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VIENNA, January 3, 2011 (LifeSiteNews.com) – A mass grave believed to contain the remains of 220 Nazi euthanasia victims has been uncovered in Austria, according to international media sources.

The grave, which is located on the grounds of the Hall hospital in the state of Tyrol, was discovered by construction workers who were building a new facility on the property. Although tests must still be done to verify the cause of death, the corpses are believed to be those of mentally and physically disabled individuals whom the Nazis deemed “unworthy of life,” and who were often killed with injections of potassium chloride, the same drug used to kill unborn children in hospitals today.

Although it was known that approximately 100 individuals had been killed at the facility, the number of bodies discovered is “exorbitantly large,” according to Horst Schreiber, a history professor at the University of Innsbruk.  In an interview with the Austrian television broadcaster ORF, Schreiber said that the additional bodies may verify a long-existing suspicion that the Nazis had locked hundreds more patients into the facility and left them to starve.

Austrian officials are now in the process of excavating the site and testing the remains to determine the precise cause of death. The results are expected to offer a final verification that, despite Nazi claims to the contrary, the facility was used as part of the regime’s massive euthanasia program.

It is believed that 200,000 handicapped people were executed by the Nazis as part of their racial “purification” program, which also included the killing of millions of Jews, Poles, Gypsies, and other groups regarded as undesirable by the regime.