Euthanasia Campaign Flashcards
Who was targeted?
-people deemed ‘unproductive’ patients eg people with disabilities
What happened to people targeted?
-they were sent to concentration camps, killed, gased, used to be experimented on, starved, injected with a lethal injection which killed them
What was the purpose of the programme?
-they believed they could create the ‘master race’ by experiments and eliminating people with ‘defective genes’
What did the red cross on the vehicle when people arrived do?
-made people feel safe and that it was a genuine/professional medical institution->ray of hope that there were doctors around
What percentage of new prisoners were sent to immediate death?
-SS doctors sent between 75-90%
What happened to the remaining prisoners?
-were used as slave labour and as medical experiments
What were the medical experiments?
-watching how different people would react to different poisons psychologically and then kill them to see how their organs and brain responded to it
What style did doctors embrace in 1933 and what did it mean?
-the styles of eugenics
-they believed they could create the ‘master race’ by experiments and eliminating people with ‘defective genes’
What does Euthanasia mean?
-assisted suicide of people suffering from terminal disease->it was their ‘reason’/cover up for killing people with disabilities
What happened to those deemed ‘unproductive’ patients in 1933?
-a loyal group of Nazis gathered in Berlin to plan the highly secret Euthanasia Programme->it would affect all of German society as every hospital in the country was ordered to surrender it’s ‘unproductive’ patients
Who were the leaders of the Euthanasia Campaign?
-doctors
How did the leaders devise a discrete system of killing their victims?
-they commandeered 6 asylums and hospitals away from the public eye
-engineers secretly installed Europe’s first gas chambers
What was the process?
-patients were sent from their hospitals
-they were told upon arrival they have to take a disinfecting shower->special buses had been sent to collect them
-about 2 weeks after the 1st bus had picked up people’s clothes had been sent back in horrible conditions like vomit->nurses knew their patients had been killed
-when the 2nd bus arrived to collect people they were very desperate->some patients had been chained to their seats
What was the role of doctors?
-they not only chose which patients were to be murdered but also oversaw the killings->they performed brief examinations and operated the gas chambers
-the doctors were mainly their to camouflage the killing with medical reasonings->but doctors knew their tasks were not medical
-they had to invent reasons for the victims deaths->sent letters to the victims family but many knew it was lying because it didn’t add up
How many people were gased?
more than 70,000 Germans and Austrians
