What was euthanasia program

In other cases, they might allow someone to take a much higher dose of a pain medication to treat severe pain. This is often a standard part of good palliative care. The person must give their full consent and demonstrate that they fully understand what will happen. A close family member usually makes the decision. This is generally done when someone is completely unconscious or permanently incapacitated.

People have debated over the ethics and legality of euthanasia and PAS for centuries. Today, laws about euthanasia and PAS are different across states and countries.

Each of these states and Washington, D. Not every case of PAS is legal. In addition, many states currently have PAS measures on legislative ballots, so this list may grow. Euthanasia is a topic of ongoing debate. In the United States, 67 percent of people were against it. However, a majority in 11 of the 74 countries voted in favor of PAS. Plus, a majority of voters in 18 U. This suggests that opinions about euthanasia and PAS are rapidly changing. By , a Gallup poll found a large shift in attitudes in the United States.

Almost three-quarters of people surveyed supported euthanasia. Another 67 percent said doctors should be allowed to assist patients with suicide. Their main objection was based on religious issues. More than 70 percent of those deaths were related to cancer. The review also found that in Washington and Oregon, doctors write less than 1 percent of prescriptions for assisted suicide. There are many arguments both for and against euthanasia and PAS. Most of these arguments fall into four main categories:.

Some people believe euthanasia is murder and find it unacceptable for moral reasons. Many also argue that the ability to decide your own death weakens the sanctity of life.

In addition, many churches, religious groups, and faith organizations argue against euthanasia for similar reasons. PAS is only legal if someone is mentally capable of making the choice. Gassing also proved to be less costly. Einsatzgruppen gassed hundreds of thousands of people, mostly Jews, Roma Gypsies , and mentally ill people.

In , the SS concluded that the deportation of Jews to killing centers to be gassed was the most efficient way of achieving the " Final Solution. Jews from the Lodz area of German-occupied Poland and Roma were killed there in mobile gas vans.

In , systematic mass killing in stationary gas chambers began at Belzec , Sobibor , and Treblinka , all in German-occupied Poland. These gas chambers used carbon monoxide gas generated by diesel engines. As victims were "unloaded" from cattle cars, they were told that they had to be disinfected in "showers.

The tighter the gas chambers were packed, the faster the victims suffocated. The Nazis constantly searched for more efficient means of extermination. At the Auschwitz camp in German-occupied Poland, they conducted experiments with Zyklon B previously used for fumigation by gassing some Soviet prisoners of war and ill prisoners in September Zyklon B pellets, converted to lethal gas when exposed to air. They proved the quickest gassing method and were chosen as the means of mass murder at Auschwitz.

At the height of the deportations in —44, an average of 6, Jews were gassed each day at Auschwitz. Gassing Operations: Oral History Excerpts. The gas chambers were relatively small, constructed to kill those prisoners the Nazis deemed "unfit" to work. Most of these camps used Zyklon B as the killing agent in their gas chambers.

New Haven: Yale University Press, Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, Pressac, Jean-Claude. These were:. Euthanasia Program Using a practice developed for the child "euthanasia" program, in the autumn of , T4 planners began to distribute carefully formulated questionnaires to all public health officials, public and private hospitals, mental institutions, and nursing homes for the chronically ill and aged.

The limited space and wording on the forms, as well as the instructions in the accompanying cover letter, combined to give the impression that the survey was intended simply to gather statistical data. The form's sinister purpose was suggested only by the emphasis placed upon the patient's capacity to work and by the categories of patients which the inquiry required health authorities to identify.

The categories of patients were:. Secretly recruited "medical experts," physicians—many of them of significant reputation—worked in teams of three to evaluate the forms. On the basis of their decisions beginning in January , T4 functionaries began to remove patients selected for the "euthanasia" program from their home institutions. The patients were transported by bus or by rail to one of the central gassing installations for killing. Within hours of their arrival at such centers, the victims perished in gas chambers.

The gas chambers, disguised as shower facilities, used pure, bottled carbon monoxide gas. T4 functionaries burned the bodies in crematoria attached to the gassing facilities. Other workers took the ashes of cremated victims from a common pile and placed them in urns to send to the relatives of the victims.

The families or guardians of the victims received such an urn, along with a death certificate and other documentation, listing a fictive cause and date of death. Because the program was secret, T-4 planners and functionaries took elaborate measures to conceal its deadly designs. Even though physicians and institutional administrators falsified official records in every case to indicate that the victims died of natural causes, the "euthanasia" program quickly become an open secret.

There was widespread public knowledge of the measure. Private and public protests concerning the killings took place, especially from members of the German clergy. He protested the T-4 killings in a sermon August 3, In light of the widespread public knowledge and the public and private protests, Hitler ordered a halt to the Euthanasia Program in late August According to T4's own internal calculations, the "euthanasia" effort claimed the lives of 70, institutionalized mentally and physically disabled persons at the six gassing facilities between January and August Hitler's call for a halt to the T4 action did not mean an end to the "euthanasia" killing operation.

Child "euthanasia" continued as before. Moreover, in August , German medical professionals and healthcare workers resumed the killings, although in a more carefully concealed manner than before. More decentralized than the initial gassing phase, the renewed effort relied closely upon regional exigencies, with local authorities determining the pace of the killing. Using drug overdose and lethal injection—already successfully used in child "euthanasia"—in this second phase as a more covert means of killing, the "euthanasia" campaign resumed at a broad range of institutions throughout the Reich.

Many of these institutions also systematically starved adult and child victims. The Euthanasia Program continued until the last days of World War II , expanding to include an ever wider range of victims, including geriatric patients, bombing victims, and foreign forced laborers. Historians estimate that the Euthanasia Program, in all its phases, claimed the lives of , individuals.

Persons with disabilities also fell victim to German violence in the German-occupied east. The Germans confined the Euthanasia Program, which began as a racial hygiene measure, to the Reich proper—that is, to Germany and to the annexed territories of Austria , Alsace-Lorraine, the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia , and to German-annexed parts of Poland.

However, the Nazi ideological conviction which labeled these persons "life unworthy of life" also made institutionalized patients the targets of shooting actions in Poland and the Soviet Union. There, the killings of disabled patients were the work of SS and police forces, not of the physicians, caretakers, and T4 administrators who implemented the Euthanasia Program itself.

In areas of Pomerania, West Prussia, and occupied Poland, SS and police units murdered some 30, patients by the autumn of in order to accommodate ethnic German settlers Volksdeutsche transferred there from the Baltic countries and other areas. SS and police units also murdered disabled patients in mass shootings and gas vans in occupied Soviet territories.