The T-4 Program

Origins, Planning & Staff

Origins of T-4

Until WWI, eugenics in Germany and the U.S. ran parallel courses. By the middle of the 1930's, more than half the states in the United Sates had passed laws that authorized the sterilization of "inmates of mental institutions, persons convicted more than once of sex crimes, those doomed to be feeble-minded by 10 tests, 'moral degenerate persons,' and epileptics." In the famous Carrie Bell case, the Supreme Court upheld the Virginia law ordering her compulsory sterilization and "presaged the arguments used later to justify eugenic killings in Nazi Germany."

The idea of enforcing “racial hygiene” had been an essential element of Hitler’s ideology from its earliest days. Hitler seems to have had a lifelong horror of mental illness and physical deformity. In his discussions with Bouhler and the head of the Reich Chancellery, Hans Lammers, Hitler referred to people who “perpetually dirtied themselves” and who “put their own excrement in their mouths.”

More generally, Hitler frequently used medical metaphors for those he sought to remove from the German “racial community” – he referred to the Jews as a bacillus which must be killed or a cancer which must be excised. Likewise, he saw the disabled as a “diseased element” in the German racial body. In the minds of Hitler and other Nazis, the need to “cleanse” the German race was inseparable from the rest of the Nazi project.

Read more at this URL: http://www.holocaustresearchproject.org/euthan/t4.html

The Holocaust Education & Archive Research Team

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