Because of the chaos of the Nazi Party and the ill-defined jobs given to its members, many Nazis took it upon themselves to do what they thought Hitler wanted. This allowed Hitler to focus on the big picture instead of day-to-day workings while his associates enacted many of the programs of the Nazi regime.
One example of this is the T.4 euthanasia program. The Nazis received a letter from a man whose child was mentally disabled, and he asked the Nazis to kill his child. Hitler gave the “ok” for that one request. Eager to please Hitler, his associates assumed Hitler must want all disabled kids murdered, which also aligned with Hitler’s message of creating a master race. In order to achieve that, the German people had to be genetically the best, which entailed getting rid of all genetically inferior people and wiping them from the bloodline.
Thus began the T.4 euthanasia program, which was a secret policy to select and kill disabled children. As part of this program, “mentally defective” children were transported to a Special Psychiatric Youth Department and murdered either by lethal injection, or they were told to go shower–with poisonous gas.
Despite how much the T.4 program aligned with Hitler’s ideology, he ordered the end of the systematic murder of the disabled on August 18, 1941. Why? To protect his reputation.
The German people, especially doctors and clergy, saw this as despicable and protested the murders. Some wrote Hitler themselves to call the program “barbaric,” and even Bishop Count Clemens von Galen, the Catholic bishop of the Diocese of Münster in Germany, publicly denounced the program.
In order to retain his reputation of the “good” Fuhrer who was dedicated to building a “good empire” with “happy” people, Hitler suspended the program.
Before we watched these Nazi documentaries, I always thought that the Nazi party would have had to have been very organized, thought-through, and from what I had heard, I assumed Hitler would have been more directly involved. Essentially, his ideas and his delivering of his ideas were very influential and caused people to commit inhumane crimes so they could please Hitler. As much as one would assume everyone would hate someone who is that outright racist and evil, he was loved by Germans at the time. It's extremely confusing and quite weird how the Nazis were able to attract so many people supporting such an evil cause. Obviously a huge part of it was the war and the stage Germany was in, but people were just underestimating him. Other leaders were allowing him to gain power, trusting his word, and no one saw into the future.
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