Though Kristallnacht happened on Nov. 9, 1938—marking the first large-scale pogrom against Jews under Nazi rule in Germany—Adolf Hitler’s “final solution” initiative to exterminate every Jew in Europe didn’t get rolling until late 1941.
What many still don’t know—even today—is how the Nazis got to that point from an infrastructure and tactical planning perspective.
This clandestine program was called “Aktion T4.”
Prior to the outbreak of WWII, Hitler deemed that caring for people with severe psychiatric, mental or physical disabilities had become an unnecessary financial burden on the State. Additionally, depending on the type of disability, he believed that a key factor in purifying his “superior Aryan race” was eliminating the potential for passing on any of these disabilities to future generations.
Beginning in the Spring of 1939, the director of Hitler’s private chancellery, Philipp Bouhler, joined Hitler’s attending physician Karl Brandt in planning sessions on this issue. What they concocted was every bit as evil as you could imagine. Beginning in late summer of the same year, the Reich Ministry of the Interior ordered all medical professionals to report any infants and children under 3 years of age who were severely disabled—either physically or mentally.
As they compiled this registry, the Nazis’ public health officials directed parents of these children to have them admitted to one of a specific set of so-called pediatric clinics. Once these babies were under custodianship of the State, the staff then murdered them, either by starvation or overdoses of lethal drugs. Over time, the scope of this horrific procedure expanded to adolescents, teenagers and adults. Later on, gassing via carbon monoxide was added to their arsenal of murder methodology.
There were a total of six different killing wards set up for this initiative in Germany and Austria. Families of those murdered were provided with fictitious causes of death, and the T4 Program continued in varying degrees for years, eventually killing as many as 250,000 people of all ages with varying degrees of disability. Additionally, Hitler issued a secret order ensuring those carrying out this systematic slaughter would be immune from any prosecution, should it ever come to light what they had done.
From Holocaust Encyclopedia: “Using a practice developed for the child ‘euthanasia’ program, in the autumn of 1939, T4 planners began to distribute carefully formulated questionnaires to all public health officials, public and private hospitals, mental institutions, and nursing homes for the chronically ill and aged. The limited space and wording on the forms, as well as the instructions in the accompanying cover letter, combined to give the impression that the survey was intended simply to gather statistical data.”
The T4 Program is the first thing I thought about when CBS reported on Health and Human Services Secretary RFK. Jr.’s plan to amass a centralized database on people with autism in the United States.
According to the article, “medication records from pharmacy chains, lab testing and genomics data from patients treated by the Department of Veterans Affairs and Indian Health Service, claims from private insurers and data from smartwatches and fitness trackers will all be linked together,” in this initiative. Additionally, “a new disease registry is being launched to track Americans with autism, which will be integrated into the data.”
The context provided in the April 16 cabinet meeting where Kennedy made the announcement is important. His comments ignited a firestorm of backlash in the media and on social media sites as well, thanks to rhetoric like, “autism destroys families,” and is an “individual tragedy as well… these are kids who will never pay taxes, they’ll never hold a job, they’ll never play baseball, they’ll never write a poem, they’ll never go out on a date. Many of them will never use a toilet unassisted.”
He painted the entire spectrum of autistic people with an incredibly broad brush, clearly positioning them in an ugly light. (This was walked back later by an HHS spokesperson who said that Kennedy, “was referring to those that are severely affected by this chronic condition” and that “this was in no way a general characterization.” But Kennedy’s personal biases could not have been made clearer.)
The historical analog here could not be more terrifying to me. And I’m not just talking about the registry itself. One of the key players in RFK Jr.’s cadre is Sr. Data Analyst David Geier, according to an article in the New York Times from March. Geier and his father have long been collaborators with RFK Jr. on his crusade against vaccines and the link he believes that ties them to autism, despite the reams of scientific evidence proving otherwise.
“In a (2005) Rolling Stone article called ‘Deadly Immunity,’” the article divulges, “Mr. Kennedy credited the Geiers with being among the few who had gained access to C.D.C. vaccine data, which he said they used to ‘demonstrate a powerful correlation between thimerosal and neurological damage in children.’ (The magazine later withdrew the article, but did not elaborate.)”
Geier’s professional history is sketchy, to say the least. In 2011, Geier was sanctioned for practicing medicine without a license by the Maryland State Board of Physicians. According to the Board’s Final Decision and Order, Geier had in fact never even attended medical school or been licensed to practice medicine at any time; he earned a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Maryland in 2002. Much of his interactions with RFK Jr. for the last decades have been centered around vaccine denial and autism-related “medicine.” And to call some of the “medicine” he reportedly practiced “controversial” might be an understatement.
According to a report published on March 27 by MedPage Today: “David Geier and his father Mark Geier, MD, are known for several discredited studies claiming that thimerosal, a preservative containing low levels of ethylmercury used in some vaccines, increased the risk of autism. (Thimerosal has been reduced or eliminated from vaccines for decades, and all vaccines recommended for children 6 and younger are available in formulations that do not contain thimerosal.) ‘The studies were poorly done; they were full of confounding variables,’ Paul Offit, MD, of Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, told MedPage Today.”
