Who Were the First Victims of the Nazi Final Solution?

Andrew Scull says the mentally ill were the first people to suffer the Nazi Final Solution, that the gas chamber and the disguise of gas chambers as showers were developed in the mass killing, and that the toll may have reached as many as a quarter million people.

Once the Nazis came to power in Germany, they treated the mentally ill as useless eaters: people consuming resources, never going to get better, and only a burden on the state. Lives with serious mental illness were treated as not worth living. Sterilization came first. When the state was still supporting the patients, Hitler started the T4 program, named for the street address of the house where the plan was made. Patients were taken to psychiatric centers and systematically put to death. Crematoriums produced black smoke, and local people called the buses that brought patients in killing crates, so neighbors knew about the killings. The effort drew on narratives born in the United States. Without the checks and balances the United States had, Hitler found the killings relatively easy, especially with war looming and the wish to stop supporting people labeled useless. German psychiatry, for the most part, collaborated.