Diogo Mainardi - The Fall - A Father's Memoir in 424 Steps

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On 1 September 1939, the Second World War began.

On the same day, Adolf Hitler signed a secret memorandum setting out his euthanasia program.

The memorandum gave doctors the power to “decide whether those who have — as far as can be humanly determined — incurable illnesses can, after the most careful evaluation, be granted a merciful death.”

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Mercy killing. Gnadentod .

Euthanasia. Euthanasie .

Those were some of the terms used by Nazism to legitimize the mass extermination of disabled newborns.

A worthless life. Unwertes Leben .

A life not worth living. Lebensunwerten Leben .

Adolf Hitler’s “euthanasia” program offered “mercy killings” to those whose lives were “worthless” or “not worth living.”

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In the previous image: the memorandum signed by Adolf Hitler, granting a mercy killing for Tito.

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In the first phase of Adolf Hitler’s euthanasia program, five thousand disabled newborns were killed.

The historian Robert Jay Lifton published the testimony of one of the doctors responsible for those deaths, identified simply as Doktor F: “Those who were approved for killing received high doses of Luminal. They were spastic children, incapable of talking or walking. Anyone seeing them would imagine they were sleeping. In fact, they were being killed.”

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After he was born, Tito was taken into the intensive-care unit of Padua Hospital, where he received high doses of Luminal. Anyone seeing him would imagine he was sleeping. In fact, he was being brought back to life.

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Adolf Hitler’s involuntary euthanasia program, known as Action T4, quickly widened its scope. As well as exterminating disabled newborns, it went on, in its second phase, to exterminate disabled adults, the mentally ill, epileptics and alcoholics.

Six hospitals were converted into extermination centers, where the doctors were charged with eliminating patients by injecting them with a mixture of morphine, scopolamine, curare and cyanide.

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In the previous image: one of the children suffering from cerebral palsy who was selected to die under the Action T4 program.

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In the first few months of 1940, in Brandenburg Hospital, Karl Brandt observed an experiment that would change the direction of the Action T4 program.

Twenty patients, confined in a place resembling a public shower room, were gassed to death with carbon monoxide.

Their bodies were immediately cremated by the SS.

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When Karl Brandt reported back on the result of the Brandenburg experiment, Adolf Hitler decided that all the “biological enemies” of the Third Reich should be eliminated in the same way: gassed and cremated.

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Biological enemies. Biologische Feinde .

Only “racial hygiene” could eliminate the “biological enemies” contaminating the Third Reich.

Racial hygiene. Rassenhygiene .

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In the second quarter of 1940, Adolf Hitler’s Ministry of the Interior ordered that an inventory should be made of all Jews in the Action T4 program.

In June of that year, the first group of two hundred Jews, from a psychiatric hospital in Berlin, were gassed and cremated at Brandenburg Hospital.

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The extermination of Gerhard Kretschmar — a disabled child rejected by his father — had become the extermination of a whole people: the Holocaust.

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In less than two years, Action T4 killed more than a hundred thousand people.

Adolf Hitler stopped the program on 24 August 1941.

Two months later, the first large extermination camp, under the command of the SS, was opened near Chelmno, and there all the biological and ideological enemies of Germany, the disabled and the Jews, were gassed and cremated on an industrial scale.

In the following months, extermination camps were opened at Belzec, Sobibor, Majdanek, Treblinka and Auschwitz.

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The administrator of Action T4, Franz Stangl, who was responsible for the deaths of thirty thousand disabled people at the euthanasia center of Schloss Hartheim, became the first commandant of the Sobibor extermination camp.

Between May and August 1942, he killed a hundred thousand Jews.

Franz Stangl was promoted to the post of commandant at the extermination camp Treblinka II.

Between August 1942 and August 1943, he killed another eight hundred thousand Jews.

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After the fall of the Third Reich, Franz Stangl fled to Brazil.

Pursued by Simon Wiesenthal, he was arrested on 28 February 1967 and extradited to Germany.

Found guilty of the deaths of more than nine hundred thousand people — among them the cerebral palsy sufferers from Action T4 and the Jews from Operation Reinhard — he died in his cell in Düsseldorf.

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Like Franz Stangl, Josef Mengele also fled to Brazil.

As an SS doctor, he was charged with examining and selecting the prisoners from the Auschwitz extermination camp.

The able-bodied — who could be used for slave labor — were sent to his right. The less able-bodied — who could be immediately gassed and cremated — were sent to his left.

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(Picture Credit 1.8)

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In the previous image: Josef Mengele in Auschwitz selects those who will live and those who will die.

The photo was taken in 1944.

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In Auschwitz, Josef Mengele conducted medical experiments that resulted in the disability or death of thousands of prisoners.

Educated at the Institute of Racial Hygiene in Frankfurt, he had a particular interest in hereditary anomalies, such as dwarfism, hermaphroditism and Down’s syndrome. According to him, Judaism itself was a hereditary anomaly. In their natural state, all Jews were “monsters.” And all “monsters” were Jews.

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In one of his experiments, Josef Mengele selected two boys — one of whom was disabled — and cut them in half lengthways with a scalpel.

Then he sewed one child to the other: back to back, shoulder to shoulder, wrist to wrist — as if they were Siamese twins.

One of the boys was called Nino. The other boy was called Tito.

That’s right: Tito.

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Tito and Nino.

My sons are called Tito and Nico.

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We are on Enseada beach in Bertioga.

On 7 February 1979, Josef Mengele waded into the sea on Enseada beach, had a brain hemorrhage and died.

I have come here with my sons Tito and Nico, on the trail of Josef Mengele. I want to wade into the sea in which he died. I want to dance on his corpse. I want to celebrate the value of the life of a disabled son.

I am the Simon Wiesenthal of cerebral palsy.

Josef Mengele is dead. Tito is alive.

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On Enseada beach, I blow up some water wings.

Tito — the monster — wades into the sea. Nico goes with him.