In 1938, a German father by the name of Knauer wrote to Hitler asking that his child, born blind, retarded, and with one arm and one leg, be granted a mercy death, or euthanasia. The case so moved Hitler that he ordered his personal physician, Karl Brandt, to establish if the claims were true, and if so, that the child be granted euthanasia. This Knauer case was to be the start of a legal euthanasia program, the first in Western civilization since the times of the Spartans and early Romans. In all, some five thousand retarded and deformed children were euthanized by the German government before the end of the war. Each case was individually reviewed by a specially appointed committee. The policy of administering euthanasia to retarded and deformed children was then also extended to incurably insane adults. Thanks to the German habit of keeping meticulous records, the exact number of incurably insane adults granted euthanasia is known: 70,273. Although the adult euthanasia project was conducted in secret, it was impossible to conceal such a thing from the German public. By 1941, news of its existence had been leaked and public pressure on the Nazi government forced its abandonment in that year. The fact that public opposition could bring an end to the euthanasia program also reveals much about the relative openness of the Nazi state and the government’s responsiveness to public opinion.

German records show that, by 1945, just under 400,000 people (none of whom were Jews) were sterilized in Germany as a result of the sterilization law. The only nonwhites to be sterilized were five hundred children born of sexual relationships between German women and black French soldiers who had been used to occupy the Rhineland area after World War I. The claim, therefore, that it was “only the Nazis” who sterilized the mentally ill, is yet another propaganda distortion. In reality, the Nazis were relative latecomers to the sterilization program.

Originally Posted By DeuceDecimator⏩