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Forgotten Victims
In recent decades, the term Holocaust has been so intricately woven with
the Jewish people that we often forget this genocide included thousands of other
innocent victims. In fact, Jews were not even the first victims in Hitlers goal of
creating the ideal Aryan race. Due to their uncontrollable diseases, handicaps, and
malformations, disabled people were at the top of Hitlers kill list. More than
275,000 disabled victims died at the cruel hands of Hitler, yet their story is seldom
told. Disabled people, among others, have become forgotten victims, and the crimes
committed against them deserve to be brought to light.
The path to ridding Germany and the surrounding countries of the people
Hitler deemed unworthy of life started with a single infant. In 1938, a blind and
deformed baby was born in Leipzig, Germany to the Knauer family. The father, Mr.
Knauer, went to a clinic in Leipzig and asked the physician to kill his child, feeling
that his baby was undeserving of life. Dr. Werner Catel sent the man away, as the
fathers demands were illegal. However, the father did not stop his mission there. He
later appealed to Hitler himself, asking him to bring about the death of his son.
Hitler instructed his personal physician, Karl Brandt, to investigate the fathers
claim that his child was deformed. Upon seeing that the baby was missing a leg and
half of an arm, Brandt reported back to Hitler, confirming the diagnosis. Hitler then
declared that it was legal to kill the child and assured the physicians that there
would be no consequence for performing the deed. Hitlers rationale basically stated
that the child would be a burden to his parents and society, and therefore should no

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longer be able to live. They euthanized the baby, which soon led to the German era
of infanticide.
With the idea of the death of this child in mind, Theo Morel, Hitlers second
physician, began researching the history and development of euthanasia programs
during the summer of 1939. After having read an extensive amount, Morel felt
compelled to write a memorandum advocating for a law that would allow for the
Destruction of Life Unworthy of Life (Evans 24). Morel stressed the importance of
killing people with disabilities because they were a burden on the rest of society. In
this document, he used demeaning words such as ausschusskinderer, meaning
garbage children. In his memorandum he wrote 5,000 idiots costing 2,000
reichsmarks each per annum = 100 million a year. With interest at 5% that
corresponds to a capital reserve of 200 million (Burleigh 99). Shortly after Morels
memorandum, the Ministry of Justice Commission of the Criminal Code provided
Germany with a new law that would allow doctors to perform what they called
mercy killings. The first two clauses of this law read:
Whoever is suffering from an incurable or terminal illness which is a
major burden to him or others, can request mercy killing by a
doctor.The life of a person who because of incurable mental illness
requires permanent institutionalization and is not able to sustain an
independent existence, may be prematurely terminated by medical
measures (Roth, 108).
Hitlers race to annihilate the disabled population started with his own
euthanasia program targeted at children. Before delving into the depths of the

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atrocities these people endured, it is vital to first understand how disabled people
were viewed during this time period. Phrases such as useless eaters, incurable
diseases, and unfit to live were often thrown around when describing the
disabled. In 1923, Hitler was quoted as saying, It is a half measure to let incurably
sick people steadily contaminate the remaining healthy ones (Evans 21). This
confirms Hitlers view that the disabled were not worthy of life in society.
Accordingly, on August 18, 1939, The Reich Committee for the Scientific
Registration of Severe Hereditary Ailments passed a law that required all
physicians, nurses, and midwives to report any child who was born with a
malformation, mental disease, or outward handicap. A committee of three men who
claimed to be medical professionals would then review each case, labeling each with
a plus or minus sign. The plus sign meant the child would be killed immediately,
while the minus sign implied the child could live. However, these physicians never
met with the children, and all they had was a piece of paper indicating whether the
child was worthy of life or death. Nazi officials would then arrive at the schools and
homes of the children who faced an inevitable death and obtain parental consent
to transport the children to a healing center that would help their children
receive better treatment. To ensure the utmost secrecy, these children were then
transported to killing centers in dark grey buses with darkened windows.
Upon arrival at some of the centers, the children were instructed to remove
their clothing for a pseudo medical examination. After the short visit was over, the
victims were crammed into shower like rooms and gassed until they died. The
bodies would then be burned in the nearest crematorium. At other killing centers,

