Transcripts For CSPAN3 Nazi Persecution Murder Of The Disabled 20240712

The video. Jason ladies and gentlemen, welcome. I am jason from the National World war ii museums institute for the study of war and democracy. We appreciate you joining us today for this webinar on the nazi murder of the disabled. And the 1945 trial. We are so fortunate to have as our special guest today dr. Patricia haber rice from the United States Holocaust Memorial museum in washington, d. C. I want to give a little bit of background about dr. Rice. She is director of the division of the Senior Historian at the jack joseph and morton Mendel Center of holocaust studies. She is an expert of the nazi on the victims of nazi annihilation policies and effort s to bring the nazi perpetrators to justice after world war ii. She has a lot of publications. So i will just mention a small number of those for you today. First is atrocities on trial, historical perspectives on the politics of prosecuting war crimes, the 2008 volume she coedited with her colleague at the Holocaust Museum. I would like to mention to you especially about this volume, she writes a contribution piece entitled early war postwar justice in the american zone, the murder factory trial, which we will get to in the second half of our discussion today. She has also contributed to the 2008 volume nazi crimes under the law. One of the kind of pathbreaking researchers on the topic we are going to cover today. A volume titled children during the holocaust, part of her series on holocaust horses in a sources in context, a very important volume of source material for educators, and finally from 2019, war and child in the era of two world wars. Patricia, welcome to our webinar today. It is so great to have you here. This is a topic that obviously a lot of our viewers are just generally familiar with. They certainly know about the nazi persecution and murder of people with mental and physical disabilities, but, obviously, when you get beyond that, there is a lot that is unfamiliar to us, a lot of the detail we just do not know as well as we should, so we feel very fortunate to have you here with us today to talk through what happened with this program, how many, what kinds of people were caught up in it in the attempts and the attempts to bring perpetrators connected to the program to justice after the war. I thought we would jump right in , patricia, and to start out with a very basic question for our viewers about your own background on this topic. It is a very difficult topic, a very painful topic to research. And i think people would be curious about how you became interested in researching this program that the nazi regime implemented during world war ii. Patricia good morning, jason. It is an honor and pleasure to be here with your viewers and your audience this morning. This afternoon in washington, d. C. , for us, but this book was actually my jumping off part, my jumping off place into the history of the Euthanasia Program. It was the subject of my masters thesis. At the time i was interested in legal history. And in early postwar trials. That this time the topic of that , Euthanasia Program was not well known. The first books on euthanasia had just come out in 1985 in german, so at the time i was writing this, which was about 1986, 1987, there was almost nothing about this in english. My immediate interest and i have been working on it ever since. Jason it is really remarkable , patricia, that you were certainly one of the first researchers in the anglophone world, in the englishspeaking world, to be working on this. I think about when i was in graduate school and the books we all had to read on this program, like the origins of nazi genocide, and those are a decade later from what you are were working on. All the more reason we are so grateful you could join us. Why dont we talk about this program, which is generally known as the t4 program. If you could tell us about the nazi regimes decision in 1939 to secretly murder people with mental and physical disabilities , and tell us which individuals specifically were targeted as part of this program. Patricia yes. What is interesting is this socalled Euthanasia Program is also known as operation t4, one of the nazis very radical policies to have what they would describe it to restore the racial integrity of the german nation, to cleanse the race. They did this by murdering European Jews during the holocaust, but one of their sort of biological enemies that they really focused on in their own community were people they ily ill,ereditary dai unworthy of life. Today we would call these individuals persons with mental disabilities, with intellectual disabilities, or physical disabilities. The nazis believed that these individuals placed both the genetic that is important, a genetic as well as a financial burden on society and the state. And at the same time, according to the nazis, they made no significant contribution to society. So they are targeting institutionalized patients in germany and austria. And in those particularly annexed by the germans, the czech republic. This Euthanasia Program, you see quotations around this term, because it is not euthanasia in terms of a mercy death, which is part of a biomedical debate today, this is a cynical program of mass murder. It is the regimes First Program of mass murder carried out against its own citizens. The overwhelming number of people who died in the Euthanasia Program were german arians, nonjews. This program was before the holocaust by about two years. And just to give you a little background, beginning in october men we will meet in a moment, they initiated a child Euthanasia Program, which murdered over 10,000 disabled children during the war years through starvation and overdoses of medication. And by 1940, you have an adult january killian program that parallels that murder of german infants toddlers, and juveniles. , this was codenamed operation t4. Here you see the villa, that was used