ALMOST as soon as president Paul von Hindenburg appointed Hitler as chancellor of Germany on January 30 1933 the nazis started to put together obscene plans to improve the Aryan race that they thought would make up the population of a German Reich that would last for 1,000 years.

First to be chosen for mass murder were the disabled. By March 1933, the Reichstag had adopted the Enabling Act that would make their plans legal. 

The nazis twisted Charles Darwin’s ideas of natural selection, in particular the idea of survival of the fittest in the animal kingdom, and applied them to the human world and society to justify widespread enforced sterilisation and even murder.

They argued that allowing disabled people to live and have children led to the unfit reproducing more quickly than the fit. They claimed that this weakened society’s ability to function efficiently and made life more difficult for non-disabled people.

The nazis claimed that the social and economic problems that Germany experienced in the 1920s and early ’30s were due in part to this weakening of the population. 

Nazi propaganda in the form of posters, news-reels and cinema films portrayed disabled people as useless eaters and people unworthy of living. 

The propaganda stressed the high cost of supporting disabled people and suggested that there was something unhealthy or even unnatural about society paying for this. 

One notorious nazi propaganda film, Ich Klage An (I Accuse), tells the story of a doctor who kills his disabled wife. The film put forward an argument for so-called mercy killings. 

Other propaganda, including poster campaigns, portrayed disabled people as freaks and parasites.

After the propaganda came direct and terrifying action. First a widespread and compulsory sterilisation programme was introduced. 

It would involve over 400,000 potential mothers. The sterilisation would be followed by an active killing programme, which started in wartime in 1939.

Under a secret plan called the T4 Programme disabled people were killed by lethal injection or poison gas. The T4 Programme took its name from the address of the programme’s Berlin headquarters at Tiergartenstrasse 4.

Orders went out from Berlin to establish a string of six death camps — called euthanasia centres across Germany and Austria. These centres contained gassing installations disguised to look like harmless shower stalls.

Two of the most notorious centres were at Hartheim Castle in Austria and Hadamar, near Wiesbaden in Germany. During this latter phase of the T4 Programme, death was via an overdose of lethal medication or sometimes even by starvation.

The Hadamar camp had a staff of approximately 100 people. To hide its horrendous real purpose, it also operated as a normal crematorium. This death camp would continue its evil work until prisoners were liberated by US troops in March 1945.

These extermination centres and poison gas installations built to look like shower stalls were clearly an eerie precursor to the full-scale chain of death camps across Germany, Austria and Poland.

As well as using the basic killing procedures and technology, there is also evidence that personnel from the T4 killing programme moved to other killing duties after the 1942 Wannsee Conference, where the Final Solution was planned.

The nazis murdered 11 million non-combatants in the run-up to and during World War II. Of these almost a third of a million were those with mental or physical disabilities who were murdered in the vain hope of making a purer Aryan race. This was in addition to the 400,000 who would suffer enforced sterilisation.

Sadly in Germany today some of those attitudes to disabled people have not gone away. Germans are still dealing with the implications of that past horror. For instance, among commercial companies there is a widespread lack of compliance with quotas for employment of the disabled. 

Any German company with more than 20 employees is required to fill at least 5 per cent of its jobs with workers who are severely disabled, meaning more than 50 per cent disabled, whether physically or psychologically. The degree of disability is determined by medical and legally defined guidelines.

Disabled employees have the right to special treatment and government subsidies are available to employers to make sure the employees get the tools and accommodations they need. 

Yet far too many employers find it simpler to pay the fines — from just £1 to less than a fiver a week — rather than actually employ a disabled worker.

A new report has stated that this cultural tendency towards avoiding employing disabled people is perhaps rooted in nazi policies that targeted people with disabilities in the run-up to World War II. 

The report says virtually all companies simply pay the government fines of between £100 and £250 per month for every position that ought to be filled by someone who is severely disabled.

A disability activist interviewed by the German media outlet DW has called this common practice buying your way out of obeying the law. 

The study also found that more than half of German workers with disabilities have endured insults at work, and a third say they have felt avoided at the office.

Using my own mobility scooter around various German cities I have been frequently frowned at, abused or told: “I should not be on the streets if I couldn’t walk.”

Other wheelchair-using friends report similar attitudes. That isn’t to say all is fine and dandy on the pavements of Britain, but there is a large gap between disabled acceptance and attitudes in Britain and Germany today, some 75 years after the start of the events I am talking about in this article.

Disability rights activists in Germany have won many rights for the disabled but it has been a long and often difficult struggle. Today that struggle is still going on and sadly some public opinion is still shaped by those same nazi views that should have been condemned to the dustbin of history many decades ago.    

Not just Germany

WE should not forget that it wasn’t only the German nazis that used enforced sterilisation against disabled members of the population. Indeed Germany wasn’t even the first country to do so.

As early as 1907 some US states passed compulsory sterilisation laws covering people thought to have genetic illnesses or conditions.

In the 1920s and ’30s countries using enforced sterilisation included Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Estonia, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Lithuania, Latvia, Hungary and Turkey.

Britain too flirted with the so-called science of eugenics but didn’t cross the line to introduce enforced sterilisation. 

But that is another story and perhaps one we should bring to these pages soon.