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children would be injected with lethal doses of morphine or Luminal. Sometimes
these children would develop pneumonia or other diseases and suffer a slow,
painful death. Eglfing-Haar was a unique killing center that included a starving
house where the food rations were first reduced to a meager amount and slowly
stopped altogether until the children died. Under the care of Dr. Hermann
Pfannmuller at this center, the children experienced the cruelest of conditions.
Pfannmuller was often described as manic, cruel, and brutal. He took it upon himself
to educate others on the inability of mental health patients to live daily lives, thus
advocating the mass murder of them. He would often host tours of his center,
showing people how the mentally handicapped lived. Other killing centers included
Brandenburg-Gorden, Leipzig, and Niedermarsberg. As the years progressed, the
numbers grew until there were twenty-three additional killing wards throughout
parts of Europe. According to Suzanne Evans, its estimated and argued that there
are between 5,000 and 25,000 children who were eliminated between 1939 and
1945 (26). There is no truly accurate number of the deaths because everything was
kept extremely secret. Many records were destroyed, and those that survived were
done in code.
There are thousands of first hand accounts from children who survived their
experience with Hitlers fatal prejudice. In Surviving in Silence: A Deaf Boy in the
Holocaust, Harry Dunai tells his story in descriptive detail. Luckily for Harry, he was
never forced into a concentration camp or killing center. Call it a stroke of luck or a
miracle, Harry was able to escape when the Nazis came to invade his hiding place
with other disabled and deaf refugees. However, this is no way implies that Harry

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did not endure the upmost suffering during this ordeal. In fact, eight year old Harry
withstood such tough conditions -starvation, lice, and disease- that he lost his own
will to live. An eight year old, who in normal conditions has the world at his feet,
decided he longer wanted to live in this cruel and unjust world. My mind was full of
anguish. I no longer wanted to struggle and decided to let myself go. I felt as though I
was in a dream (Dunai, 64). Harry did survive the Holocaust, and fortunately for us,
was willing to tell his story. Brave men and women like Harry enable us to
understand the true and unjust atrocities these victims endured.
As the killing centers grew in number, questions arose about what was
occurring behind the closed doors of these institutions. In order to keep questioning
family members at bay, Nazi officials would send out falsified death certificates and
letters explaining how their child died. Some of the excuses included pneumonia,
appendicitis, and influenza. The officials, however, would often mistakenly tell a
family that the child had died of appendicitis when he/she didnt even have an
appendix to begin with. In addition, they would send back the remains of the child
to the family in an urn, but the ashes would contain bobby pins or hair clips, even if
their child was male. This goes to show that the bodies were thrown collectively into
a crematorium and the bodies were not kept separate. Small incidences like these
put question into the minds of many.
Then, to the Nazis dismay, those who lived near the killing centers, as well as
doubting parents, began developing a vague idea of what occurring. Parents of
deceased victims would often travel to the centers and attempt to meet with a
physician. Without fail, they were always turned away and told never to return. The

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parents were also asked by officials to keep the death of their child secret. However,
in retaliation and rebellion, some parents decided to publish an obituary in local
newspapers to try and covertly send the information to other locations. One such
letter wrote: After weeks of anxious uncertainty we received the shocking news on
September 18 that our beloved Marlanne died of grippe on September 15 at Pirna
(Evans 31). Though this article did not include the suspicion that the officials had
murdered Marlanne, it was a way to show others that thousands of children were
dying in these institutions. Fortunately for the victims, these obituaries were
successful in spreading the news.
Parents of these victims were not alone in noticing how detrimental the
killing centers had become. However, not everyone saw the mass amount of death
as a detriment of Germany. In fact, some were even encouraged by it. Hitler, in 1939,
was intrigued and fascinated with how successful the killing centers were
becoming. Feeling inspired, he met with Leonardo Conti, Martin Bormann, and Hans
Heinrich Lammers to discuss how to further implement the ideals extracted from
the childrens genocide into a mass euthanasia program that would target disabled
adults as well. Hitler explained that he truly believed destroying these people would
save the country thousands of dollars in medical, hospital, and food expenses.
In order to start this mass program, which would later be known as Action
T4, Hitler appointed Conti to supervise the ongoing massacre. However, Hitler
quickly replaced Conti with Phillip Bouhler (chief of the chancellery) and Viktor
Brack, a leading Nazi physician. Though this all began in the summer, Hitler waited
until October of 1939 to send a secret commission for this effort to make it appear

