The disabled were one of the groups sought to be eradicated by the third Reich of the nazi regime. How did they treat their disabled veterans that fought for their country. Were they deemed as an undesireable even if they met the conditions of the aryan race?

by BombasticBomb

Watching Man in high castle...random thought as to how they treated their veterans.

restricteddata

Their laws and programs were primarily focused on what they called the "hereditarily diseased" — people who were (in their view) had genetics as the cause of their disability, not people whose issues had come from somatic sources (e.g. war, injury, etc.).

For example, their sterilization law of 1933 targeted:

(1) Congential Mental Deficiency,

(2) Schizophrenia,

(3) Manic-Depressive Insanity,

(4) Hereditary Epilepsy,

(5) Hereditary Chorea (Huntington's),

(6) Hereditary Blindness,

(7) Hereditary Deafness,

(8) Any severe hereditary deformity.

Which they saw as related to aiding the "gene pool." Which is to say: if you broke a leg, they aren't coming after you. If you lost a leg in war, you're not on their ideological radar. Being born without a leg (for whatever reason) might get you on the "lives not worth living" list.

The Aktion T-4 program, which "euthanized" those were considered to have conditions that were "lives not worth living," and costing the German state, had a less rigorous definition. A euthanasia law that was never passed included language like:

  1. Anyone suffering from an incurable illness that leads to strong debilitation of either oneself or others can, upon explicit request of the patient and with permission of a specially appointed physician, receive dying help [Sterbehilfe] from a physician. . . .
  1. A patient who, as a consequence of incurable mental illness requiring lifelong care, can, through medical intervention and without his knowledge, have his life terminated

This approach is clearly vague enough to include somatic injuries of the sort obtained in war. But I do not know if any war veterans were sucked up in the maw of Aktion T-4 when it cleaned out state hospitals for the disabled. The public rhetoric of such programs was primarily focused on the genetic angle, though.

All of this is separate from whether one met the conditions of being "Aryan" or not — different laws, different issues, even though the Germans saw there as being an overlap from a genetic standpoint (everything was a matter of "blood" to the Nazis).

On the "euthanasia" program, see Robert N. Proctor, Racial Hygiene: Medicine Under the Nazis (Harvard University Press, 1988), chapter 7.

commiespaceinvader

No to stifle further discussion of this question but I have written about this subject matter before in this thread and the short of it is that while there are a very small number of known cases and some indirect indication for a planned program, nothing much can be said about what was planned.