Nazi Germany and the Eugenics Movement
The Third Reich’s systematic killings of people with disabilities during the Holocaust were deeply influenced by a scientifically inaccurate theory known as eugenics. Nazi Germany used eugenics as the “scientific” motivation for the genocidal campaigns responsible for the death of millions in the Holocaust. The theory of eugenics acquired popularity in the late-19th to mid-20th century. Sir Francis Galton, an English scientist and the younger cousin of Charles Darwin, coined the term “Eugenics” in 1883, which means “good genes” or “good stock” in Greek. The theory stems from a biased application of Charles Darwin and Gregor Mendel’s scientific discoveries. Eugenics claims that the human condition can be improved through selective breeding. It promotes reproduction amongst those with “positive” genetic traits, while preventing those with “negative” genes from procreating, often through methods such as sterilization, segregation, and eventually “euthanasia” (National Human Genome Research Institute 2021)
Nazi Germany, like many other Western nations at this time, was highly influenced by the eugenics movement. In 1895, German biologist Alfred Ploetz created the German term for eugenics, Rassenhygiene, which translates to“racial hygiene”. (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum 2020) As a direct result of eugenics’ influence, the Nazi Party began implementing legislation promoting “racial hygiene” in the early to mid 1930s. Germany’s 1933 law for the “Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring” mandated the forced sterilization of anyone suffering from certain hereditary conditions. This law defines conditions such as schizophrenia, hereditary blindness, hereditary deafness, hereditary epilepsy, and those with Huntington’s disease as eligible for sterilization. This law also targeted those with less clearly defined diagnoses, such as “congenital mental deficiency”, “manic-depressive insanity”, “severe hereditary deformity”, and those considered to be “severe alcoholics”. (Germany 1933) The vague and overqualified nature of some of these diagnoses allowed for the persecution of those who did not conform or submit to Nazi authority. Under this law, Nazi Germany involuntarily sterilized an estimated 400,000 people. (Steger et al. 2012) The forced sterilizations of people with disabilities in Nazi Germany was a horrific practice that would soon evolve into a genocide against disabled Germans under the Nazi Aktion T4 program.
THE HISTORY OF CHILD "EUTHANASIA" IN NAZI GERMANY
The history and legacy of the mass murder of disabled children is a complex and multi-layered event to understand within World War II. The following sections summarize the history of child “euthanasia” in the Third Reich. These sections include Nazi Germany and the Eugenics Movement, Children and Aktion T4, Propaganda and Public Reaction, and Am Spiegelgrund: Remembrance and Legacy.
German Children at a Mental Institution in 1934.
Bundesarchiv Bild 152-04-12. Disabled children at the Schönbrunn Sanitorium. 1934. Photograph.
Children and Aktion-T4
The “euthanasia” of children with disabilities under the Aktion T4 program was one of the earliest organized killing operations carried out by the Nazi Party. As of 2026, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum estimates Aktion T4 was responsible for the deaths of at least 10,000 infants and children.
Aktion T4, named after the street address of the program’s headquarters in Berlin, was a project initiated by Adolf Hitler and his personal physician, Karl Brandt. (Bulmash 1966) While German legislation had already mandated the sterilization of disabled people since 1933, Hitler personally authorized the mass murder of disabled children in 1939.
Richard Jenne at Kaufbeuren-Irsee Sanitorium, 1944
Richard Jenne was the last victim killed at Kaufbeuren-Irsee Sanitorium in Bavaria on May 29, 1945. He died only two months before the Sanatorium was liberated by American forces. Jenne was four years old at the time of his murder.
Richard Jenne at Kaufbeuren-Irsee Euthanasia Facility. 2013. Photograph.
The United States Holocaust Memorial and Museum. https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/pa10049.
An article published by the American Journal of Public Health describes how a father requesting permission to have his own disabled child murdered inspired the beginnings of Hitler’s “euthanasia” campaign against disabled children,
This father, who petitioned Hitler for approval to murder his own child, marked a turning point within the already inhumane treatment of the disabled. Not only did this event inspire Hitler’s systematic killings of the disabled, but it also demonstrated the depths to which morality and human empathy were compromised within Nazi Germany.