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as if he was doing this task for the betterment of the country and its war effort. This
commission read: Reich Bouhler and Dr. Brandt are charged with the responsibility
to extend the powers of specific doctors in such a way that, after the most careful
assessment of their condition, those suffering from illnesses deemed to be incurable
may be granted a mercy death (Burleigh, 112). In July of 1940, after having met
with several other physicians in Germany, Bouhler, Conti, and Brack began
searching throughout Germany for hospitals that could be turned into killing centers
to help pursue their mission. In the Swabian Alps, the trio found their place: The
Inner Missions Samaritan Foundation for Cripples at Grafeneck. Almost
immediately, SS members began turning the castle into the first killing center in the
T4 program. The transformation included the installment of offices, barbed wire
fences, and warning signs to lure citizens away. These signs included warnings that
would tell the citizens that the patients had contracted highly contagious and
infectious diseases and thus needed to be kept in quarantine. A couple hundred
yards away, they built the castles crematorium and gas chambers.
In order to have a successful killing program, it was vital to have cooperation
with most of German citizens. In order to bring this about, officials created
bureaucratic agencies that would secretly serve as the main organizations for the
program. One of these agencies included The Reich Working Party for Mental
Asylums; its main purpose was to control the men who falsified death certificates
and to register the victims. Another agency included the Community Foundation for
the Care of Asylums. This agencys main mission was to acquire the poisonous gas
for the chambers. Each step of the program was meticulously thought out to avoid

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errors, and a great deal of time was put into each aspect of the program. These
bureaucracies helped persuade the Reich Committee in September of 1939 to issue
a decree that requested local governments provide them with a list of all
institutions in their geographical region holding mental patients, epileptics, and
the feeble minded (Evans, 45). The list would then go to a committee of medical
experts, who would sort through these files and send them to the T4 panelists.
From there, the members of the T4 (Tiergartenstrasse 4, where the office was
located) would then decide who would live or die. Much like the euthanasia
program for children, the people who were chosen to die were transported to killing
centers. The victims would have a piece of tape stuck to their back with a number.
Often the transport to the new facility was done without the consent of the family
members. After the transportation was already completed, a letter was sent to the
families notifying them. Approximately two months later, another letter was sent to
inform the family that the patient had passed away.
In total, there were six killing centers in the T4 program: Brandenburg,
Grafeneck, Hartheim, Sonnenstein, Bernburg, and Hadamar. In just two short years,
at least 100,000 people would be murdered because of their disabilities. Some
historians believe the number was as high as 275,000.
The first killing center, Grafeneck, operated from January of 1940 to
December of 1940. The town of Munsinger was only three miles away, so its citizens
soon made connections between the bus routes and the stench of burning flesh in
the air. By July, concern had arisen in Wurttemberg about what was happening at
Grafeneck. Because of this, Bishop Wurm, head of a Lutheran church, began writing

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letters to Wilhelm Frick, Minister of the Interior. Wurm was greatly concerned about
the future of Germany and what children would come to think about its culture.
Lines of his letter read: What conclusions will the younger generation draw when it
realizes that human life is no longer sacred to the state? Either the National Socialist
State must recognize the limits which God has laid down, or it will favor a moral
decline and carry the state down with it (Letter from Wurm). Frick, however, did
not respond to the inquiry of Wurm, so he decided on September 5th to send an
additional another letter to Frick. Its assumed that Frick forwarded these letters to
a higher ranking power because in December, a memorandum from SS leader
Heinrich Himmler was received: The population recognizes the gray automobiles of
the SS and think they know what is going on at the constantly smoking
crematory.Thus the worst feeling has arisen there, and in my opinion there
remains only one thing(letter from Himmler). Himmler went on to say that the
center needed to be discontinued and disseminated. Unfortunately, though the
killing center was only open for eleven short months, tens of thousands of people
with disabilities had already been murdered in its gas chambers.
In order to maintain the upmost secrecy of the whole program, there were
sixty-one falsifiable death causes that doctors would send to the relatives of the
family members. Each cause had a list of possible drawbacks and consequences and
was inclusive of a brief description of typical symptoms. An example of this includes:
Strokes: This cause of death is especially suitable in the case of older people, of at
least forty or more years of age.This cause of death always seems reasonable to
relatives, and they like to believe it (Burleigh 150). Each killing center included a

