Germany on Friday marked International Holocaust Remembrance Day with a tribute to the 3,00,000 ill and disabled people killed under the Nazis' "euthanasia" programme who are often seen as forgotten victims of that era
Holocaust survivors lay wreaths at the former Auschwitz Germany Nazi death camp in Poland. Pic/AP
Holocaust survivors lay wreaths at the former Auschwitz Germany Nazi death camp in Poland. Pic/AP
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Berlin: Germany on Friday marked International Holocaust Remembrance Day with a tribute to the 3,00,000 ill and disabled people killed under the Nazis' "euthanasia" programme who are often seen as forgotten victims of that era.
In a solemn ceremony at the German Bundestag, parliament speaker Norbert Lammert said the programme was the first to use gas to murder those considered "unworthy of living" and served as a "trial run for the Holocaust".
"It became the model for the mass murder that would follow in the Nazi extermination camps," he said in a speech attended by Chancellor Angela Merkel and relatives of victims.
Adolf Hitler's euthanasia programme, in which doctors and scientists actively participated, sought to exterminate the sick, the physically and mentally disabled, those with learning disabilities and those considered social "misfits".
Between January 1940 and August 1941, doctors systematically gassed more than 70,000 people at six sites in German-controlled territory, until public outrage forced them to end the overt killing.
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