August 18:
Phobos
* 293 BC - The oldest known Roman temple to Venus was founded, starting the institution of Vinalia Rustica.
* 1590 - John White, the governor of the Colony of Roanoke, returned from a supply-trip to England and found his settlement deserted.
* 1868 - Pierre Janssen discovered helium while analysing the chromosphere during a total eclipse of the sun.
* 1877 - Asaph Hall discovered Phobos, the larger of Mars' two moons.
* 1941 - The T-4 Euthanasia Program in Nazi Germany was temporarily halted due to public resistance.
T-4 Euthanasia Program
This poster reads: "This person suffering from hereditary defects costs the community of the people 60,000 Reichsmark during his lifetime. Comrade, that is your money, too. Read 'New People', the monthly magazine of the political-race office of the Nazi party."
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This poster reads: "This person suffering from hereditary defects costs the community of the people 60,000 Reichsmark during his lifetime. Comrade, that is your money, too. Read 'New People', the monthly magazine of the political-race office of the Nazi party."
T-4 Euthanasia Program (Tiergartenstraße 4) was the official name of Nazi Germany's Eugenic euthanasia program. It was established by Adolf Hitler, operated under authority of Chief of the State Chancellery Philip Bouhler and Dr. Karl Brandt, and headed by Werner Heyde and Paul Nitsche. The name T-4 comes from the Berlin address of the office.
The purpose of the program was to maintain the genetic purity of the German population and exterminate the undesirable population of the occupied territories by systematically killing citizens who were physically deformed, disabled, handicapped, or suffering from mental illness. Disabled children were removed from their families and taken to special hospitals. The program was later expanded to include adults, though most disabled adults fell under the Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring which allowed for compulsory sterilization.
The first extermination was carried out in Kocborowo, in occupied Poland, on September 22, 1939 and was subsequently followed by similar atrocities in the rest of the country resulting in the death of 26,000 psychiatric patients. In Germany, program was carried out at Grafeneck (beginning January 20, 1940), Hartheim (beginning May 6, 1940), Hadamar (beginning January 1941), Bernburg (beginning November 21, 1940), Brandenburg (beginning February 8, 1940) and Sonnenstein (beginning June 1940) using gas, suffocation, injection, poisoning, starvation, and overdose of medication. The first experiments with gassing and mobile gas vans were performed during October-November of 1939 in Poznan with the patients from Owinska psychiatric hospital and in March 1940 in the hospital in Kochanówka near Lódz. Soon, the Nazis performed further experimentation that involved piping carbon monoxide from a truck's engine into a sealed chamber. Much of this extermination was supervised by the psychiatrists Carl Hans Heinze Sennhenn and Werner Villinger. Sennhenn supplied hundreds of brains of the exterminated to Nazi researchers. Werner Villinger conducted experiments with humans before ordering them to their deaths. Even before the Holocaust, the first gas chambers were built at Hartheim where mostly adult victims were suffocated with carbon monoxide.
On August 18, 1941, Hitler ordered a temporary halt to the program, due to resistance from churches and relatives of the victims. 70,000 people had already been exterminated. The German public resistance led to a slowdown but did not stop the program, it was simply conducted with greater secrecy. Trained crews continued in their trade. Some graduates of the Aktion T4 program were then transferred to military concentration camps.
Most of those, such as Josef Mengele, responsible for carrying out the T-4 Euthanasia Program, became active in the Holocaust as well, developing gas chamber technology and even helping to build death camps at Belzec, Treblinka or Sobibór in Operation Reinhard. Aside from the well-known Auschwitz-Birkenau these were the main centers of extermination by gas for millions of people.
By the end of 1941, every third inmate of a psychiatric institution in Germany had already died, either by being directly killed or by starvation, leading to about 93,000 "free beds." An estimated 200,000 people died under the T-4 program. Germany's practice of euthanasia did not end in 1941. Doctors and nurses continued the practice at hospitals around Germany and Austria. Killings and intentional neglect were conducted in such a way to minimize the suspicion of the German population. However, no such precautions were taken when exterminating people of the occupied territories. Acts of cruelty and violence were reported and recorded.
Doctors and nursing personnel involved in the euthanasia program were not always brought to justice. Long after the creation of the new German states in 1949 high-ranking officials involved in euthanasia had escaped prosecution and were still involved in the German health system.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. |