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Special Registry Office that contained dozens of employees whose main purpose
was to draft an acceptable death timeline that would not raise suspicion. It was
believed that if too many death certificates were sent out at one time, citizens might
become more aware of the atrocities that were taking place. Each patient was
assigned an acceptable death date using the number that had been placed on their
backs. However, each victim was usually killed upon arrival at the center. This date
was only used as a way to keep track of when to send the death certificate and letter
to the family members. Usually, the victim was already dead before the family had
even been notified via letter that a transport had occurred. Each letter always
contained a paragraph of condolences, but ended with a form of propaganda that
emphasized, discretely, the importance of euthanasia. An example of this type of
propaganda read we offer our heartfelt condolences for your loss, and beg you to
find comfort in the thought that your son was released from a severe and incurable
disease (Friedlander, 104).
Though each of the six killing centers had the same purpose and fundamental
structure in common, each one varied slightly from the other. Hadamar, the sixth T4
killing center, opened in January of 1941. Records estimate between 40,000 and
400,000 disables were murdered while Hadamar was open. Hadamar literally
became the place of a conveyor belt death where murders occurred in the same
manner as a machine manufacturing car parts. In fact, a Hadamar employee later
recalled a celebration that occurred when the 10,000th victim was murdered. All of
the workers gathered around the body, covered it with a Nazi flag, and stood around

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drinking beer and wine. Everyone then proceeded to the basement and watched a
ceremonial burning of the body.
Because people were beginning to become enraged at the death tolls of the
victims, Hitler ordered the T4 program to halt temporarily. Hitler did not want to
lose the support for the Nazis all together, so he sacrificed this particular effort.
Technically, the T4 Program officially halted on August 24, 1941 after orders from
Hitler. However, his order was only applicable to the six killing centers and to the
use of poisonous gas. The mass murder of disabled people still occurred in dozens of
other regions. This became known as wild euthanasia and wouldnt stop
permanently until 1945. Because the use of poisonous gas was banned, various
other forms of killing appeared. These included torture, poison, starvation, and
shooting of the victims. Physicians started turning hospitals and mental asylums
into hunger houses that allowed for the slow, but immanent death of their patients.
Moreover, those who escaped their murder were then forced into slave-like
positions where Nazi officials would extract as much labor out of them as possible.
Once their disability/illness progressed enough until they were unable to work
anymore, they were illegally killed. The T4 program then progressed with this new
initiative and required all physicians to report the status of their patients,
documenting if they were able to work or not. For the first time, the program
focused more on those who were unable to produce anything in society, rather than
solely people with disabilities. This new blanket of victims now reached across to
the elderly, as well as the terminally ill. Because of this new policy, the disabled
population was subdivided into three separate categories: 1. Those who were

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incurable but still able to work; 2. Those able to perform labor as part of
treatment; and 3. Those incurable and no longer able to work (Evans 83). Out of
the disabled, sick, and elderly population, the deaf people were exploited worst of
all. Because their hearing loss never affected their ability to perform manual labor,
the deaf were often forced into cruel occupations. They were highly desired because
they could be placed into war zones or high-noise industrial settings, and due to
their inability to hear, continue to work.
It seems nearly impossible to have a final ending to this pandemic of cruel
murder, torture, and abandonment. However, the culmination did occur a few
months before the end of World War II. Thousands of disabled victims would soon
be liberated because a Russian forensic pathologist listened to suspicious reports
about what was happening in an asylum in Obrawalde and chose to investigate. This
pathologist started interviewing survivors at the asylum, asking about their
conditions and what had been happening there. He also exhumed the dead bodies
and found morphine in each of their systems. He then extracted the death records
and estimated that around 18,000 patients had been cruelly murdered.
The last recorded victim of the new and improved T4 program was on May
29, 1945. Four-year-old Jenne was murdered by Kaufbeuren hospital staff at 1:10 in
the afternoon. His death certificate states that his cause of death was typhus. In the
following month, American forces investigated the hospital and found its conditions
deplorable. In their descriptions they included wholesale extermination
plantscabies, lice, and other vermin were encountered throughout, linens were
dirty and quarantine measures non-existent (Friedlander, 162).

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People often wonder how the atrocities surrounding the disabled people had
occurred. Its questioned why citizens were so apt to believe that disables were
unworthy of life, and thus a burden to the rest of society. Honestly, the answer is
simple: Nazis were experts in their use of propaganda. Nazi officials showed clips of
people with mental handicaps, deafness, and malformations. However, instead of
showing them in normal daily life, they were always shown in the most
dehumanizing ways. Nazi officials always tried to tie in animalistic characteristics
with the disabled people, as well as incorporate how much money each handicapped
person was costing the government. There are records of some of the propaganda
videos that were used during this time period, and the victims were always shown
as people who were unable to live daily lives. Because of this, subconsciously,
society members began to correlate the feeble minded (as the videos liked to call
them) with animals who were nothing but a burden to the rest of society.
In addition to video clips, Nazi officials also implanted these ideas into
childrens schoolbooks. An example of this includes a math problem in a textbook:
To keep a mental patient costs approximately 4 RMs a day, a cripple 5.50 RMs, a
criminal 3.50 RMs(a) Illustrate these figures with the aid of pictures. According to
conservative estimates, there are about 300,000 mentally ill, epileptics, etc. in
[asylums in Germany.] How much do these people cost to keep in total at a rate of 4
RMs per person? (Ziegler, 208). There were hundreds of problems just like these
that children were forced to try and solve. Because disabled people had simply
become statistics on a page, children grew up thinking they truly were not worthy of
a life because they were nothing but a number and a burden to society.

