In spring 1939, Hitler had ordered the liquidation of the elderly, the mentally ill and the deformed to ensure ‘survival of the fittest’. Hitler had often talked at dinners of his plan ‘to eradicate the incurably ill and not just the mentally ill’. He commissioned his personal doctor Karl Brandt and a Reich Committee for the Scientific Registration of Major Genetic Disease and Suffering, made up of radicalized doctors, to create a secret system denoted T4 (Tiergartenstrasse 4, Berlin – headquarters of the euthanasia programme). In September 1939 Hitler ordered ‘mercy killings of ill people
...more