as a nerve center for the Euthanasia Program. Thishose of you who know, villa was hit in the days of world war ii and stood right about where the berlin philharmonic stands now. They took the street address for and they used it to create the codename for the organization, which is operation t4. Basically, what the operation does is to remove individuals from their home facility to eventually one of six centralized killing centers throughout germany and austria. And within hours of their patients are just gassed. You see the gas station as it was restored. It was restored after the war at the memorial site. They are gassed with Carbon Monoxide in gas chambers that look like showers. They are removed and their bodies are burned in crematoriums. About 70,000 patients were murdered between january 1940 and august 1941, in this gassing phase of the Euthanasia Program. The program stops for about a year between january of 1941 and 1942. Januarybut it begins again in august of 1942 in places like hadamar, and continues to the end of the war. And about 250,000 institutionalized patients died as a result of the Euthanasia Program. Jason thank you for that overview. There is a lot for our viewers to deal with. And that this is a program really that covers most of the war, other than this one year that you mention, which we will discuss as well. But i thought we would talk about hadamar and some of the key perpetrators that you alluded to. The one that you mentioned, hadamar, was one of six killing centers in the third reich. These killing centers were supervised by men with the last name of b, if that helps us remember some of them. You mentioned a couple of them already. Theip belieber bueller, director of hitlers private chancellery, hitlers attending physician, and much of the day to day management of the program was done by victor brock. Often when we look at these perpetrators, i think this is largely affected by the trial of adolf ikeman. Which have been to later. Into not directly tied this program but his trial , shaped the way we think a lot of this program. The term death murderer gets used for many men involved with either the t4 program or the genocide of the jews. So, if you can tell us about these perpetrators, and if you think the term death murderer is adequate for understanding them or not. Patricia that is a good definition for what these individuals did. Lets take a look at who these men were. This is philip, a very interesting photograph. It is a color photograph, which you do not usually see in this particular era. Philip bouhler is the man in the dark uniform. As you said he is the director , of the chancellery, and he manages hitlers affairs. It is off the radar screen of most germans, as a small podium of organization. It is a perfect machine for this operation. Next we have dr. Carl brandt. Letter foramed in a the Euthanasia Program. And here you see him serving his place at the nuremberg doctors trial in 1946. He was, of course, the attending physician for hitlers. Brock victor brock. ,he is at his desk in 1940. He is basically what you might call a man with no medical training who runs the daily operations of the t4, t4 office manager. And in these men were responsible for the killing program. Putting it into operation,. Anaging from their desks they are responsible for orchestrating the killing process. They do not do any actually killing. And the trials for these kind of men are very hard to come by, especially in early war crime trials. We tend to see this later in the 1960s. You name the adolf eiseman trial as a perfect example, who never killed anybody personally as far as we know of, but operated these enormous, important killing operations from their offices. These perpetrators i just talked about, they carefully organized and implemented the Euthanasia Program, but the links to the organization that require investigation, tenacious prosecution. So they literally often got away with murder some of these t4 , perpetrators. Jason thank you. Hey are such a frightening kind of perpetrator to deal with. They are legally, but as far as intellectually people to come to terms with about these individuals, literally the paper that they push involved the deaths of thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of individuals. And we will obviously hear more about these three men as we work through. You have already alluded to the phases of this program, this t4 program. If we could kind of distinguish these a little bit. The first one lasted from january 1940 until late august, 1941. Describe r. G. For our chief describe example hadamar, what happened , to victims during this first phase . People try to understand, how did this actually take place . How did this work . Obviously we have learned a lot thanks to your research, and how this actually worked for the victims. Patricia of course. Hadamar was one of the last of the six established killing centers. It is often cited as the most famous. You cannot tell from this photograph, but it actually set above the town of hadamar. Hadamar. In the 10 short months from january to august of 1941 when it was in operation, the staff gassed 10,072 mentally and physically disabled individuals. Before that, halt in the Euthanasia Program takes place. We will talk about that in just a little while. But patients were simply brought to hadamar from their home institutions. More often, they went through facilities, these kinds of way stations that disguised where the patients were actually going. That was to keep the relatives of victims, agencies like insurance agencies government , agencies that track these individuals, their positions and so on from being able to follow where their patients went. Patients were usually brought from these facilities to hadamar. They come in boxes of about 80 to 100 every day, except for sunday. The buses run through the town, hadamar, where they are seen by the local population. They go up to the hill in the facility. They are given a