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Loud Out Research Paper

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Singled Out
Elie Wiesel, a Holocaust Survivor, Nobel Laureate, and International Leader of the Holocaust Remembrance Movement once said, “How does one mourn for six million people who died? How many candles does one light? How many prayers does one recite? Do we know how to remember the victims, their solitude, their helplessness? They left us without a trace, and we are their trace.” Many people perished during the Holocaust and World War II, the deadliest war of them all. Hitler and the Nazi Party had many mass murder programs and killed over eleven million people. During the Holocaust, the Germans’ and Nazi Party targeted many different types of people, impacting how they were viewed at that time. First, the Nazis attacked the nomadic Roma …show more content…

For example, the Nazis set up euthanasia program that targeted the physically and mentally ill. The word “euthanasia” literally means merciful death. Heads of the euthanasia program called their enterprise “T4”. The euthanasia program was the first mass murder program initiated by the Nazis. If the disabled were not killed, they were sterilized so they could not reproduce. According to JewishVirtualLibrary, “Meticulous records discovered after the war documented 70,273 deaths by gassing at the six "euthanasia" centers between January 1940 and August 1941.” (Persecution of the Mentally & Physically Disabled 1). Furthermore, during the euthanasia program, the Nazis would call the parents of disabled children and tell them to send their kids to “pediatric care centers”. These care centers were really killing centers. The kids would go to take a shower, but instead of water coming out of the nozzle, it would be poisonous gas that would kill the kid. Workers would clean out the shower and prepare it to receive the next person up in line. The dead body would be burned in a crematorium into ashes. Then, workers would take some ashes from a central pile and put them into an urn to send to the parents of the dead. Even though the physicians and workers would say the victims died of natural causes, the program quickly became common knowledge. Everyone knew about the program and started to protest. Eventually, Hitler was pressured into ordering a halt to the dreaded program. Although he ordered a halt publicly, the killings still went on in secrecy. The "Euthanasia" program continued on until the last days of World War II. It expanded to include a wider range of victims including geriatric patients, bombing victims, and foreign forced laborers. In total, most historians estimate that the "Euthanasia" Program, a death sentence for the disabled, claimed the lives of up to 500,000

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