Sterilization of Germans with diseases believed to be hereditary, including schizophrenia and epilepsy, had routinely taken place since the mid-1930s. The Nazi obsession with racial strength and purity permitted such operations to be performed on the basis that these people were considered a burden on the nation’s resources and a threat to a strong gene pool; therefore, they should not be permitted to procreate. As the Reich expanded, pitiless policies against those who were perceived as imperfect in mind or body were carried out with increasing efficiency.
Before the outbreak of the Second World War, the father of a deformed child wrote to Hitler, personally requesting that his infant be killed. Hitler authorized the murder as a merciful act. Thereafter upwards of 5,000 children also lost their lives in so-called mercy killings under the Nazi euthanasia programme. In the autumn of 1939, this initiative was extended to adults under the code name ‘Aktion T-4’, leading to the deaths of some 70,000 people with mental and physical disabilities within a period of less than two years. Not only were they considered a state encumbrance, but the Nazi rhetoric now extended so far as to deem such people unworthy of life.
Lethal injections or drug overdoses were administered as a means of ending patients’ lives, and many children were killed through enforced starvation. It was as part of the euthanasia programme that Nazi doctors first experimented with gas poisoning. Mock shower rooms with pipes leading to canisters of pure carbon monoxide gas were built in six clinics across Germany and Austria and used to kill the mentally and physically ill residents, who were then cremated. Natural causes of death such as heart failure were noted on the victims’ death certificates, but these were merely a euphemism for genetically motivated murder.
In Poland and other parts of Eastern Europe, meanwhile, Einsatzgruppen commanders were reporting that the violence and bloodshed inherent in pit killings was having a demoralizing effect on their troops. Gas was seen as a less distressing, more efficient alternative to mass murder than shooting and was now being used across the Reich to routinely dispose of those considered unworthy of life. A new method of gassing that asphyxiated victims with exhaust fumes was developed and by September 1941, Einsatzgruppe C possessed a purpose-built killing vehicle.
While murder on a mass scale was sustained in the East, murder on a smaller, but no less merciless scale, continued in the West. Aktion T-4 was officially suspended in August 1941, but the killing of disabled children and adults by means other than gas nevertheless persisted until the end of the war. In gassing, however, the Nazis had discovered their preferred method of exterminating Untermenschen, and the euthanasia clinics were the predecessors of the death camps.