Well before they began killing Jews on an industrial scale in the death camps, the Nazis practiced and refined their methods on the disabled in asylums. In a euthanasia program known as Aktion T4, which officially began in 1939, upwards of 200,000 disabled people were murdered. Some died in the Reich’s first gas chambers; many more were likely killed in acts of “wild euthanasia” performed by medical professionals who took it upon themselves to carry out the Nazi principle that care of the disabled was too great a financial strain for a country at war. Bodies were thrown into mass graves or incinerated. For the most part, families were told that their relatives had died of infectious disease.

XREF: Connects to histories of medicalized mass killing and the eugenics ideology predating the Holocaust. QUESTION: Worth tracing how Aktion T4 personnel and gas chamber technology later transferred to the death camps.

Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, loc. 692