Child euthanasia in Nazi Germany

Child Euthanasia (German: Kinder-Euthanasie) was the name given to the organised murder of severely mentally and physically handicapped children and young people up to 16 years old during the Nazi era in over 30 so-called special children's wards. At least 5,000 children were victims of this programme, which was a precursor to the subsequent murder of children in the concentration camps.

The ideology of the Nazis was based on social Darwinism that held unreservedly to the notion of the survival of the fittest, at both the level of the individual as well as the level of entire peoples and states. This notion claimed to have natural law on its side. All opposing religious and humanitarian views would ultimately prove to be unnatural. A people could only prove its worth in the long run in this ongoing "struggle for survival", if they promoted the best and, if necessary, eliminated those that weakened them. Moreover, only a people as racially pure as possible could maintain the "struggle for existence". To maintain or improve the Nordic-Germanic race, therefore, the laws of eugenics or the (biologistically oriented) "racial hygiene" would have to be strictly observed, that is, the promotion of the "genetically healthy" and the elimination of the "sick". All those with hereditary illnesses or who were severely mentally and physically handicapped were classified as "lives unworthy of life" (lebensunwertes Leben). They would, in terms of natural selection, be "eliminated". This form of eugenics was eventually the basis of the National Socialist genetic health policy which was elevated to the rank of state doctrine.

In 1929 Hitler said at the Nazi Party Conference in Nuremberg, "that an average annual removal of 700,000-800,000 of the weakest of a million babies meant an increase in the power of the nation and not a weakening". In doing so, he was able to draw upon scientific argument that transferred the Darwinian theory of natural selection to human beings and, through the concept of racial hygiene, formulated the "Utopia" of "human selection" as propounded by Alfred Ploetz, the founder of German racial hygiene. As early as 1895, he demanded that human offspring should not:

...
Wikipedia