Disabled People During The Holocaust Essay

Treatment of Disabled People During the Holocaust

"... In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart. I simply can’t build up my hopes on a foundation consisting of confusion, misery, and death. I see the world gradually being turned into a wilderness, I hear the ever approaching thunder, which will destroy us too, I can feel the sufferings of millions and yet, if I look up into the heavens, I think that it will all come right, that this cruelty too will end, and that peace and tranquility will return again." - Anne Frank. Disabilities can affect the brain, or the body, and some being not as severe as the next, but to Adolf Hitler a disability was something that affected the work of a person, making them unfit to be in his “perfect race.” There are many types of disabilities, and many types of people, but during the Holocaust, disabled people were treated much differently, resulting in thousands of unnecessary early deaths. Even though there are many ways of killing, the Nazis had a preferred method for killing disabled people; but used others too. There are a lot of types of disabilities, but all got killed. Hitler tried his hardest to even prevent people from having disabled children, and he killed thousands of people trying to do so.
In Hartheim Castle, they killed many people with the form of “Euthanasia” which translates to “good death.” Euthanasia is what they called “physician-assisted suicide” where they would starve the person, inject them with a lethal substance, or lethal overdose of medication. Other methods of killing disabled people were carbon-monoxide chambers, mass shootings, and medical experiments that were often fatal. Many of the disabled people were capable of doing the work that the other people were doing, but were never given a