The Crimes
The success of the Nazi propaganda negatively changed people’s opinions and attitudes towards Jewish and disabled people. Once Hitler came to power, the terror began. He imposed the Nuremberg Laws upon his citizens, which would define who unfit to be in Hitler’s population, in order to exclude them. Concentration camps would be built to hold these people, and what happened inside of these camps still baffles medical scientists and people today. Hitler was extremely interested in eugenics, defined as the selective reproduction to create a desirable population.
The perfect population, according to Hitler, were those of Aryan race and without disability. Many inhumane medical experiments and tests were conducted on the Jewish prisoners who did not fit Hitler’s standard. Nazi doctors began to perform mass sterilization, euthanasia, and abortions. During the following years under Hitler’s reign, the Nazis made medical science into an instrument of political power as they killed over six million Jewish, disabled, homosexual, and “undesirable” people.
