Quilters hail Nazis’ disabled victims
An exhibition which commemorates some of Nazi Germany’s forgotten victims has opened in a Galloway church.
Quilts have been made to commemorate thousands of people murdered for being disabled – which didn’t fit with the Nazi ideology of creating an Aryan master race. In 1940 and 1941 some 70,273 men, women and children were murdered under a Nazi programme called Aktion T4 because they were ill, or had a mental or physical disability.
Their medical records were given to three doctors – if two of them marked the form with a red cross, that person’s fate was sealed.
The quilts, which are hanging in Whithorn Priory, are made from panels of white cloth stitched together. Each panel has on it two blood-red crosses.
Each pair of crosses symbolises a life lost – and the way the victim was condemned.
Exhibition organiser Rebecca Davison stumbled across the story on social media through a blog by a woman called Jeanne Hewell-chambers in America who, two years ago, started Project 70273.
“When you look at the numbers of the crosses and you realise that each of those crosses represents a person, it is quite staggering to realise how many people were exterminated in that particular way,” she said.