What do students know and understand about the Holocaust?

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Who were the victims?
shipped off to concentration camps to be killed. The
consequences of these perceptions extend beyond
knowledge for its own sake and come clearer
into view when juxtaposed against what actually
happened to disabled people.
Nazi policy against disabled people began just
months after the ascension to power. On 14 July
1933 the Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily
Diseased Progeny was passed by the German
government, coming into force at the beginning of
1934. According to this legislation, people deemed
to have particular mental or physical disabilities
were liable for compulsory sterilisation. The
conditions included were myriad and ‘it was by no
means certain that some of the sicknesses were
hereditary’ (Burleigh and Wipperman 1991: 136).
Embedded in the legislation was its rationale: the
regime was concerned with ‘the increasingly evident
composition of our people’, and specifically with the
‘countless number of inferiors and those suffering
from hereditary conditions’ who ‘are reproducing
unrestrainedly while their sick and asocial offspring
burden the community’ (Burleigh and Wipperman
1991: 137–8).
By the start of the Second World War upward
of 300,000 people regarded as having a hereditary
disability had been forcibly sterilised under this law,
with legislation also adapted to allow for others
deemed ‘asocial’ – including Roma and Sinti
(Gypsies), as discussed below, but not Jews. As
these measures were implemented, continued social
ostracisation of disabled people went hand in glove
with a general deterioration in the care provided to
those already institutionalised (Burleigh 1995: 43-89).
Meanwhile, in 1935 Hitler is said to have shared with
the leading physician Gerhard Wagner his intention
to implement a programme of ‘euthanasia’ against
disabled people in the event of war (Burleigh and
Wipperman 1991: 142; Friedlander 1995: 39).
While this is taken by some historians to indicate
that ‘the path to the killing of the handicapped was
extraordinarily straight’ (Browning 2004: 185), the
origins of the children’s ‘euthanasia’ programme
are commonly attributed to a personal request for
authorisation of a ‘mercy killing’ made to Hitler in
1938 or 1939 by the parents of a disabled child.
Having assented and charged one of his physicians,
Karl Brandt, to oversee the action, Hitler empowered
Brandt and Phillip Bouhler from the Führer’s
Chancellery to oversee future requests.
An organised and highly effective bureaucracy soon
sprang up: disabled children were registered, their
documentation was processed and assessed by
doctors, and those selected for death received
a ‘+’ mark on their registration form. If not already
institutionalised, children selected for ‘euthanasia’
were then admitted to designated wards on the
pretext of receiving specialist care. Some, though
not all, were experimented on. All were killed, often
through lethal medication or starvation.
The children’s ‘euthanasia’ programme claimed
the lives of around 5,000 disabled children by May
1945. It was interwoven with an adult equivalent
that built on the actions taken against children and
commenced in earnest in the winter of 1939. To
deal with the much larger number of adults, the
bureaucratic structure was expanded, with central
administration rehoused on Berlin’s Tiergartenstrasse
4 from which the programme acquired the
codename ‘T4’. The transportation company
mentioned above was established, asylums were
identified for the installation of gassing apparatus,
and a cadre of administrative and medical staff were
recruited. Both the child and adult programmes were
given the appearance of quasi-legality through a
private document signed by Hitler which effectively
instructed Brandt and Bouhler to grant ‘mercy death’
to those ‘considered incurable’ (Friedlander
1995: 67).
In August 1941, when more than 70,000 adults
had been murdered, ‘euthanasia’ was formally
halted by Hitler. The programme had become
common knowledge, leading to public protests.
Although these were certainly embarrassing for the
regime and are usually framed as the reason for the
halt order, Burleigh and Wippermann (1991: 153)
argue that ‘more likely the programme was halted
because the original target figure had been reached’.
Furthermore ‘wild euthanasia’ continued, both on
children’s wards and in the asylums – the latter of
which had also been used since spring 1941 for the
murder of concentration camp prisoners deemed by
doctors to be sick, hereditarily ill or simply ‘asocial’
(Friedlander 1995: 142). A significant proportion of
those killed under this initiative (codenamed ‘14f13’)
were Jews. Meanwhile, a number of T4 personnel
were redeployed to the East: either to work with the
Einsatzgruppen (mobile killing squads) or in the newly
opened death camps (Burleigh and Wippermann
1991: 166).
Between 200,000 and 250,000 disabled people
were killed as part of the ‘euthanasia’ programmes,
in addition to thousands of concentration camp
prisoners – including Jews and Roma and Sinti
(Gypsies). The programmes required the active
involvement of thousands of bureaucrats, auxiliaries,
doctors and nurses, in addition to a cultural milieu
that was open to extreme measures, more of which
will be said below. Moreover, there was a number of
extremely important intersections and crossovers
between the killing of disabled people and what
would become the extermination of Europe’s Jews.
Taking the historical events into account, it
becomes easier to identify the implications of