Grave of Nazi Euthanasia Victims Discovered in Germany
By Hilary White
MENDEN-BARGE, Germany, October 5, 2006 (LifeSiteNews.com) – The mass grave of 22 children and 29 adults thought to have been victims of the Nazi government’s Euthanasia program, has been discovered in the cemetery of a Catholic church in the village of Menden-Barge.
BBC news reports that state prosecutor Ulrich Maass said the authorities are looking for evidence and witnesses but it would be difficult to prosecute anyone 61 years after the war.
The grave site is near a hospital once run by Hitler’s personal physician, Dr. Karl Brandt, who headed Action T-4, the Nazi state euthanasia program that “compassionately” murdered hospitalized handicapped infants, children, elderly and mentally ill people and even veterans before it was ordered stopped.
The T-4 program allowed the Nazi’s to develop the gas chamber technology that was used on a large scale in the death camps such as Auschwitz. The excavation of the Menden-Barge cemetery is still under way.
“We assume that these were victims of the Nazi regime,” said Maass who confirmed that the children’s’ bodies, three of which showed signs of having had physical handicaps, had been thrown haphazardly into the grave without coffins.
Reuters interviewed local church historian Theo Ostermann who said that the people in the village had known that euthanasia was being practiced at the local clinic.
Although modern euthanasia promoters naturally shun the comparison, US scholar Henry Friedlander in his landmark book, “The Origins of Nazi Genocide: from Euthanasia to the Final Solution,” chronicled the progress of the eugenics philosophy from sterilization of the “unfit” to the T-4 program to the Holocaust.
Friedlander shows in his book how widely accepted the euthanasia ideologies were among the scientific and academic elite. The same elite now again pushing for a new euthanasia movement is supported by some of the scientific world’s most famous names, including Princeton University’s bioethics guru, Peter Singer and James Watson, the Nobel Prize-winning discoverer of DNA.
The current eugenics movement is working around the world to bring in laws to allow the killing of handicapped children and sick people.
Currently Belgium, the Netherlands and the US state of Oregon have laws allowing physicians either to kill patients directly or prescribe lethal doses of medication. Other jurisdictions, such as Switzerland, have legal loopholes that allow passive or active euthanasia and Britain has a powerful euthanasia lobby working through the House of Lords towards legalization.
Read related LifeSiteNews.com coverage:
Current Medical Euthanasia and Eugenic Abortion Practices Echo Nazi Past
https://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2003/oct/03100208.html
Read a review of Friedlander’s book:
https://www.ess.uwe.ac.uk/GENOCIDE/reviewsh35.htm