very brief examination that lulls them into a sense of security. It is a very antichamber of the gas chamber. And often the doctors are trying to give a sense that this is a medical procedure kind of like , mental and the rest. But they are also looking for a diagnosis that they might be able to use. The patients are gassed, it in the gas chamber made to look like showers. And then they are cremated. The physicians sign death certificates giving a cause of death. And then the relatives of these victims receive the death certificate, as well as an urn with ashes on the floor of the crematorium. So it is a grisly business. Horrifying when you look at the details of this, how systematic, how thoughtful it is. A kind of bureaucratic process, and yet one so full of ideological fervor, the nazis commitment to purging people, in this case murdering, purging as in mass murder, tens of thousands of the most vulnerable citizens of germany and greater germany during these years. How did the perpetrators try to keep this secret . The followup that people always want to know, who have studied this a bit, is how did the public come to learn something about the fact that this program was in place and operating . Patricia yes, part of the effort to keep this kind of on track and off the radar screen to the public involved using fictitious dates and causes of death and giving the impression to relatives and to the insurance agencies, by the way germany is a welfare state that the bulk of these patients are actually being paid for, their care, by the german , the publicth health administration. So the relatives of the victims receive these fictitious death certificates, and they are trying to convey the impression that these patients have died of natural causes. But very soon this seeker these becomes secret operation becomes for many reasons an open secret. Here you will see probably a better photograph of that town. You can see the smoking crematorium. The first access the public add had to these programs usually happened around the places of the euthanasia sites themselves. As you can see, hadamar was perched above the agricultural town, and these are all farmers. I am a nice midwestern girl from a farm town in illinois, and i can tell you that when you burn flesh, it has a peculiar smell. And these are all farmers in this community. And at a certain point, they are murdering and burning so many patients that they claimed to the local Agricultural Chamber that the ashes from the crematorium are ruining their crops. The relatives of the victims very often find out when they receive very strange diagnoses that happened. For example, someone might die of appendicitis. That is the classic case. And their appendix has been removed several years ago, or they receive something for a 17yearold saying this person has died of old age. You see the slipups occur and it gives clues to relatives that things are not quite right. We know that lawyers in the legal profession, most German Government agencies were not briefed until relatively late about this secret program. So it is a secret from them, too. You see attorneys trying to figure out on behalf of families why their loved one has disappeared and they are told to shut down. People are finding out various parts of the great find that something strange is going on. I should also point out that Church Officials are some of the early detectors of this program. People like the bishop of finds out that patients are being removed from a catholic institution. He is also receiving a lot of dispensation requests from relatives whose relatives have been cremated. Catholics at the time could not be cremated. This is how a lot of catholic figures found out that something strange was happening. Publicalso know that the , may be the public does not understand exactly every detail, but it is very clear that a large segment of the population knows something is afoot. When the germans, when the Nazi Administration tries to mount a tv campaign to screen the countrys inhabitants for tuberculosis, lots of people do not show up because they actually fear that they will be pulled intos this killing process. At this very crucial time during justar, germany has invaded the soviet union in june 1941. Hitler calls bouhler personally and tells him to halt the program. Jason this is such an important point for people who studied at this ask questions about the popular pressure, Popular Resistance to the regime. Did the regime ever fear public pressure, public opposition . And so this case that you are talking about here, where everyday people begin to figure something out, and then the role that the church plays, you mentioned the bishop this is always something that people have to factor in when they are thinking about should there be resistance or not . Did people actually defy the regime or challenge the regime. This is a very interesting case. You noted already that hitlers orders a halt to adults in august of 1941, and then a year later the regime resumes the murder of adults with disabilities. Could you Say Something about the second phase of the t4 program, which goes into late in the war and how it differed from the first phase . Patricia this is a very interesting part of the Euthanasia Program. It is not what you see until recently, a lot of books on this subject. There is Less Research done on this part of the Euthanasia Program. This halt lasts 19411942. It is a time when the planners of these programs are trying to knock out the kinks and make the program or covered. More covert. By the way, this is a time at which the final solution of the europe is going on. Not only the shootings in the soviet union, but the first killing centers begin guessing assing jews. This is a really interesting time where there is a connection between the first killing operation and the final solution. While these facilities remain dormant, many euthanasia people were sent to other places. These killing centers murdered 925,000 jews, almost