was an agency of the Nazi Party and a private chancellery placed under the direct authority of Hitler which employed about 195 staff in 1939. Main Office IIb under Hans Hefelmann and his deputy, Richard von Hegener, was responsible for "clemency". The head of Main Office II and thus Hefelmann's superior was the Oberdienstleiter, Viktor Brack, one of the leading organizers of Nazi euthanasia.
child Euthanasia (German: Kinder-Euthanasie) was the name given to the organised murder of severely mentally and physically handicapped children and young people up to 16 years old during the Nazi era in over 30 so-called special children's wards. At least 5,000 children were victims of this programme, which was a precursor to the subsequent murder of children in the concentration camps.
Background
Schönbrunn Psychiatric Hospital, 1934. Photo by SS photographer Franz Bauer
Social Darwinism came to play a major role in the ideology of Nazism, where it was combined with a similarly pseudo-scientific theory of racial hierarchy in order to identify the Germans as a part of what the Nazis regarded as an Aryan or Nordic master race.[1] This ideology held unreservedly to the notion of the survival of the fittest, at both the level of the individual as well as the level of entire peoples and states. This notion claimed to have natural law on its side. All opposing religious and humanitarian views would ultimately prove to be unnatural. A people could only prove its worth in the long run in this ongoing "struggle for survival", if they promoted the best and, if necessary, eliminated those that weakened them. Moreover, only a people as racially pure as possible could maintain the "struggle for existence". To maintain or improve the Nordic-Germanic race, therefore, the laws of eugenics or the (biologistically oriented) "racial hygiene" would have to be strictly observed, that is, the promotion of the "genetically healthy" and the elimination of the "sick". All those with hereditary illnesses or who were severely mentally and physically handicapped were classified as "lives unworthy of life" (lebensunwertes Leben). They would, in terms of natural selection, be "eliminated". This form of eugenics was eventually the basis of the National Socialist genetic health policy which was elevated to the rank of state doctrine.
In 1929 Hitler said at the Nazi Party Conference in Nuremberg, "that an average annual removal of 700,000-800,000 of the weakest of a million babies meant an increase in the power of the nation and not a weakening".[2] In doing so, he was able to draw upon scientific argument that transferred the Darwinian theory of natural selection to human beings and, through the concept of racial hygiene, formulated the "Utopia" of "human selection" as propounded by Alfred Ploetz, the founder of German racial hygiene. As early as 1895, he demanded that human offspring should not:
be left to the chance encounter of a drunken moment. [...] If, nevertheless, it turns out that the newborn baby is a weak and misbegotten child, the medical council, which decides on citizenship for the community, should prepare a gentle death for it, say, using a little dose of morphine [...] .[3]
In 1935 Hitler also announced at the Nuremberg Nazi Party to the Reich Medical Leader Gerhard Wagner that he should aim to "eliminate the incurably insane", at the latest, in the event of a future war."[4][5]
The elimination of "undesirable elements" was implemented under the term "euthanasia" at the beginning of the Second World War. Petitions from parents of disabled children to the Hitler's Chancellery (KDF) that asked for their children to be given "mercy killing" were used as a justifiable excuse and to demonstrate external demand.
Phases of the Nazi Euthanasia Programme
The Nazi euthanasia killings may be broadly divided into the following phases:
Child euthanasia from 1939 to 1945
Adult euthanasia from 1940 to 1945
Action T4, the centralised gas killings from January 1940 to August 1941
Decentralised, but partly centrally-controlled medication-administered euthanasia or death by malnutrition from September 1941 to 1945
Disabled or detainee euthanasia, known as Action 14f13 from April 1941 to December 1944
First Phase from April 1941 to April 1944
Second Phase from April 1944 to December 1944
Action Brandt from June 1943 to 1945 (but recent research no longer counts this directly as part of the euthanasia complex.)[6]
According to the latest estimates about 260,000 people fell victim to the "War Against the Sick".[7]