The Aktion T4 program officially began in October of 1939, when Adolf Hitler signed a letter giving doctors authority and immunity to administer “mercy killings” to those they found to be incurably sick. The letter was backdated to September 1, 1939, which was the day of the Nazi invasion of Poland, most likely suggesting Hitler wanted it to appear as a wartime measure. The Reich Ministry of the Interior began requiring doctors, nurses, and midwives to report any child with severe disabilities or birth defects to the Ministry. Teachers and daycare workers were similarly asked to report any student displaying developmental delays or signs of learning disabilities. Parents of children born with severe medical issues were pressured by medical authorities to turn their children over to government-run medical institutions. (CITE) The article, “Physicians and the Nazi Euthanasia Program”, describes the process by which children were selected for euthanasia.
Most of the children killed under this program came from the community, not institutions. The doctors referring them were pediatricians and general practitioners, not asylum directors. The information about each child was forwarded to a central agency, the Reich Committee for the Scientific Registration of Severe Hereditary Ailments. This committee was simply a front for a small group of physicians who decided which children should be killed. The form was reviewed by three physicians who decided each child's fate. If the answer was affirmative, the child was ordered to be hospitalized at one of the medical centers that had been chosen as killing centers. (Kessler 2007, 10)
Children at Nazi killing centers were typically murdered by a lethal dose of medication or by starvation. (Weindling 2013, 421) The medical staff at these clinics often viewed these children as nothing more than research subjects. As a result of this attitude, children at these killing centers were also subjected to inhumane “scientific” experiments. One example of the medical torture and experimentation inflicted on children by Nazi doctors is the abusive treatment of Valentina Zacchini at the Wittenau clinic in Berlin. Historian of the Aktion T4 program, Paul Weindling, described Valentina’s treatment, “Valentina's movement difficulties were filmed by the Berlin paediatrician Gerhardt Kujath. Valentina was severely mishandled on film as - in the words of journalist Ernst Klee - a research object. Her brain was extracted by the neuro‐pathologist Berthold Ostertag, who completed the brain dissection in Tübingen after the war.” (Weindling 2022) The corpses of “euthanasia” victims were commonly researched on and dissected. Most of the parents and families of those who were killed by the T4 program received a letter that their relative had died of natural causes, and even requested payment for child ‘care’. (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum 2026) (Smith and Van Voran and Liebrenz 2023)
"A pivotal case of State-sponsored “euthanasia” occurred in Fall 1938 and was granted personally by Hitler. The father of an infant born blind, with a malformed brain, and with one arm and part of one leg missing, petitioned Hitler for the right to a “mercy death” for his son. Karl Brandt, Hitler’s personal physician at the time, was sent to Leipzig by Hitler, where the baby was hospitalized, to consult with the doctors in charge. At the Doctors’ Trial, Brandt described the orders Hitler gave him: “If the facts given by the father were correct, I was to inform the physicians in Hitler’s name that they could carry out euthanasia,” an order that Brandt followed." (Gordin and Miller and Kelly 2018)
"Most of the children killed under this program came from the community, not institutions. The doctors referring them were pediatricians and general practitioners, not asylum directors. The information about each child was forwarded to a central agency, the Reich Committee for the Scientific Registration of Severe Hereditary Ailments. This committee was simply a front for a small group of physicians who decided which children should be killed. The form was reviewed by three physicians who decided each child's fate. If the answer was affirmative, the child was ordered to be hospitalized at one of the medical centers that had been chosen as killing centers." (Kessler 2007, 10)
Early Eugenics Propaganda Poster, 1933
Nazi propaganda depicting a German man carrying two disabled people on his shoulders. The poster portrays the disabled as a physical and financial burden on healthy Germans. The title’s translation says, "You Are Sharing the Load! A Hereditarily Ill Person Costs 50,000 Reichsmarks on Average up to the Age of Sixty."