as many as at auschwitz. And in the key personnel there are actually t4 staff. And are euthanasia operatives, who have been so used to killing on german soil, that they are key players in the execution of the final solution, the genocide of European Jews. Hadamar opens as one of the first euthanasia facilities in the summer of 1942. It is the only of the original t4 killing centers during the second phase. And it goes on murdering patients until 1945, when hadamar, ise in overrun by American Forces. It shows the key changes that take place in euthanasia facilities all over germany and austria. And one is the way that they kill. They started with killing using. Assing from january 1940 until august 1945. They switch to the more successful method using child euthanasia. The second thing that changes is who does the killing. During the gassing phase, they had a gas valve that was in the hands of the physician. Phase the second killing that changes. , now the nurses, female nurses are dispelling overdoses of medications. It looks like a normal process, you might give outpatients to give them something to sleep. But what is interesting now, female nurses add to killing process. That is really the first time that you see women connected with a killing program, not so much with concentration camps, but with killing programs. Finally, it decentralizes entirely. Now, instead of six killing centers, it becomes one of about 100 facilities across germany and austria. And other territories. About 250,000 ultimately died. Hadamar, which originally killed 10,000 patients kills 5000 more , during that second killing phase. Jason that number, 250,000, is a staggering number. It really is. And i think because we know the obviously connected to the final solution, which are much higher, is the only reason there is not more recognition of the facts about a quarter of a million people, mostly nonjews, were murdered as part of this program and the connections that you alluded to between the genocide of European Jews and this program. You also noted in your research that there were other victims beside those with disabilities who were caught up in the vortex of destruction during the second phase. And this is really, i think, crucial insight you have provided for us about how the net really spreads during the second phase. Can you Say Something about who else is targeted when the killing starts in 1942 again. Patricia from january 1940 until august 1941, the key at a and relatively only victims of the Euthanasia Programs, meant that they were intellectually or physically disabled patients. By 1943, the killing operation begins to expand beyond merely severely disabled adults, which was once the focus of t4. The Program Begins to focus on a new circle of victims. And here you see disabled children and juveniles being killed at the facility, and they did not have a special pediatric facility for murdering Young Children and juveniles, but instead these are being drawn into the killing process the adult killing process, and that is actually very unusual for a euthanasia killing center. They murder some jewish men. Jews of one jewish parent and one area and parent arian parent are murdered there. Nothing was actually wrong with them. They had no kind of disability or mental disorder of any kind. They are murdered simply because they are the children of jews a mixed marriage between jewish and christian parents, aryan parents, and that seems to have been some effort to start in that direction, and it fizzles out. So about 40 of these children are murdered in hadamar, and that is the only place i know that has happened. We have soldiers murdered at these facilities. And we, originally, these guidelines that were set out for the Euthanasia Program strenuously forbade the trends of current soldiers being murdered. But we see them ending up in this vortex too. About 100 victims of allied bombing raids, it usually elderly women who are traumatized, they are bombed out of their houses and have no one to come and collect them and they wind up at hadamar. What is really sad as you see people even from the bombings of dresden coming to these facilities. The very famous, the bombing of dresden, you see the bombing victims being murdered. And many people were bombed out in hamburg. That is a port city. It was very heavily bombed. Finally and most importantly, we have the murder of forced labor at the facility, these are not jewish forced laborers, they are foreign civilian forced laborers, specifically polish and soviet, or they were called eastern workers by the nazi. S. They are significant because they are the basis for the hadamar trial. If they were ill or exhausted while they were performing forced labor, they were sent home and sent back east. But this was not possible at a certain point in the war effort when the red army was coming towards the german border. Camp was set up to confine basically these individuals, but in the frankfurt area near where hadamar was, these forced laborers, almost all of them had tuberculosis, they were close enough to the population to cause a Public Health crisis. They did not want tuberculosis to spread to the population, so they sent these individuals to be murdered at hadamar. And we know that exactly 476 laborers were killed in hadamar. Jason everything you told us there points to the fact that the nazi regime, as you noted the second phase in 1942, the summer of 1942, and as the war turns against hitler, the dictatorship over the next year, stalingrad curves north africa and sicily, the invasion and the italian peninsula, and the regime expands the killing. They dont hold back from it, they broaden the array of victims and that goes right into the end of the war, and the fact that takes us here to the wars end and the discovery of these killing centers and the attempt to bring justice to the perpetrators. So when the americans show up in late march of 1945, what did they find there . Patricia the americans overrun