Interesting article. Thanks!“Leben unswerten leben”, and sadly, I’m too familiar with this subject. I wrote an article on it for a pro-life magazine back in the 1990s, in fact, under my pen name (its available on this website): jewsforlife.org/Article_Detail.cfm?ID=196
What few people realize is that the Nazis started with disabled people, not with Jews. They routinely starved disabled people to death, or injected them with phenol to kill them.
I think you’re right that this is uncommon knowledge. I only came across this knowledge through pro-life sources.And what few people realize (this deserves its own thread, really!) is that the eugenics movement upon which the Nazis based their ideas, started right here in the USA in the 1920s, with the junk science coming out of Cold Spring Harbor, NY.
And I think very few people are aware of Sanger’s “Negro Project”.Margaret Sanger (of Planned Parenthood infamy) was a leader in the eugenics movement, and she even had Nazi leaders writing for her magazine, Birth Control Review!
How horrible and disturbing. I had originally learned about these sterilizations from the documentary “War on the Weak”:My father had a lifelong fear of medical doctors, and an inability to trust them…and it stems from what happened to his aunt during the 1920s…she had fallen from a tree, developed a mental problem from it, and doctors convinced my great grandmother (who spoke no English) to sign her away, where she was placed into a mental institution and was sterilized against her will. This issue is a very, very personal one for me and my father’s family…and it STARTED here in the USA!
No, the Nazis prided themselves on the scientific rational logic of their positions, and even they could see that you can’t define someone as sub-human just because of where they happen to be living. They spoke of “race” (as they defined it) as the determining factor for persecution, but like their greatly admired progenitor Bismarck, and Frederick of Prussia before him, the persecution was primarily about religion, secondly about culture, with race (defined as we, not the Nazis, define it) a distant third.The really big target were the Slavs - whatever form of Christianity they practiced - not because of their Christianity but because they were Untermensch (‘sub-humans’) occupying the new territories of the Großdeutsches Reich (‘Greater Reich’).
My uncle was a Catholic priest in France. He was abducted by the Nazi’s in a train station in France. No one knew what happened to him until one day after the war had ended, they found this starving stranger wandering in the streets of their little town. My mother did not recognize her own brother.No, the Nazis prided themselves on the scientific rational logic of their positions, and even they could see that you can’t define someone as sub-human just because of where they happen to be living. They spoke of “race” (as they defined it) as the determining factor for persecution, but like their greatly admired progenitor Bismarck, and Frederick of Prussia before him, the persecution was primarily about religion, secondly about culture, with race (defined as we, not the Nazis, define it) a distant third.
Kaninchen,One of the reasons why I’ve always thought the Pius XII a complete diversion is not so much the accuracy or not of the claims against him (always questionable at best) but focusing the issue on the behavior of one individual and a group of regularly quoted ‘righteous gentiles’ who somehow become representative of ‘The Church’ or ‘Catholics’ or ‘Protestants’ (for that matter).
The thing is that anti-Semitism was rife in Catholic Europe, ‘Catholics’ were involved in the Nazi machine and ‘Catholics’ collaborated with Nazi occupation authorities. Not only that, institutional Catholicism in countries like Slovakia and Croatia had a role in the authoritarian, persecutory regimes.
The truth is mixed - ‘Catholics’ were involved in the Nazi State, the Nazi war and the Nazi genocide - ‘Catholics’ were also involved in resistance to the Nazi State and occupation, fighting against the Nazis and saving Jews from the Holocaust. The activities of the former do not form some kind of ultimate condemnation of ‘Catholics’ but the activities of the latter do not form some kind of ultimate defense.