Public Education & Policy :: Position Papers

Triangle Symbol

The black triangle was the badge of the "asocial" people under the Nazis.

We chose this as our logo because from our understanding it is the one that was worn by handicapped prisoners in Nazi Germany. The following describes the program.

Nazis, Eugenics and the t-4 Program (1920-1950)

It is not widely known that Hitler's extermination policies began with the widespread killing of institutionalized disabled people in Germany in the 1940s, and that the eugenics theories that were the basis for Hitler's policies originated in the United States in the 1920s. Sterilization and euthanasia were not the ideas of the Nazis. Germany, however, was the only country (at that time) in which the political climate allowed materialization of the final goal of sterilization and euthanasia.

The project that carried out the extermination of children and adults with disabilities was known as "T4". The initials came from Tiegartenstrasse 4, Berlin, which was the full address of the Furher Chancellery. The T4 Project included four organizations:

1) The Realms Work Committee in charge of collecting information on candidates for euthanasia from questionnaires sent to hospitals,
2) The Realms Committee for Scientific Approach to Severe Illness Due to Heredity set up exclusively to apply euthanasia to children,
3) The Charitable Company for the Transport of the Sick, which transported patients to the killing centers, and
4) The Charitable Foundation for Institutional Care, in charge of final disposition of the victims' remains.

At Hadamar Mental Institution, the victims were stripped, dressed in paper shirts and taken to a gas chamber where they were murdered with hydrocyanic acid gas. The bodies were moved to crematoriums by conveyer belts, six bodies to each furnace. The psychiatrist in charge at Hadamar was Dr. Adolf Wahlmann, an active member of the German Mental Hygiene Movement. After information about the exterminations began to filter down to the German public, some members of the clergy started speaking out against the program. Hitler ordered the T4 program to stop killing patients in gas chambers. Instead, the program went underground and victims were poisoned or starved to death. On May 8, 1945, the war ended in Germany. In the extermination institutes, they either kept on killing or let the patients starve to death. As late as May 29, 1945, a four year-old, "feeble-minded" boy was murdered in Kaufbeuren. Estimates of how many disabled people died under the Nazis, range up to 250,000.

The extermination program in Nazi Germany caused eugenics theorists in the United States and Europe to backpedal on their beliefs about eliminating mental illness and congenital disabilities through euthanasia. However, sterilization of with disabilities continued to be a widespread practice well into the 1970s.

The Disability Social History Project/Internet Site

"THOSE WHO CANNOT REMEMBER THE PAST ARE CONDEMED TO REPEAT IT!"
- George Santayana