Medical research and National Socialist euthanasia: Carl Schneider and the Heidelberg research children from 1942 until 1945

The systematic murder of unwanted 'inferior' groups of people began under National Socialism in 1939 with the centrally organized part of the policy to murder psychiatric patients (the T4 program). Shortly after the attack on Poland in September 1939, the perpetrators registered, evaluated and gassed residents of the mental hospitals and nursing homes of the German Reich including Austria. Over 70,000 patients were murdered in gas chambers in 1940 and 1941