hadamar, the town, in late march of the second infantry 1945. Division, and in most cases in terms of others nation killing they comeilling sites , into the towns and say they are killing people up there, and everybody is talking about it. Go up there and check on the patients, and that is how and forces learn. And that is how the American Forces learn. And a captain of a unit that comes into town, they decided to investigate and they sent him and a group of americans. They go to visit the facility on the 29th of march, a few days after they come into hadamar in 1945. We do not know what the conditions were like. Because the official record of not findable, is not within the preliminary court documentation, so we do not know what that original report said. We know that there were about 550 people who survived the killing. You can see three of them there. And in the final months many of , the orderlies had been drafted and these were older people, so they were not of service age, but they had been drafted to the the home army. So young men and old men defending the front lines, the home front. And others had fled because they knew they were in a lot of trouble with allied authorities who could arrest them. So the chief physician at the and the head female nurse, they decided that they would stay with the patients and they were immediately arrested. So investigating officers, you see a photograph of that 581 mass graves in the institution cemetery. They found at the death register showing 15,000 patients dying, which is not what you would expect at an ordinary institution where mortality may be 2 to 5 of the population. Just given that some people are older or elderly and might pass away. So they contact the United States war crimes branch, which it is so early that the location is in paris, to investigate this scenario. Jason seeing those images is so startling. And it is often overlooked than t americans we think about the , americans liberating dacau, liberating buchenwald, but obviously they liberated these killing centers and facilities where they had operated at the same time. As you point out, americans put on one of the first trials preceding the nuremberg trial, the hadamar trial of 1945, at which you describe, and i am quoting here, as the first mass atrocity trial to be done. And among one of the first proceedings to be tried there an American Military tribunal. Can you take us through the trial a bit . Patricia so this is an early trial, it is one of the earliest trials in the u. S. Zone. There were four occupation zones in germany, and each of these , the u. S. , great britain, france and the soviet union, they were trying to carry out trials and there is of occupation. But this hadamar drought, but ial, in which they were basically trying war criminals. The hadamar trial took place in october, just before the nuremberg trial was handed out. So we are pretty early. Before this particular trial, u. S. Forces have been trying what you might view as classical violations of war, war crimes like the murder of downed service personnel. That was pretty common. An order at the end of the war to murder any pilots that were found in the local population, because germany was very heavily bombed, and they were told to follow these instructions. So in a lot of cases you have downed allied flyers, and the local population shot them or beat them to death before they could be taken to a prisoner of war camp. These were typical trials, they were classical war crimes trials involving u. S. Re servicemen. But this goes outside of that scope and addresses crimes carried out because of nazi racial policy, so this is not your classical war crimes trial,. And i think you also wanted to of the one of the trial. And that is the trial judge advocate, the prosecutor in this case. He was a rather obscure corporate lawyer from houston, texas and his name was leon. And for those who grew up in the 1970s and 1980s, and remember those endless watergate proceedings, he goes on to gain fame during the Nixon Administration as chief prosecutor. You see him on the cover of Time Magazine at that particular time, but at the time he was no stranger to war crimes prosecution and he had been trying many of these earlier trials, which was trying german civilians for murdering u. S. Servicemen. Things uple final jason a couple final things as we are watching the time here, if you could fit in briefly, can you go into some detail about the role these forced laborers play and could you Say Something to our audience about the final verdict, what actually happens at the outcome of this early trial . Patricia very interestingly, these eastern workers that i talked about earlier are going to form the basis for the proceedings that occur. Originally, leon jawarski was very eager to try the individuals that he had in custody and who had murdered the 15,000 mental patients and physical patients at the facility. But because there was no prece dent at the time in International Law that allowed nationals, foreign nationalities like the United States, the u. S. Army to try german nationals for killing their own kind. This is a german on german crime , german nationals who killed their own citizens. Precedent in no International Law before the crimes against humanity that came out in the nuremberg trial in the international tribunal, that would kind of ease the wheels of justice. And the judge advocate general brought the trial to jaworski, and he said you cannot try these people, you have no jurisdiction in this matter. So Leon Jaworski comes up with the idea that these individuals or at least some of them that they had in custody, had murdered civilian forced laborers. Soviets and pols who are our allies. So that was the basis for this actual trial. And to talk about who finally gets in the trial, so Leon Jaworski tries the hadamar seven. And i think that we see a at least theree, and the photographs, woman in the center, she is the head nurse. And that is the director of the