Austrian Nazi Crimes

From Yahoo:

"Austria probes gruesome fate of Nazi-era disabled"

Forensic crews scraping away dirt from the remains of the Nazi-era psychiatric patients were puzzled: The skeletal fingers were entwined in rosary beads. Why, the experts wondered, would the Nazis — who considered these people less than human — respect them enough to let them take their religious symbols to their graves? It turns out they didn't. A year after the first of 221 sets of remains were exhumed at a former Austrian hospital cemetery, investigators now believe the beads were likely nothing more than a cynical smokescreen, placed to mislead relatives attending the burials into thinking that the last stage of their loved ones' lives was as dignified as their funerals. But skeletons don't lie. Forensic work shows that more than half of the victims had broken ribs and other bone fractures from blows likely dealt by hospital personnel. Many died from illnesses such as pneumonia, apparently caused by a combination of physical injuries, a lack of food and being immobilized for weeks at a time. Neither do medical records, which show that medical personnel cursed their patients as "imbeciles," ''idiots" and "useless eaters." Indeed, there is now little doubt that for many of the dead — mentally and physically disabled people considered by the Nazis to be human garbage — their final months were hell on Earth. Nazi extermination of the mentally and physically deficient has been documented since the end of World War II. But information gathered from the hospital cemetery in Hall, an ancient Tyrolean town of narrow, cobble-stoned alleys, cozy inns and graceful church spires east of Innsbruck, has filled out the picture in chilling new ways. Historians, anthropologists, physicians and archaeologists say the Hall project represents the first time that investigators can match hospital records with remains, allowing them to identify, for example, cases in which patients had broken ribs, noses and collarbones that were not listed in their medical histories, suggesting that the patients had been beaten by those responsible for their care. The Nazis called people deemed too sick, weak or disabled to fit Hitler's image of a master race "unworthy lives," in the terrible culmination of the cult of eugenics that gained international popularity in the early 1900s as a way to improve the "racial quality" of future generations. More than 70,000 such people were killed, gassed to death or otherwise murdered between 1939 and 1941, when public protests stopped most wholesale massacres. From then until the end of the war in 1945, the killings continued at the hands of doctors and nurses. In all, at least 200,000 physically or mentally disabled people were killed by medication, starvation, neglect or in the gas chambers during the war. Documents show that the cemetery was created in 1942, a year after the formal end of the mass-killing campaign meant that Hall patients could no longer be shipped to gas chambers. It was shut down and abandoned in 1945, when the war ended. During that time, deaths in the psychiatric ward rose from an average of 4 percent a month in early 1942 to as high as 20 percent in some months before the end of the war.

^ Austria tries to portray itself as a victim of Nazism when in fact the Austrians voted to join Hitler's Germany in 1938 and many Nazis were Austrian (as was Hitler.) This article sheds light on a lesser-known group - the mentally and physically disabled - that the Nazis did experiments on and murdered. As the article states the public learned about the killings and demonstrated against them so officially they ended in 1941 - I wonder why no one demonstrated against how the Jews, Gypsies, Homosexuals and other "sub-humans" were treated. Of course no German (or Austrian) alive at the time "knew" anything about what was going on just as no one was ever a Nazi once the war was over. Even though 60 years have passed it is still important to document everything that happened and if the victims can be identifed then every effort should be made to do that. ^

http://news.yahoo.com/austria-probes-gruesome-fate-nazi-era-disabled-