the holocaust,hitler and germany
...refused to admit them so they were interned in "relocation camps" on the Polish frontier. In the fall of 1939, the German government established, under the Reich Chancellery, the Euthanasie Programme under the direction of Philip Bouhler and Dr. Karl Brandt. The headquarters of the operation were at Tiergartenstrasse 4, Berlin and the code name for the program was derived from that address -- T-4. The choice of terminology for the program is consistent with the Nazis' penchant for euphemism. Euthanasia typically means "mercy killing" and in the 1990's in the United States and other western nations, it is synonymous with "physician-assisted suicide." The kind of killing carried out through the T-4 program bears little resemblance to contemporary concepts of euthanasia. Hitler's rise to power produced a completely new set of definitions. Guided by the over-riding principles of racial hygiene, racial purity, and national health, the Nazi regime seems consistently committed to the removal of those unfit to live and produce inferior offspring. In 1935, the Nuremberg Laws provided for the forced sterilization of the unfit. Not only did Hitler have in mind such "inferior races" as Jews and Gypsies, he also included unfit Aryans -- the mentally defective, severely handicapped, the incurably insane and the incurably sick. The first major step leading to the "Final Solution" was the attempt on the part of the Nazi regime to force Jews to emigrate out of Germany. Hitler's motivation seems to have been two-fold: to ensure the racial purity of Germany and to create lebensraum, "living space," for German nationals of "Aryan" blood. His obsession with the former is reflected in the Nuremburg Laws of 1935. Throughout the 1930's Nazi domestic policy was aimed at stripping Jews of any citizenship rights, economic and political rights. The first step toward a "Final Solution of the Jewish Problem" was the complete dehumanization of the Jew. In Western Europe, which was highly visible to the outside world, Germany was careful to observe Geneva Convention guidelines. Consequently, their actions were not a matter of international concern. In the east, particularly in Poland, atrocities had been committed, blatantly, from 1939 onward. The escape of Slovakian Jews, Rudolf Vrba and Alfred Weczler, from Auschwitz in April of 1944 brought the brutal treatment of camp inmates to the attention of western authorities. Even earlier, following the invasion of Poland, members of the exiled Polish government, in particular Edvard Benes, had reported on the Nazi treatment of civilians in Eastern Europe where slave labor was commonplace from 1939 on and where extermination was the order of the day after 1942. In response to these reports, the United Nations forms the United Nations' War Crimes Commission in October 1943 and a list of war criminals was already in process over a year before the war...