Disabled Remembered

From the BBC:
"Nazi disabled victims memorial unveiled in Berlin"

A glass monument has been publicly opened in Berlin to 300,000 victims of the Nazis with mental and physical disabilities or chronic illnesses. The 24m-long (80ft) blue, glass wall is in front of the Berlin Philharmonie building, where the office housing the Nazi "euthanasia" programme once stood.

It is the fourth monument in the German capital to victims of the Nazis. In the past 10 years, memorials have been erected to Jewish, Roma (Gypsy) and gay victims. Under Adolf Hitler's initial programme, the Nazis killed more than 200,000 people from early 1940 to August 1941, focusing on patients in mental health clinics and care homes.  It was known as T4, after the Tiergartenstrasse 4 office from which it was directed. The T4 programme continued covertly for another four years, with gas chambers and killing centres used in Germany and Austria. It was considered a precursor to the Holocaust in which six million Jews were murdered.

^ The disabled murdered by the Nazis deserve a memorial just like all the other groups and they all deserve to be in Germany's capital of Berlin (which was also the capital of Nazi Germany.) With that said, I don't care for the actual, physical structure of this memorial. It is poorly designed and doesn't really have anything to do with the disabled  - it's just a glass wall. It's nice for the Germans to finally create memorials to those killed but they need to have memorials that are respectful and informative. The Memorial to the Murdered Jews is another of those that I don't think is a good memorial. It is just a maze of blocks (where people can "reflect" by themselves.) The Memorial to the Homosexuals at least shows a picture of two men kissing (they change it every now and then to two women kissing) and gives feeling. I have seen many memorials for the different victims of the Nazis and just think the Germans could have taken more time to properly honor and remember them - I mean it took them around 60 years to make these memorials in Berlin so they had enough time to think about the design and message. One of the better memorials to those killed by the Nazis that are found throughout Europe is the Stolperstein (stumbling block) are paid by the friends or family of the victims and are more informative than any of the official German memorials as they have the name and info of a victim. The memorials that personalize their victims are better than just a glass wall or a maze of blocks. ^


http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-29029058