Editing Aktion T4 (section)

==Background==
At the beginning of the twentieth century, the sterilisation of people carrying what were considered to be hereditary defects and in some cases those exhibiting what was thought to be hereditary "antisocial" behaviour, was a respectable field of medicine. [[Canada]], [[Denmark]], [[Switzerland]] and the [[United States]] had passed laws enabling [[coerced sterilisation]]. Studies conducted in the 1920s ranked Germany as a country that was unusually reluctant to introduce sterilisation legislation.{{sfn|Hansen|King|2013|p=141}} In his book ''[[Mein Kampf]]'' (1924), Hitler wrote that one day racial hygiene "will appear as a deed greater than the most victorious wars of our present bourgeois era".{{sfn|Hitler|p=447}}{{sfn|Padfield|1990|p=260}}

In July 1933, the "[[Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring]]" prescribed [[compulsory sterilisation]] for people with conditions thought to be hereditary, such as schizophrenia, [[epilepsy]], [[Huntington's chorea]] and "imbecility". Sterilisation was also legalised for chronic alcoholism and other forms of social deviance. The law was administered by the Interior Ministry under [[Wilhelm Frick]] through special [[Hereditary Health Court]]s ({{lang|de|Erbgesundheitsgerichte}}), which examined the inmates of nursing homes, asylums, prisons, aged-care homes and special schools, to select those to be sterilised.{{sfn|Evans|2005|pp=507–508}} It is estimated that 360,000 people were sterilised under this law between 1933 and 1939.<ref>{{cite web |title=Forced Sterilization |website=[[United States Holocaust Memorial Museum]] |url=https://www.ushmm.org/learn/students/learning-materials-and-resources/mentally-and-physically-handicapped-victims-of-the-nazi-era/forced-sterilization |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20190104162134/https://www.ushmm.org/learn/students/learning-materials-and-resources/mentally-and-physically-handicapped-victims-of-the-nazi-era/forced-sterilization |access-date=21 December 2022 |archive-date=2019-01-04 }}</ref>

The policy and research agenda of racial hygiene and eugenics were promoted by [[Emil Kraepelin]].{{sfn|Engstrom|Weber|Burgmair|2006|p=1710}} The [[eugenic sterilisation]] of persons diagnosed with (and viewed as predisposed to) [[schizophrenia]] was advocated by [[Eugen Bleuler]], who presumed racial deterioration because of "mental and physical cripples" in his ''Textbook of Psychiatry'',

{{blockquote|The more severely burdened should not propagate themselves... If we do nothing but make mental and physical cripples capable of propagating themselves, and the healthy stocks have to limit the number of their children because so much has to be done for the maintenance of others, if natural selection is generally suppressed, then unless we will get new measures our race must rapidly deteriorate.{{sfn|Joseph|2004|p=160}}{{sfn|Bleuler|1924|p=214}}{{sfn|Read|2004|p=36}}}}

Within the Nazi administration, the idea of including in the programme people with physical disabilities had to be expressed carefully, because the [[Reich Minister of Propaganda]], [[Joseph Goebbels]], had a deformed right leg.{{efn|This was the result either of [[club foot]] or [[osteomyelitis]]. Goebbels is commonly said to have had [[club foot]] (''talipes equinovarus''), a congenital condition. [[William L. Shirer]], who worked in Berlin as a journalist in the 1930s and was acquainted with Goebbels, wrote in ''[[The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich]]'' (1960) that the deformity was from a childhood attack of [[osteomyelitis]] and a failed operation to correct it.{{sfn|Shirer|1991|p=124}}}} After 1937, the acute shortage of labour in Germany arising from rearmament, meant that anyone capable of work was deemed to be "useful", exempted from the law and the rate of sterilisation declined.{{sfn|Evans|2005|p=508}} The term {{lang|de|Aktion&nbsp;T4}} is a post-war coining; contemporary German terms included {{lang|de|Euthanasie}} ([[euthanasia]]) and {{lang|de|Gnadentod}} (merciful death).{{sfn|Miller|2006|p=160}} The T4 programme stemmed from the Nazi Party policy of "racial hygiene", a belief that the German people needed to be cleansed of racial enemies, which included anyone confined to a mental health facility and people with simple physical disabilities.{{sfn|Breggin|1993|pp=133–148}} New [[Insulin shock therapy|insulin shock treatments]] were used by German psychiatrists to find out if patients with schizophrenia were curable.{{sfn|Bangen|1992}}