On August 24, 1941, Adolf Hitler ordered the discontinuation of the T4 euthanasia program of the mentally and physically ill in response to protests in Germany led by the Bishop of Munster, Clemens von Galen. Pope Pius XII had earlier denounced the program, stating in December 1940 it violated Divine law and that the “killing of an innocent person because of mental or physical defects is not allowed”. Despite the official stoppage in August 1941, the euthanasia program secretly continued until Germany’s defeat in 1945. It was launched in September 1939.
T4 (later given the name “Aktion T4” after the war) was Nazi Germany’s program of mass killing of the severely mentally and physically ill people in psychiatric hospitals in Germany and occupied territories, Austria, Poland, and the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia (present-day Czech Republic). The reasons for its implementation were eugenics, reduce suffering, racial purification, and cost savings for the government.
In the latter stages, patients were killed en masse with cyanide poison in gas chambers.
(Taken from Wars of the 20th Century – World War II in Europe)
Genocide and slave labor Because of the failure of Operation Barbarossa and succeeding campaigns, Germany was unable to implement the planned mass-scale transfer of targeted populations to the Russian interior. Elimination of the undesired populations began almost immediately following the outbreak of war, with the conquest of Poland. The killing of hundreds of thousands of civilians occurred in hundreds of incidents of massacres and mass shootings in towns and villages, reprisals against attacks on German troops, scorched earth operations, civilians trapped in the cross-fire, concentration camps, etc.
By far, the most famous extermination program was the Holocaust, where six million Jews, or 60% of the nine million pre-war European Jewish population, were killed in the period 1941-1945. German anti-Jewish policies began in the Nuremberg Laws of 1935, and violent repression of Jews increased at the outbreak of war. Jews were rounded up and confined to guarded ghettos, and then sent by freight trains to concentration and labor camps. By mid-1942, under the “Final Solution to the Jewish Question” decree, Jews were transported to extermination camps, where they were killed in gas chambers. Some 90% of Holocaust victims were Jews. Other similar exterminations and repressions were carried out against ethnic Russians, Ukrainians, Poles, and other Slavs and Romani (gypsies), as well as communists and other political enemies, homosexuals, Freemasons, and Jehovah’s Witnesses. In Germany itself, a clandestine program implemented by German public health authorities under Hitler’s orders, killed tens of thousands of mentally and physically disabled patients, purportedly under euthanasia (“mercy killing”) procedures, which actually involved sending patients to gas chambers, applying lethal doses of medication, and through starvation.
Some 12-15 million slave laborers, mostly civilians from captured territories in Eastern Europe, were rounded up to work in Germany, particularly in munitions factories and agriculture, to ease German labor shortage caused by the millions of German men fighting in the various fronts and also because Nazi policy discouraged German women from working in industry. Some 5.7 million Soviet POWs also were used as slave labor. As well, two million French Army prisoners were sent to labor camps in Germany, mainly to prevent the formation of organized resistance in France and for them to serve as hostages to ensure continued compliance by the Vichy government. Some 600,000 French civilians also were conscripted or volunteered to work in German plants. Living and working conditions for the slave laborers were extremely dire, particularly for those from Eastern Europe. Some 60% (3.6 million of the 5.7 million) of Soviet POWs died in captivity from various causes: summary executions, physical abuse, diseases, starvation diets, extreme work, etc.