Life unworthy of life

The term included people with disabilities and later those considered grossly inferior according to the racial policy of Nazi Germany.

This concept formed an important component of the ideology of Nazism and eventually helped lead to the Holocaust.

[2] The "euthanasia" of certain cultural and religious groups and those with physical and mental disabilities continued more discreetly until the end of World War II.

The methods used initially at German hospitals such as lethal injections and bottled gas poisoning were expanded to form the basis for the creation of extermination camps where cyanide gas chambers were purpose-built to facilitate the extermination of the Jews, Romani, communists, anarchists, and political dissidents.

[6][7][8][a] The expression first appeared in print via the title of a 1920 book, Die Freigabe der Vernichtung Lebensunwerten Lebens (Allowing the Destruction of Life Unworthy of Life) by two professors, the jurist Karl Binding (retired from the University of Leipzig) and psychiatrist Alfred Hoche from the University of Freiburg.

This poster (published in the NSDAP's Office of Racial Policy 's monthly magazine Neues Volk around 1938) urges support for Nazi eugenics to control the public expense of sustaining people with genetic disorders . The poster says: "This person who suffers a hereditary disease has a lifelong cost of 60,000 Reichsmarks to the National Community . Fellow German, that is your money as well."