Charles Edward of Saxe-Coburg

Download or read book Charles Edward of Saxe-Coburg written by Alan R. Rushton and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2018-10-09 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Charles Edward was ruler of the German Duchy of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, president of the German Red Cross, and the grandson of Queen Victoria. He was closely allied with the rise of Adolf Hitler and the implementation of eugenic policies designed to improve German racial health. When war began in 1939, Hitler ordered a secret program of murder by poison gas and starvation to eliminate the mentally and physically handicapped “ballast people”; approximately 250,000 people were eventually killed. Readers in medicine, law, sociology and history will be interested in this tragic story of a weak-willed, but powerful Nazi leader who facilitated this murderous program, even though one of his own relatives died in the “euthanasia” scheme. Although Charles Edward traveled to neutral countries during the war, he did nothing to broadcast the inhumane treatment of his own and thousands of other families whose relatives disappeared into the murder machine.