Aktion T4

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Um, and then the end result of that can be something incredibly beneficial, like, say, Medicaid, or something incredibly harmful, like, say, the Aktion T4 euthanasia program, uh, in the Nazi state.

Mm-hmm.

Um, and, and so I found myself particularly fascinated by how these otherwise boring, normal people, uh, inside the NSDAP could perpetrate, uh, I mean, just a, a systemic slaughter on a scale that is hard to imagine, uh, mostly through bureaucratic processes where the actual, um...

They feel like they don't have an ability, and somebody takes that momentum, and they tweak it for their own use, right? And that's where you start to get the idea that, well, if we just breed Germans better and we don't allow Jews to take our space, then we will be able to do better.

So the Aktion T4 program, which is something that I hint to in the book, there's a bit of an Easter egg there, uh, in one of the early chapters, uh, was a, a program that was designed to essentially breed out undesirable qualities in, in, in Germans.

The, the marginalized Dr. Berg, who's fired from Heidelberg Hospital early in the book, the one that is somewhat of a Wernher von Braun type character, um, he, uh, he, he really i-i embodies the German mindset at the time.

Um, I don't have opportunity.

It was all, you know...

He, he was, he, he was smart enough in one way to not put his name on that paper- The only real documentation that we have is when he signed the order for the T4 program to go ahead.

Now, this is important.

You need to understand the T4 program.

It stands for Tiergartenstrasse 4, which was the building where the people that were employed to conduct this operation to kill the disabled and the mentally ill.

The first victims of the Holocaust were the disabled and the mentally ill.

People walk around now, "I have anxiety, I have this, I have that, I'm an alphabet person, I'm this, I'm that." You wouldn't have said that in Germany in 1942-- in 1940, 1939.

Th-th-through the Ger-Germany, in Nazi Germany, you would just never have said that because you would have been killed, sterilized then killed.

They're never going to get better.

Why not kill them all? And indeed, the program that was called T4, after the number of the house in Berlin where this program was hatched, the T4 program involved the murder of up to a quarter million mentally ill people in Germany.

And it was there that the technology that became available part of the death camps, the extermination of the Jews and other undesirables as far as the Nazis were concerned.

That's where it was developed.