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The first to go
When the nazi party started the Holocaust, first to be murdered were not Jews, Gypsies, communists, homosexuals or trade unionists. They were the disabled. PETER FROST tells the horrific story

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.

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