The facts are well-known — from 1933 the Nazis murdered more than 200Â 000 physically and mentally disabled people, including a cousin of Adolf Hitler believed to have been schizophrenic.
But it has taken more than 60 years for an exhibition to trace in detail the fate of the first victims of Hitler’s sinister “health” policies, based on his obsession with racial purity that led to the Holocaust.
Deadly Medicine: Creating the Master Race opens in the eastern city of Dresden on Wednesday amid a chilling reminder of the crimes the Nazis committed as their genetic engineering fantasies escalated into genocide.
Last week, German investigators announced that they had uncovered two mass graves in Menden, in the west of the country, which held the remains of 50 people believed to have been killed by the Nazis because they were disabled.
One of the graves contained the skeletons of 22 children.
Revelations in recent years have shown that thousands of frail children were murdered as part of the Third Reich’s “euthanasia” programme designed to rid society of people deemed unfit to live.
In one hospital alone in Vienna, 789 sick and disabled children died after Hitler annexed Austria in 1938.
Decades later, the truth about the deaths at the Am Spiegelgrund clinic emerged as staff found infants’ body parts preserved in formaldehyde in hundreds of jars in the basement.
Tests confirmed that the remains contained traces of lethal drugs.
In Germany, there were similarly gruesome finds in psychiatric hospitals as late as the 1990s.
The exhibition at the German Hygiene Museum in Dresden, which drew about 72Â 000 visitors in an earlier run at the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, shows how doctors implemented the order Hitler signed on September 1 1939 to kill the fatally ill and the handicapped.
The items on display include vials of sedatives paediatricians administered to infants doomed to “mercy deaths”.
The mass killing programme was code named “T4” after its headquarters at number four in Berlin’s Tiergartenstrasse.
Historians believe that in Dresden and in five other centres around Germany, including a castle in Wuerttemberg, doctors and nurses stood by as Nazis shot or gassed about 70Â 000 people from 1940 to 1941.
Sick Wehrmacht soldiers and unfit forced labourers also counted among the victims of the programme, which was officially abandoned in 1941 amid protests from the public and the clergy, led by the popular archbishop of Muenster, Clemens August von Galen.
But the exhibition makes clear that the mass killings continued in secret.
Tens of thousands of people were killed with medication in 1941 after the programme was scrapped or simply starved to death.
The exhibition has faced criticism from German mental health professionals who claim it is inaccurate because it overlooks evidence that thousands of people deemed insane were starved to death in psychiatric institutions even after the end of World War II.
In Germany’s careful reckoning with its past and atonement for Nazi crimes, the nation turned to the issue of “mercy” killings relatively late.
It was only in 1989 that a plaque was finally put up in Tiergartenstrasse in memory of the victims.
That marked a turning point at which several hospitals admitted the extent to which they had collaborated with the Nazis on genetic engineering.
With the exhibition, the German Hygiene Museum also acknowledges its former fervent support for Hitler’s pursuit of a pure Aryan race.
It comes full circle perhaps by displaying its own material from the 1930s for the study of eugenics, including an anatomy model that was photographed surrounded by Nazi officials, in an exhibition that shouts a warning against perverse science. — AFP