Proctor, Robert N. Nazi Propaganda Poster. Photograph. Military Medical Ethics 2. Vol. 2. U.S. Army. Office of The Surgeon General. Borden Institute, 2003.
Following the 1933 Law for the "Prevention of Offspring with Hereditary Diseases", Nazi Germany launched a propaganda campaign against people with disabilities. This campaign presented the disabled as “life unworthy of life” and “useless eaters”. (Holocaust Memorial Day Trust 2026) The effort to ingrain ableism into the German public was widespread. Wendy Lower’s 2013 book, Hitler’s Furies, describes how ordinary school teachers would indoctrinate ableism into their young pupils.
“In math class, students calculated government welfare costs for the disabled in state asylums, implanting in young minds an economic justification for the mass-murder program of the patients who were called “useless eaters”. (Lower 2013, 41)
The Nazi Party even produced propaganda movies against those with disabilities. Propaganda films promoting eugenics and euthanasia, such as Abseits vom Wege, which was released in 1935 (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum 2024), and the 1941 film Ich Klange An (Liebeneiner 1941), argued that murdering disabled people was the ethical and moral imperative of healthy Germans. While some did adopt the ableist attitudes of the Nazi Party, many Germans did not support the inhumane treatment of the disabled.
Despite attempts by the Nazi’s to keep their “euthanasia” campaigns from the public, it became widely known throughout Europe by 1940. (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum 2026) The Vatican is one of the institutions frequently criticized for its general inaction towards Nazi atrocities. However, the Catholic Church did publicly denounce the Nazi’s on one issue– the “euthanasia” of disabled people. Clemens August Graf von Galen was a German cardinal of the Catholic Church who was frequently critical of Hitler. On August 3, 1941, Galen delivered an impactful sermon in Lambertikirche in Münster. The Journal of Contemporary European History published this speech translated into English in the article “Between Enthusiasm, Compliance and Protest: The Churches, Eugenics and the Nazi 'Euthanasia' Programme”. An excerpt from Galen’s sermon reads as follows:
Soon after Galen this sermon was delivered, Hitler publicly shut down the “euthanasia” program and vowed that after the war, he would “extract retribution down to the last farthing” against Galen. (Burleigh 1994, 226) Some historians argue that this was a direct result of Galen’s sermon; however, Burleigh argues that it was done as an attempt to maintain public support and focus the Party’s genocidal efforts on the ‘Final Solution’. (Burleigh 1994, 263) While the Church’s resistance to the mass killing of the disabled is commendable, it raises the question of whether this resistance was motivated by the fact that the victims being killed were German and Austrian children, not Jewish ones.
These slides were held by Austrian and German scientific institutes in the second half of the twentieth century. That scientists continued research on these slides between 1945 and the late 1980s suggests a disassociation of guilt and responsibility for the deaths of the victims by the German scientific community. German post-war scientists classified the Nazis as racial fanatics whose killing of large numbers of victims was unstoppable. Scientists might salvage something for the benefit of science by retaining brains, bones and other body parts for their research. Nazism was linked to "pseudo-science," and so by definition a true scientist could not be seen as involved in Nazi racial atrocities. (Weindling 2013, 415)
Propaganda and Public Reaction
Rememberance and Legacy: Am Spiegelgrund Killing Center
Select this paragraph to add your own text. Just drag and drop or click here to add this paragraph to your site, then you can add your own content and make changes to the font.
