On this day in 1940, a "special unit" carries out its mission-and murders more than 1,500 hospital patients in East Prussia. Mentally ill patients from throughout East Prussia had been transferred to the district of Soldau, also in East Prussia. A special German military unit, basically a hit squad, carried out its agenda and killed the patients over an 18-day period, one small part of the larger Nazi program to exterminate everyone deemed "unfit" by its ideology. After the murders, the unit reported back to headquarters in Berlin that the patients had been "successfully evacuated." Nazis kill "unfit" people in East Prussia — History.com This Day in History — 5/21/1940 Nazi Persecution of the Disabled: Murder of “The Unfit” Nazi Persecution of the Disabled: Murder of "The Unfit" Nazis ‘killed hundreds of unfit children at clinic’ Irish Examiner - 2005/08/09: Nazis ‘killed hundreds of unfit children at clinic’
Geez. I'm usually pretty calm and laid back, but reading that makes me want to stab a Nazi in the face. :stabfrenzy:
I wonder whether Neo-Nazis gloss over this more than sordid aspect of their glorious past regime? I wonder, also, whether they realised that the disabled actually have other abilities that surpass the average person? Their brains compensate for their disabilities, rather in the manner that when people are blinded, their hearing and other four sences become heightened. Friends of ours have a down syndrome son. He plays online games, and is consistently in the top 5% slot of the game due to superior hand-eye skills. I don't imagine that the vaunted racial superiority gurus of the Third Reich were aware that widening the genepool produced children of consistent quality and beauty. Mixed race kids are particularly striking in appearance. Did they realise that, genetically, they were headed for a race of 'plain Janes', with little to distinguish them intellectually from their grandparents? It's the ultimate seal of doom to 'racial theory'. Todays attitudes from "normal" people toward the disabled are suspect. My wife teaches kids with disabilities and is consistently shocked at the narrow mindedness displayed towards her charges. But, when we look at the way in which the oldest culture on Earth treat their disabled, it's little different from the old Spartans, discarding children who did not "look right", leaving them to die by exposing them to wolves. Australian traditional Aboriginal culture is actually quite narrow in it's treatment of those less fortunate at birth, and this idea is carried forward in their complex web of social/sexual labelling ('Skingroups') that determine just who can marry whom without violating the old taboo of intermarriage. So, the idea that disability has to be avoided is VERY old.
Something that seems to have been swept under the carpet is the Eugenics Movement that was at it's peak during the interwar years and in some places continued, in some form, until the late 1960's and into the 1970's. Granted most of the world was satisfied with: institutionalization, segregation and social pressure to prevent their gene pools from being contaminated by the so called "feebleminded' or "lesser races" some resorted to forced sterilization and on the extreme end "euthenasia". While the third Reich took the eugenics theory to the extreme most other countries practiced a system of genetic cleansing that was almost as appalling and some even continued their eugenics programs well after WW2 and in some ways still continues. About the history and evolution of eugenics Eugenics Equals Fauxgenics: Canada’s Awful Experiment With Genetic Manipulation | Illuminati Conspiracy Archive Blog A Science Odyssey: People and Discoveries: Eugenics movement reaches its height And the most comprehensive and concise : Compulsory sterilization - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia David Morgan, Yale Study: U.S. Eugenics Paralleled Nazi Germany Further reading: Eugenics in the United States
The question I most want to ask is, how on earth did such pseudo-scientific doctrinal dogma ever become accepted theory and practice in so many nations? It says much about science in the first half of our century not being subject to empirical 'proof' at all, but rather, at the mercy of 'acceptance' based on the reputations of it's proponents. Political theory suffers from this as well, but what seems so illogical is that so many people simply took in the words of theorists without any independant method of determining whether these ideas really did hold water or not! These days, I believe, we couldn't get away with sprouting such dogmatic assumptions, although I note that Church groups seem to be able to get away with a lack of empirical proof of their ideas. Too many people simply put their trust in so called intellectuals and their far flung ideologies. Shame. Imagine if Steven Hawking had been put to death under policies such as this? Hawking was a prize winning mathematician it is true, before his affliction landed him in a wheelchair, but someone like him would have been discarded under these theories. I'll bet Neo-Nazi's rue the day they classified Jewish people as 'unfit', only to have Jewish intellectuals like Albert Einstein wipe the floor with them in the scientific field! (Ha Ha!)