SOUTH CHINA MORNING POST: Many children who fell short of the Nazis’ Aryan ideal were killed alongside other ‘unworthy lives’
Thousands of children were murdered by the Nazis because they fell short of the Aryan ideal. Now, a hushed audience has gathered in Austria’s parliament to watch the world premiere of an opera depicting how the Nazis methodically killed mentally or physically deficient children at a Vienna hospital during the second world war.
The killings were part of a greater campaign that led to the deaths of about 75,000 people – homosexuals, disabled people, or others the Nazis called “unworthy lives” – and served as a prelude to the Holocaust.
Austrians played a huge role in these and other atrocities of the era – nearly 800 children were killed at Vienna’s Spiegelgrund psychiatric ward – and the premiere of the opera Spiegelgrund was the latest instalment of a national effort to atone for such acts in word and deed.
The timing was picked to commemorate Holocaust Memorial Day, which will be observed worldwide today, and the performance was streamed live on the internet for international audiences. But the parliamentary venue was chosen for a particularly Austrian reason: as a reminder of how the country’s politicians fomented the atmosphere of intolerance and authoritarianism that allowed Hitler’s troops to walk in in 1938, and a determination to not let history repeat itself. » | Associated press in Vienna | Sunday, January 27, 2013