facilities. Leon jaworski, as you alluded to in the beginning, he said the beginning, the trial is described in the paper as the hadamar murder factory trial. And that is because Leon Jaworski as a strategy that he uses it in almost every trial there is the head physician who ordered the deaths of these patients and checks to see if they are dead. There is klein, who you see in the picture, who orders his staff to kill these patients as they arrive. There are the nurses who are actually carrying out the murders. They admit to the murders. There is the woman in the picture, the only woman in the dock, and she is responsible for giving the medicine. She is handing out the morphine solution from her pharmacy that is under her control. So she is putin in the pharmaceuticals that kill these patients. They are also charging adolf for forging the death records and a man named philippe bloom who buried these individuals. So he is stressing the assemblyline nature of these killing processes and saying it is a production line of death. , as usual,ategy results in a completely set dock, where everyone in the dock is convicted of their crimes. Two male nurses are hanged. The chief physician, he is in poor health, he gets a life sentence. And and philip bloom, who have only tangential connections to the murder, because they forged the death certificates and buried the bodies, they get 35 and 30 years. And of the woman that hands over the pharmaceuticals, gets 50 years. So that is what happens in the trial. Jason thank you, patricia, deck that gives us a a lot of insight about from the beginning of the program in 1939 to the end of attempt to try these individuals. And probably in the q a you will be able to say more about these trials. But i thought we could open it up to some questions. We have already gotten a few, not surprising given how crucial the subject matter is. The first question is from john here in new orleans, and his question is did the germans keep the records of where their victims were prior to entering the system that eventually led to their demise . And then he has a followup. Was there any form or method of selection as to when one was finally sent to hadamar . He was curious about was forced labor was imposed on people with disabilities. You have obviously talked about people who are brought in as forced laborers, but people with disabilities, were they ever required to do anything in terms of labor expectations, some kind of labor for the facility . Patricia right, i will answer the first question first. We will take it in chronological order. The key apparatus, the euthanasia apparatus, kept a very complicated statistics on this. That is how we know exactly how many people died. We know 70,273 people were gassed. We know every single individual. Usually the patients came with their patient records. Their names were registered, so we do have records of each of those individuals and each of those families gets a condolence letter along with the death certificates and the ashes, but also their personal effects. There is this very complicated bureaucratic machine operating able to sendand is every one of these victims their personal effects, or death certificates and so forth as if it were a natural thing. How these patients were selected . They were selected on the basis of questionnaires sent to the medical directors throughout the facilities in germany and austria, lets say for brevitys sake. And the directors of these facilities in general, they have to fill out the questionnaires, and they have to flag people with serious disabilities. They have to flag people in the institution because they have committed a crime. Think about john hinckley, who serves in a Mental Institution rather than a prison for shooting president reagan. It flags nontreatment victims. 5000 jews were murdered as a part of the euthanasia facility before the general deportation of jews begins in 1941. And they flag people who have been in a longterm setting, one of these facilities, for more than five years. They are looking for incurable cases. On the forced labor thing, they are there to offset the missing labor of individuals who had been sent to the front, ordinary germans who were fighting at the front. But there is a kind of, i would not say exactly that it is forced labor, but from the 1920s onward, it was very common in german facilities, a lot of european facilities, because it was seen as therapy, what is called work therapy. That meant patients worked at these facilities, which were kind of self functioning. They had shoe factories, basket weaving. They had farms, so they were basically selfsustaining at many of these institutions. The patients worked at these facilities and the idea was to fight the symptoms of institutionalization. To keep them busy and to give them skills, but the dirty little secret is of course when there was a financial crisis in the 1920s and 1930s, at the institutions are instrumental to help facilities run. They are cooking and cleaning. The patients are working, and there is indeed on the questionnaire, it asked specifically if the patient is able to work, which usually see withe connected concentration camps later who is , able to be forced labor. They are not the kind of forced labor we associate with a camp in auschwitz, but they are working and they are expected to work. That is an interesting question. Jason thank you. I thought we would work in two more, so i will just give these to you and i think we can squeeze these in. The first is from arthur, in melbourne, australia. He was curious about hitlers role in this. How much is he directly involved or not . The other one is from my friend , gretchen, who has joined us from the twin cities. She was curious about whether medical experiments are conducted on these victims before they are murdered. Patricia first to arthur, hello in melbourne. I do not know what time it is there, but it must be quite late or quite early. Thank you for joining us. Hitlers