Five years before the liberation of Auschwitz in January 1945, the Nazis conducted a “test killing” of 9,000 disabled people to make sure the carbon monoxide gas method they’d developed was “suitable” for mass extermination. Citing the theories of eugenics, the Third Reich claimed the murdered children and adults were “animals, not humans.” The test was declared a success, and followed by the killing of 70,000 additional disabled people at that site, another 230,000 elsewhere, and 6 million Jews and other victims in concentration camps. The site of the test killing, Aktion T4, in Brandenburg, Germany, contains the remains of an old brick barn with only a small memorial plaque. By design, there were no survivors left to testify about the Nazi “experiment.” Read about a disabled person who escaped the Nazi social hygiene policies in A Brain. A Heart. The Nerve. (see NOVELS).
