West Germany: Cheating Justice

In his drive to preserve the Aryan race, Adolf Hitler did not stop with the extermination of the Jews. In 1940, Hitler appointed Dr. Werner Heyde, a pale, bespectacled SS major and former Wiirzburg University Medicine lecturer, supervisor of "Operation Mercy Killing." Until courageous protests from German church leaders forced the Nazis to curtail the program in 1941, Heyde and a staff of "selectors" in his euthanasia task force killed more than 100,000 mental defectives, including many who were only senile or epileptic.

After the war, Heyde was interned by the Allies but escaped to the north German state of...

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