Author: Megan Brobst
Interviewer: Anna Conrad
Between 1933 and 1945, Nazi Germany implemented a plan to eliminate all people they deemed unfit for their society. Before the Holocaust, the Nazis used the eugenic practices of sterilization and euthanasia to attempt to destroy Germany’s mentally and physically handicapped people. When concentration camps rose up, euthanasia against the handicapped was stopped in favor of killing off more and more inmates in the camps. Using the same infrastructure, mass extermination took the lives of millions. The vast majority of the Nazis’ victims included both the mentally and physically ‘inferior’ and the racially ‘inferior’. Megan Brobst will discuss the beginnings of the eugenics program, how it was executed, and how it was used as a springboard for the mass killings of the Holocaust.