It is surprising how many people do not know about, have
never even heard about, the first victims of the Nazi concentration camps and
Euthanasia programs.
The first victims of the Konzentrationslager, concentration
camps, were largely the political opposition to Hitler: the Social
Democrats, the intellectuals, the communists.
"The first concentration camps in Germany were
established soon after Hitler's appointment as chancellor in January 1933. In
the weeks after the Nazis came to power, The SA (Sturmabteilungen;
commonly known as Storm Troopers), the SS (Schutzstaffel; Protection
Squadrons—the elite guard of the Nazi party), the police, and local civilian
authorities organized numerous detention camps to incarcerate real and
perceived political opponents of Nazi policy.
German authorities established camps all over Germany on an ad hoc basis to
handle the masses of people arrested as alleged subversives. The SS
established larger camps in Oranienburg, north of Berlin; Esterwegen, near
Hamburg; Dachau, northwest of Munich; and Lichtenburg, in Saxony. In Berlin
itself, the Columbia Haus facility held prisoners under investigation by the
Gestapo, the German secret state police, until 1936."
But as brutal as they were, these first concentration
camps were meant to remove and intimidate opposition to the regime. We
must never forget how the people of conscience among the German people were
cowed into submission, to remove and silence their voices and serve as an
example to the rest.
The
first victims of mass murder were the disabled, the emotionally impaired, and
the unproductive. Hitler personally signed an order to begin the
'mercy killings' of men, women and children who were in state run hospitals
and schools, and even in private care. The reason they were murdered
is that they were deemed to be too expensive to live, too unrproductive, too
much of a drain on the people and the state. This even included people
with what today might be considered treatable and transitory mental illnesses
such as depression. If you showed the wrong kinds of weakness, you were
disposed of, and often brutally by starvation.
Why have most of us never heard about this? For two or three reasons
perhaps.
First, of course, is that the weakest, then as it is now, have few to rise up
and speak on their behalf against the power of an over-reaching State and the
sociopaths among us. Where is the lobby that speaks on behalf of the
poor and the disabled, the sick and the defenseless? Yes, the churches
and different groups may speak out, but they are easily marginalized and
overwhelmed by slogans and insults.
Second, the sad truth is that this first mass killing compromised the greater
part of the German professional class: the lawyers, the doctors, the
nurses, the economists, the media, and the intellectuals.
People who knew what was happening either approved or pretended not to see
it. It was a very poor career decision to oppose such a policy,
especially since as I noted above the most visible opponents of the new
regime were being carted off to Dachau starting in 1933.
And German propaganda was weighing heavily from early days on the notion that
some people were not fit to live in a society that must be economically and
physically tough. They hardened the peoples' hearts, slowly but surely.
The needs of 'the State', which was really a gang of self-absorbed
sociopaths caught in the will to power and riches, resembling thugs and
gangsters, were judged to be the highest priority.
Officially starting in 1935, although the actual persecution began in 1933, homosexuals
were considered to be unproductive members of society.
The Nazis believed that male homosexuals were weak,
effeminate men who could not fight for the German nation. They saw
homosexuals as unlikely to produce children and increase the German
birthrate. The Nazis held that inferior races produced more children than
'Aryans,' so anything that diminished Germany's reproductive potential was
considered a racial danger.
Of course all of this line of
thinking found its full fury in some of the most horrific organized mass
killings in human history, primarily of the Jews, and to some extent the
Slavs. Although it certainly included other non-Aryan groups like
gypsies. It was a terrible and horrible act. It is hard to imagine
where and how far it might have gone if it had not been finally stopped.
But people also tend to forget that although there was organized murder on a
large scale beyond any question, the camps were also important hubs of slave
labor, with the weakest being murdered outright, and the rest slowly worked
to death in the war factories and special projects. Always the
decisions had a strong economic element of 'practicality.' It was the
triumph of utilitarianism and madness.
Like most terrible and horrible acts, it did not begin with a single event, a
single decision. It began with a profound intolerance for other
people, ideas and dissent; and then, when it found its political footing and
felt more confident, it found the will to murder the weakest, the most
vulnerable, and those who had no one to speak for them. And its
unquenchable thirst for power, money and blood was unleashed. For when
all the laws of God and men have been knocked down and flattened, who then
can stand when the cold winds blow across the land.
This is how a nation and a people can begin their long and painful descent
into barbarism and bestiality: by a program to stifle dissent, and then
to use the media and the journals to harden the hearts of the people with
fear, and corrupt practical ideas about who is or is not 'worthy of life,'
marginalizing the poor, the vulnerable, and the different.
People craft romantic images of themselves and their group as strong and more
cunning and ruthless than most, exceptional, like predators entitled
to their prey. And so over time they become truly distorted and
corrupt, grotesques, and make themselves into beasts.
This is how it is always with the will to power. And in the end it only
serves itself, consuming all.
Aktion
T4 - A Timeline of the Nazi Euthanasia Program
