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Child euthanasia (German: Kinder-Euthanasie) was the name given to the organized killing of severely mentally and physically disabled children and young people up to 16 years old during the Nazi era in over 30 so-called "special children's wards".
The Hartheim, Bernberg, Sonnenstein and Hadamar centres continued in use as "wild euthanasia" centres to kill people sent from all over Germany, until 1945. [118] The methods were lethal injection or starvation, those employed before use of gas chambers. [120] By the end of 1941, about 100,000 people had been killed in the T4 programme. [121]
Gerhard Herbert Kretschmar (20 February 1939 – 25 July 1939) was a German child born with severe disabilities. After receiving a petition from the child's parents, the German Führer Adolf Hitler authorized one of his personal physicians, Karl Brandt, to have the child euthanized.
In his 2004 published anthology Autism and Creativity, he classified Hitler as an "autistic psychopath". Autistic psychopathy is a term that Austrian physician Hans Asperger had coined in 1944 in order to label the clinical condition that was later named after him: Asperger syndrome, which has nothing to do with psychopathy in the sense of an ...
Later the killing was extended to people considered 'racially impure' or 'racially inferior' according to Nazi thinking. [ 11 ] The concept culminated in Nazi extermination camps , instituted to systematically murder those who were unworthy to live according to Nazi ideologists.
The Nazis and their collaborators killed children for these ideological reasons and in retaliation for real or alleged partisan attacks. [2] Early killings were encouraged by the Nazis in Aktion T4 , where children with disabilities were gassed using carbon monoxide , starved to death, given phenol injections to the heart, or hanged .
This list includes people from public life who, owing to their origins, their political or religious convictions, or their sexual orientation, were murdered by the Nazi regime. It includes those murdered in the Holocaust , as well as individuals otherwise killed by the Nazis before and during World War II.
For example, in May 1945, up to 1,000 people killed themselves before and after the entry of the Red Army into the German town of Demmin. [2] In Berlin alone more than 7,000 suicides were reported in 1945. Periods of suicides have been identified between January and May 1945 when thousands of German people took their own lives.