The remembrance and legacy of child “euthanasia” victims of Aktion T4 are complex and still evolving. This complexity is reflected in the interconnected legacy of both victims and perpetrators at the Am Spiegelgrund killing center. Spiegelgrund was one of the most prolific child-killing centers used in the Aktion T4 program. Located in part of a historic hospital still operating in Vienna, the Spiegelgrund children’s “clinic” was responsible for the killings of 789 children. (Weindling 2013, 417) In 2002, the remains of hundreds of children were laid to rest after their preserved brains were discovered at the hospital, which formerly housed Spiegelgrund. The remains of these children were studied for decades following the war by Nazi doctors, such as Heinrich Gross, who evaded prosecution for their war crimes. (Bell 2012)
Am Spiegelgrund began operating as a killing center in 1940, and continued operations despite Hitler’s official succession of Aktion T4 until the liberation of Vienna in 1945. (National Fund of the Republic of Austria 2026) The children of Spiegelgrund were subjected to extreme medical torture before they were killed. An article published by the National Library of Medicine reports that these children often “suffered fatal consequences from inhumane experimental procedures, including pneumoencephalographies, electroshock therapy, and forced overdoses”. (Smith and Van Voran and Liebrenz 2023)
Rudolf Karger was a survivor of medical experimentation at Spiegelgrund. After a few incidents of minor disobedience, Rudolf was sent to the killing center when he was eleven years old in 1941, despite being able-bodied. (Karger 2010) He experienced daily beatings by “medical” staff, which only worsened after he attempted to escape to his grandmother's house. Rudolf Karger wrote about his experience in 2010,
Rudolf Karger was spared from murder because he was not physically or mentally disabled, and thus, his brain was not medically unique enough for the prolific Nazi physician, Heinrich Gross.
Dr. Heinrich Gross, a Nazi psychiatrist and neurologist, tortured and authorized the killing of disabled and developmentally delayed children during inhumane experiments at Am Spiegelgrund. Following the war, Gross evaded prosecution and went on to become one of the most highly respected scientists in Austria, even winning the Austrian Cross of Honor for Science and Art in 1975. Gross’s reputation in the European scientific community shifted in 1998, after the discovery of hundreds of child brain samples from victims at the former Spiegelgrund hospital. As a result, Heinrich Gross was charged with war crimes in 1999.
In the article “From Scientific Object to Commemorated Victim: The Children of the ‘Spiegelgrund'”, Paul Weindling describes the treatment of these victims remains amongst scientists such as Gross, “These slides were held by Austrian and German scientific institutes in the second half of the twentieth century. That scientists continued research on these slides between 1945 and the late 1980s suggests a disassociation of guilt and responsibility for the deaths of the victims by the German scientific community. German post-war scientists classified the Nazis as racial fanatics whose killing of large numbers of victims was unstoppable. Scientists might salvage something for the benefit of science by retaining brains, bones and other body parts for their research. Nazism was linked to "pseudo-science," and so by definition a true scientist could not be seen as involved in Nazi racial atrocities.” (Weindling 2013, 415)
Even with overwhelming evidence of his guilt, Heinrich Gross was later deemed unfit to stand trial. He died as a free man at the age of ninety in 2005, never serving any time for his crimes against children. (Weinling 2013, 423)
A memorial to the victims of Am Spiegelgrund was built in 2003 at the hospital, which formerly housed it. The National Fund of the Republic of Austria describes this memorial as having, “772 light steles commemorate 772 murdered children and adolescents who were killed in the National Socialist euthanasia institution 'Am Spiegelgrund' between 1940 and 1945”. (National Fund of the Republic of Austria 2004). Similar memorials to the victims of Nazi child “euthanasia” have since been built in Berlin and Hamburg. Despite more recent efforts to memorialize these young victims, their stories and legacy still go widely underrecognized.
“On one trip outside, I had the opportunity to escape. Out of homesickness I ran home to my grandmother. Less than two hours later, the door bell rang. Two nurses from Spiegelgrund were there to take me back. They assured my grandmother that there would be no consequences for me. But I already knew what would happen to me – the same as happened to everyone who escaped. And I wasn't spared. Barely was I back at Spiegelgrund, I was beaten. … I was taken to the Children's Special Department 15 or 17. The pavilions where there were deaths on a daily basis. I still have hazy recollections of being put in a cell. I was so hungry and was given painful injections. I only saw men and women dressed in white and who mistreated me. I don't know for how long I was in pavilion 15 or 17. Today, I know that I was in the clinic of Dr. [Heinrich] Gross, who removed the brains of the tortured children in the name of science. I remain convinced that I was only spared because I had the wrong kind of brain for Dr. [Heinrich] Gross.” (Karger, 2010)