role, this is not a big consideration of his. We do know that he signed on his own private stationary. It is the only time that we have hitlers signature on what could be seen as an order for killing for a killing operation. That is talk for another time. This is not his thing. He is interested in the jews. The real impetus for Euthanasia Programs, i can talk for hours on this, it comes from the medical community, and a lot of individuals around hitler were interested in things like eugenics and the idea of getting rid of populations like these that might cause genetic stain. As well as a financial one. Really making a master race by getting rid of hereditary conditions. That is the impetus for that. It is not really hitlers thing. The other question from gretchen has to do with medical experimentation. Of course, nazi doctors, this is a program carried out by the german medical community. The ss does not have a role in this. The medical professionals have implemented this program. So, in the concentration camp system, that is where you see the bulk of experimentation on concentration camp victims. That being said, there is experimentation on some of these patients, but what is kind of terrifying is that that was very common even before the nazis. Here at hadamar, we talked about the chief physician, he was interested in an anticonvulsant drug. I am looking at the time to make sure we have enough time. Was thought it Shock Therapy, electroShock Therapy was done on the basis of convulsive medicine and it made you convulse. The idea was epileptics who had convulsions did not have schizophrenia. So Shock Therapy was supposed to shock the system by making the patient convulse with convulsive medicine. He was interested in this. Andas the chief physician he is actually experimenting on patients using these convulsive drugs, and there are devastating results because the patients can break their jaws, their backs, their spines in these uncontrolled convulsions. He is working on this drug and he thinks it is great because he is trying to make therapeutic advances in medicine. What is terrible of course is these things were not tried in the postwar, and they went on. They went on before, and if you talk to people in psychiatric communities in the u. S. Itself, where they were clearly the mental patients, people with disabilities, where experimented on for years without the attention that the concentration camps put through. That is a very sad story. Jason extremely sad. That said, i want to thank you for joining us. You have given us a lot of think about, especially how to integrate all of this material you provided into a way that we understand the third reich. That regime was waging a different kind of war against its own citizens, against jew ,s slavs, in addition to the kind of war that is more familiar to the Holocaust Museum audience. So you have given us a lot to consider and we appreciate that. Thanks to all of our viewers for joining us, from wherever you are, and we hope you will join us again for our webinars very soon. Thank you very much. [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. Visit ncicap. Org] announcer you can watch archival films each week on reel america on saturday and sunday on American History tv. Here is a look at one of our recent programs. Silent majority is about to make itself heard. Not by shouting obscenities, not with disorderly street demonstrations, waving the flags and demanding america throw in the sponge. That is what he says. Thats not necessarily true. Did you find that out here . No. How can he speak for the majority when he does not know who they are . Seeyas. Businessked about the in the country, i think the agnew is trying to keep the country divided. I see that is his purpose, because when people are divided they fight with each other and they forget about the major issues, like what we have to do in this country to help the poverty programs, the poor people or housing. Housing has never been taken care of in this country. So if we fight among ourselves contentions, the way he criticizes certain people, we keep divided and we cannot do much. And i think that is the purpose of him. You are talking about our Vice President doing these things. Why . Who is he serving . The interest of the party or people running the country. I do not think that they want people, like the average guy, to get together and demand his representatives to account for what he is doing. You are talking about the people running the country, we are the people supporting the country. It doesnt make sense. You really do not have much to say about what is going on. We support the country and somebody else runs it, is that what you are telling us . I do not make the policy, somebody better makes the policy, or somebody who should be better in the know makes the policy, but i hope they know what they are doing. If they do not know, we are in trouble. The silent majority is like with a say in the bible. Enrollment, obey the law of the land because the laws of your to put people in power and government, and you should obey the laws of the land as you are the laws of god. We were brought up to never question. This is for people of our age group. The government was right, the police man was right, the priest was right and mom and dad were right, anybody in authority knew what was best and how we should think. And they told us how to think. Told my dad was crazy. I think the government is insane. This is an insane thing we are doing. How will we say it . How should i say it . In a proper manner. I do not like that. I did not like school when i was going to school. The sister slapped my hand one day and i did not go in the intersection. Films can watch archival in their entirety on our weekly series, reel america. He professorstory emeritus ellen dubois discusses her book womens long battle for the vote. Professor dubois provides an overview of the movement from the beginnings when many suffragist were abolitionists, to