Unethical Euthenasia

             Unethical Euthanasia.
             Imagine awaking to the Gestapo in your home, ransacking your belongings, and loading you into a cattle car with an unknown destination. Repeatedly hosing you down, spitting in your face, and mocking you they strip you of your clothing, shave your hair, and deny you all rights. Standing in a line for the showers, you are cold, hungry, and humiliated. Now imagine you have the brain capacity of an infant, an IQ less than sixty, and a crippled body. That is what the T-4 program was and the brutal effects it had on its victims during Nazi occupied Germany in the late thirties/early forties. The use of euthanasia in every sense was unethical and immoral.
             Designed to eliminate the incurably ill, the T-4 program required the cooperation of German doctors who not only supervised the killings of thousands of handicapped victims, but also took part in their deaths. In the beginning of World War II these doctors refused to take part in such an explicit crime, but nearing the end they became a large part of the population of those who believed it was the moral thing to do. They were the leaders, the murderers, the unethical outcasts of society. Or were they outcasts at all? Guided by the principles of racial purity and national health, these men and women committed to the removal of those unfit to live and produce impure offspring.
             The Euthanasia Program, established under the Reich Chancellory, met at Tiergartenstrasse 4, Berlin, in the fall of 1939. Originally determined to hide the inner workings of their program, it was named the T-4 Euthanasia Program derived from that address. Hitler considered it his obligation to create a master race and these "useless" people were a threat to his idea of Aryan purity. .
             Six institutions at Grafeneck, Bradenburg, Hartheim, Sonnenstein, Bernburg, and Hadamar were constructed to eliminate the worthless lives of seriously ill mental patients and expanded to house mentally and physically handicapped men, women, and children.