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From the Knauer baby to four-year old Jenne, hundreds of thousands of
innocent people were murdered at the cruel hands of Hitler and the Nazis. Because
disabled people were born differently, their lives were taken away in the most cruel
and unjust manner. The majority of the criminals were never even brought to trial
and continued to live their lives as if nothing had ever occurred. Some survivors
received a small pension, but the victims, both dead and surviving, never received
the true justice they deserved. In fact, their stories are hardly ever talked about or
remembered. They are too overshadowed by Jewish accounts of what happened in
the holocaustic concentration camps. Its our duty as humans to bring their story
into awareness. In order to prevent this atrocity from happening again, we have to
give the whole side of what actually occurred, and it all starts with the telling of
these peoples stories. It takes one person to write one paper to begin the process.
Because I have the privilege of living in a free society, I find it important to
memorialize the 275,000 disabled victims, to prevent their deaths from occurring in
vain, and to continue to make their holocaust story heard.

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Works Cited
Primary Sources
The Deaf Holocaust- Deaf People in Nazi Germany. BBC, 2005. Documentary.
Dunai, Eleanor. Surviving in Silence: A Deaf Boy in the Holocaust. Washington D.C.:
Gallaudet University Press, 2002. Print.
Letter to Frick 5 Sept. 1940. 1946. MS. The Library of Congress. Nazi Conspiracy
and Aggression. 27 Apr. 2014.
Memorandum from Himmler Dec. 1940. 1946. MS. The Library of Congress. Nazi
Conspiracy and Aggression. 27 Apr. 2014.
Roth, Karl-Heinz. Gesetz die Sterbehilfe bei unheilbar Kranken: Protokolle de
Diskussion ber die Legalisierung der nationalsozialistischen Anstaltsmorde
in den Jahren 1938-1941, in Roth (ed.), Erfassung zur Vernichtung, 108.
(Roughly translated, this is an original court case that stated the laws
concerning the mercy killings of the disabled)
Qtd. in Forgotten Crimes: The Holocaust and People with Disabilities
Secondary
Alexander, Leo, M.D., Medical Science Under Dictatorship, New England Journal
Of Medicine, July 14, 1949, 39-47.
Bryant, Michael S. Confronting the Good Death: Nazi Euthanasia on Trial, 19451953. Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2005.
Burleigh, Michael. Death and Deliverance: Euthanasia to the Final Solution, 19001945. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.
The Deaf Holocaust. GCSE Modern World History. BBC, n.d. Web. 27 Apr. 2014.

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< http://www.johndclare.net/Nazi_Germany3_deafholocaust.htm>
Euthanasia Program. Holocaust Encyclopedia. United States Holocaust Memorial
Council, 10 June 2013. Web. 29 Apr. 2014.
< http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005200>
Evans, Suzanne E.. Forgotten Crimes: The Holocaust and People With Disabilities.
Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2004. Print.
Fleming, John. Euthanasia Today and Euthanasia in Nazi Germany-Similarities and
Dissimilarities. Bioethics Research Notes. Southern Cross Bioethics Institute,
n.d. web. Mar. 2000.
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ieces/1201%20Euthanasia%20today%20and%20euthanasia%20in%20Nazi
%20Germany.pdf>
Friendlander, Henry. The Origins of Nazi Genocide: From Euthanasia to the Final
Solution. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995.
LeZotte, Ann Clare. T4: A Novel in Verse. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 2008. Print.
T4 Program. Encyclopedia Britannica. Encyclopedia Britannia Online Academic
Edition. Encylcopaedia Britannica Inc., 2014. Web. 26 Apr. 2014.
<http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/714411/T4-Program>
Weindling, Paul. Health, race and German politics between national unification and
Nazism 1870-1945, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989)
Ziegler, Jean. The Swiss, the Gold, and the Dead. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1998.