Over seventy years after the systematic extermination of physically and mentally handicapped individuals began in 1939/1940, this exhibition recollected this dark chapter, the “child euthanasia” program during the Nazi period. Under this program, medical crimes were perpetrated against sick and disabled persons in Germany, including children and teenagers, based on Nazi racial ideology. Through 1945, over 10,000 of them fell victim to the various programs which were designed to exterminate “life unworthy of living.”
The exhibition showed that the physicians were involved in the killings were generally not concerned with painlessly ending the suffering of these individuals, but rather with “ridding” the public of “ballast existences” whose lives were extended only long enough “to serve science,” in accordance with Nazi racial ideology.