DOMINIC LAWSON Play all medicalestablishment should watch. All Our Children, which opened last week, is based on the programme known as Aktion T4, under which tens of thousands of Germans with learning disabilities were selectively eliminated. There is no shortage of drama written and produced about the Holocaust. Sophies Choice, Schindlers List, The Pianist these are only the most successful examples of how directors and actors have attempted the fraught task of using a medium of entertainment to communicate the horror of Nazi Germanys policy to exterminate the Jews. But now a theatre in the West End of London has embarked on what I believe is the first attempt to dramatise a much less well known policy of mass murder carried out under Adolf Hitlers leadership one which has lessons for this country today. Watch breaking news videos, viral videos and original video clips on CNN. Sam Thompson was granted a hall pass over the summer as he took a break from his girlfriend Tiffany Watson. Yet this backfired and now the pair dont even speak. Watch our most popular videos, original series, 360 VR videos, and more only available at Huffington Post. Watch Trumps Drug Czar Nominee Under Scrutiny After Opioid Investigation, a CBSN video on CBSNews. View more CBSN videos and watch CBSN, a live news stream. Mediagazer presents the days mustread media news on a single page. Find the latest TV recaps, photos, videos and clips, news and more on MSN TV. Are you in Sign up for the For The Win daily email newsletter for the top stories every day. Yes Send me the For The Win Daily Newsletter. All Our Children, which opened last week at the Jermyn Street Theatre, is based on the programme known as Aktion T4, under which tens of thousands of Germans with learning disabilities were selectively eliminated. Hitler dated this Euthanasia Decree to the very day he sent his troops into Poland September 1, 1. Perverted. In fact, Hitler had long advocated the idea of eliminating those he considered a mere drain on resources. His belief that the genetically weak should be weeded out was shared by a number of British politicians on the Left of the political spectrum however, the so called liberals who took this view at the time advocated compulsory sterilisation of the feeble minded classes, not actual elimination. But it was war which gave the Fuhrer the excuse to embark on such a policy his argument about the need for scarce resources not to be wasted on useless eaters would, during a state of war, seem less outlandish to members of the medical profession who, after all, were the men being asked to carry out this task. That dilemma for the German medical profession is at the heart of All Our Children. Its author, Stephen Unwin, has a particular reason for writing such a drama he is a successful theatre director, but this is his first play. His younger son, Joey, is a profoundly disabled 2. T4. Theatre director Stephen Unwin, who wrote All Our Children, has a particular reason for writing such a drama. He says his disabled son Joey, left, would no doubt have been murdered under T4I have this much in common with him my own younger daughter, Domenica, now almost 2. My cat, Artemis, is a bustling career woman. She has many jobs that she juggles between stealing my hair ties and spilling her kibble in addition to serving as the. Downs syndrome. And people with this condition were also among the victims of the Nazis programme. There was a link between the slaughter of the disabled and that of the Jews beyond the fact that both conformed to Hitlers pseudo scientific theories of racial purity and perverted Darwinism. The doctors presiding over the Aktion T4 programme used gas chambers. For example, at Sonnenstein, one of the six dedicated euthanasia centres, a room in the basement of a mental hospital was made into a gas chamber disguised as a shower room. The chosen victims were, on arrival, told that they should strip off and enter the showers. Watch All For Melissa Online Mic' title='Watch All For Melissa Online Mic' />Some people are fans of the Green Bay Packers. But many, many more people are NOT fans of the Green Bay Packers. Watch Private Peaceful Online (2017) here. This 2017 Deadspin NFL team preview is for those in. If you cant make travel plans to see the eclipse, this is the next best thing. But once inside, the gas valve was switched on and they were asphyxiated. The process could take up to around 2. Nazi doctors simpered about in self justification. In this way, the industrialised method used for the mass extermination of the Jews with deceptive play acting designed to fool the victims into unknowing acquiescence was pioneered with the likes of epileptics and those with Downs as the guinea pigs. Dominic Lawson is pictured with his younger daughter Domenica, who has Downs syndrome. People with this condition were also among the victims of the Nazis programme. Indeed, the Nazi doctors who came up with this innovative method of silent mass murder such as Dr Irmfried Eberl later took a leading role in setting up and running the gas chambers of the extermination camps, notably Auschwitz. They were, after all, the experts. The main character in Unwins remarkable play is an invented one Dr Victor Franz, the director of a clinic for the young disabled, who each week at the urging of his fanatical Nazi administrator sends a selection of his patients to their fate. At the centre of the play is a confrontation between Dr Franz and the Catholic Bishop of Munster, Clemens August Graf von Galen, who attempts to persuade the doctor to stop this perversion of medicine, with murder masquerading as care. However, while Franz is an invention, von Galen was a real character and his heroism is insufficiently known today. Although originally not opposed to the Nazis Stormtroopers attended his enthronement, complete with Swastika flags this aristocratic cleric was horrified when he learned what was happening to the disabled under their rule. Appalling. But what marked him out as extraordinary was that he declaimed against both it and the whole theory of racial purity from the pulpit. In a scene from the play, Bishop Von Galen, played by David Yelland, left and Dr Victor Franz, played by Colin Tierney, attempts to persuade the doctor to stop this perversion of medicine, with murder masquerading as care. In one such sermon, von Galen an awesomely imposing man of almost 6ft 7in denounced the euthanasia programme as murder, and thundered Here we are dealing with human beings, with our neighbours, brothers and sisters, invalids unproductive, perhapsBut have they lost the right to live Have you or I the right to live only because we are productive If all unproductive people may be thus violently eliminated, then woe betide our brave soldiers who return home wounded or maimed. The British government got to hear about this and printed thousands of leaflets of von Galens sermons, which were then dropped over Germany by the RAF. Not surprisingly, some leading Nazis wanted von Galen executed. But Hitler who was in his way a very shrewd politician never wanted outright conflict with the Catholic Church, not because he was a believer himself, but because he knew millions of Germans were, and devoutly so. Von Galen was not even arrested, still less executed. More than that in the wake of his sermons, the Aktion T4 programme was discontinued in August 1. Nazi rule. This illuminates something else that those doctors who oversaw the programme of gassing whether of the disabled or of Jews were not under unbearable pressure to do so. The Catholic Bishop of Munster right, Clemens August Graf von Galen, was horrified when he learned what was happening to the disabled under the Nazis rule and declaimed it from the pulpit. Pictured left is Adolf Hitler. Watch Iron Sky Online Ibtimes on this page. There is no record of those who refused being sent to concentration camps. Some acted as they did out of careerism it certainly helped to be in the good books of the Nazis others, because they actually enjoyed this foul work. As was demonstrated by Dr Ian Paterson, the breast cancer surgeon last week found guilty of malicious wounding of patients unnecessary surgery carried out either for perverse pleasure or profit or both there will always be some doctors, in any society, who abuse their profession in a depraved fashion. Lessons. But when I said at the outset that Unwins play has lessons for us today, I was not thinking about the appalling Dr Paterson. I was thinking more about the fact that, in Britain, ever greater efforts are devoted to weeding out exactly the sort of humans that Hitler and the Nazis regarded as useless eaters. When, almost 2. 2 years ago, I wrote about Domenicas birth, the hugely popular ex NHS nurse and agony aunt Claire Rayner declared that my wife and I had been selfish in not agreeing to the tests to detect Downs in utero and that the costs of dealing with what she called the misery of our daughters life would have to be met by society. Leave aside the fact that Domenica is the least miserable person I know Rayners argument was exactly that put forward by the Nazi eugenicists.