Bundestag remembers Nazi euthanasia

For the first time, the annual hour of remembrance for victims of the Holocaust on 27 January, the day in 1945 that the Auschwitz concentration camp was liberated, was devoted to victims of the Nazi regime’s euthanasia programme. The Bundestag especially highlighted the murder of some 300,000 people with special needs who were considered “unworthy of life” by the Nazis.

It had taken Germany a long time to come to terms with this particular crime in its past, Bundestag President Norbert Lammert (pictured) said. Many of the perpetrators who were doctors and scientists had gone on to become university professors in the Federal Republic after the Second World War, he recalled. “The fact that this commemoration was possible at all, we owe to the efforts of a few untiring individuals,” he emphasised.

The euthanasia murders had been a “test run” for the “deliberate and systematic” murder of the millions that followed. With the exception of individual representatives of the Christian Churches such as the Catholic Bishop of Münster, Clemens von Galen, and the Protestant Bishop of Württemberg, Theophil Wurm, hardly anyone had had the courage to “defy this inhuman Zeitgeist”, Lammert said, unable to hold back his tears as he read out the names of some of the known victims.

Sebastian Urbanski, an actor with Down’s syndrome, read out a letter from an inmate of the Hadamar Euthanasia Centre to his parents describing the appalling conditions under which he and his fellow inmates were slowly starving to death. The letter was confiscated by the Nazis and  recovered after the war. Speaking to KNA, Mr Urbanski deplored the continued social exclusion of people with Down’s syndrome.