Worthy of life..Unworthy of life

[Guest Peeves]

With the numbers of Germans complicit, I will never believe that the 'average' German was unaware of the atrocities being committed. Another example follows.

http://news.national...i-era-disabled/

As you read on at some point, you suddenly find yourself in a world where the goose-bumps appear

Nazi extermination of the mentally and physically deficient has been documented since the end of World War II. But information gathered from the hospital cemetery in Hall, an ancient Tyrolean town of narrow, cobble-stoned alleys, cozy inns and graceful church spires east of Innsbruck, has filled out the picture in chilling new ways.

Historians, anthropologists, physicians and archaeologists say the Hall project represents the first time that investigators can match hospital records with remains, allowing them to identify, for example, cases in which patients had broken ribs, noses and collarbones that were not listed in their medical histories, suggesting that the patients had been beaten by those responsible for their care.

Faced with the horrors of the findings, those involved in the probe struggle to maintain the detached attitude of an investigator.

“At first, I sat here and worked through these documents in a relatively dry manner from the point of view of a scientist,” psychiatrist Christian Haring said. “But as you read on at some point, you suddenly find yourself in a world where the goose-bumps appear.”

The Nazis called people deemed too sick, weak or disabled to fit Hitler’s image of a master race “unworthy lives,” in the terrible culmination of the cult of eugenics that gained international popularity in the early 1900s as a way to improve the “racial quality” of future generations.

“Patients, who on the basis of human judgment are considered incurable, can be granted mercy death after a discerning diagnosis,” Hitler wrote in a 1939 decree that opened the flood gates to the mass killings.

More than 70,000 such people were killed, gassed to death or otherwise murdered between 1939 and 1941, when public protests stopped most wholesale massacres. From then until the end of the war in 1945, the killings continued at the hands of doctors and nurses. In all, at least 200,000 physically or mentally disabled people were killed by medication, starvation, neglect or in the gas chambers during the war.

[Guest American Woman]

With the numbers of Germans complicit, I will never believe that the 'average' German was unaware of the atrocities being committed. Another example follows.

http://news.national...i-era-disabled/

I read a really good book about that: "What we knew: Terror, Mass Murder, and Everyday Life in Nazi Germany" http://books.google....id=kjo__n_uEcAC

You may find it interesting, too. It's real interviews with real people - from a broad spectrum of the population at the time.

[Topaz]

A few weeks ago i just finshed reading "War and Remembrance" which deals with WW2, in the Pacific and in Europe and it makes one really think about life when we go to war and why. It also make one wonder what is going on in this world today by any country.

[Guest Peeves]

I read a really good book about that: "What we knew: Terror, Mass Murder, and Everyday Life in Nazi Germany" http://books.google....id=kjo__n_uEcAC

You may find it interesting, too. It's real interviews with real people - from a broad spectrum of the population at the time.

Sadly I have read sooooo much on the Holocaust that I tend now to avoid it unless something varied gets my attention. Thanks for the thought and suggestion.

[Guest American Woman]

Sadly I have read sooooo much on the Holocaust that I tend now to avoid it unless something varied gets my attention. Thanks for the thought and suggestion.

I believe that this is different; at least the quoted interviews are. It certainly directly addresses the question you raised as that's the question the book raises.

[Guest Peeves]

I believe that this is different; at least the quoted interviews are. It certainly directly addresses the question you raised as that's the question the book raises.

BTW, My in laws have peacocks on their patio...or did till a wildcat got them one by one.