Excerpt from Euthanasia Program and Aktion T4 - U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum

"The Euthanasia Program was the systematic murder of institutionalized patients with disabilities in Germany. It started in 1939, about two years before the Nazis began systematically murdering Europe's Jews as part of the "Final Solution." The program was one of many radical eugenic measures which aimed to restore the racial "integrity" of the German nation. It aimed to eliminate what eugenicists and their supporters considered "life unworthy of life": those individuals who—they believed—because of severe psychiatric, neurological, or physical disabilities represented both a genetic and a financial burden on German society and the state."