Further down in the same article, I came across this passage that made my blood run cold: “David and Mark Geier also ‘promoted bogus and potentially dangerous therapies for autism,’ Offit observed, “combining leuprorelin (Lupron), a synthetic hormone that suppresses testosterone production, with chelation.”
“It basically was chemical castration to delay puberty and chelation therapy to rid your body of the heavy metals that presumably were causing your autism,” Offit said. “For that, the Maryland Department of Health censured David Geier for practicing medicine without a license.”
The findings reported by the Board are chilling in their descriptions of Geier’s responses to questions, how they deemed him to be falsely representing what occurred in the course of the case that led to the sanctions and his clear disregard for the law in Maryland. Ultimately, his father’s medical license was revoked as well. The chemical castration alluded to in the quote from Offitt above was covered in the Final Decision and Order of the State Board of Physicians in Maryland.
From the Board’s published decision:
“Dr Geier treated patients with Lupron, a medication that was not approved by the FDA in the absence of precocious puberty. (According to the Mayo Clinic, “Precocious puberty is when children’s bodies begin to change into adult bodies too soon.”) He did not, however, perform an adequate examination to determine whether these patients had precocious puberty, or the causes of their symptoms…Based on his theory that Lupron therapy is appropriate in certain situations in which its administration is not approved by the FDA or the American Academy of pediatrics, Dr. Geier purported to treat patients who met his profile with Lupron. With the exception of Patient E, however, none of these patients even met Dr. Geier’s profile for Lupron therapy… Dr. Geier prescribed chelation therapy to patients who failed to display the need for chelation. He began this therapy without documenting a reason for the treatment and without adequate documented informed consent. He violated the standard of quality care by so doing. He also violated the standard of quality care by prescribing for patients the drug DMPS, a drug not approved for any use in the United States…. Dr. Geier provided a consent form to the parent of Patient I that named an FDA-approved drug which falsely stated that it was to be used in the chelation treatment when another drug, DMPS, which was not FDA-approved, was to be used (and in fact was used) in the chelation treatment. Dr. Geier failed to explain to the parents that the drug he was asking them to insert into the children’s rectum was not approved for use in the United States.”
It gets even worse, and while the full extent of his unlicensed, uncertified son’s involvement isn’t clear, what is clear is that there is an undeniable sense of entitlement at play for both Geiers, who clearly falsified data, lied to patients and their families, and provided care that did not even meet the standards of the laws governing the medical profession in Maryland, according to the State Board of Medicine’s reports.
And today, David Geier has managed to fail up into the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, working to help RFK Jr. do God-knows-what with the data they amass and the registry of people with autism that they plan on building.
In a vacuum, such a registry might only raise an eyebrow, but given the cruelty on display, the disbanding of other federal entities that serve as watchdogs and auditors for initiatives such as this one, and the hiring of David Geier to investigate the long-debunked claims of a link between vaccines and autism, there’s nothing about any of this that should not set alarm bells off.
“It’s eugenics, pure and simple,” says Westminster resident Freya* a 45-year-old Registered Nurse and single mother of Lydia*, a 20-year-old autistic woman currently enrolled at University of Colorado, Boulder. “This is how it always starts. I’m terrified for what it means for my own daughter, but I’m also terrified for all of us. Everyone.”
“While I’m not necessarily surprised by it, it is a deeply fearful reality to be living in,” Lydia says. “Autism already has so much stigma and misconceptions and this simply incentivizes autistic people to continuously mask their autism and disincentivizes getting diagnosed—which is required for any legal right to accommodations. For me, as a high-masking autistic, I don’t face outright ableism like other people might. But RFK Jr.’s decision places more pressure on me to mask—which is frustratingly exhausting. I am scared for all of the people that go undiagnosed too who won’t be on that list—especially Black women. This essentially puts another barrier on women (and all autistic people) and their access to quality of care because it discourages accommodations because as RFK characterized us, we are just social parasites who have no meaningful contribution to society—which is entirely false.
“Fighting to be seen as you are is one of the things I struggle most with and RFK has reinforced these blockades to me just being me, which is incredibly frustrating,” Lydia adds. “But mostly the sadness I feel is for other people in my community who don’t have the same support systems I have where autistic people are much more likely to commit suicide than the general population.”
It’s undeniable that RFK Jr. isn’t acting in good faith. His beliefs are clearly cast in stone with regard to the long-since debunked connections between vaccines and autism. His choice to engage someone who has already proven to be willing to falsify records to get the results he wants to oversee the data is proof positive that RFK has no interest in “truth”—but instead seeks data manipulation to further his personal agenda.
As there are still plenty of questions to answer—such as whether or not the data compiled will actually include Personably Identifiable Information (PII)—the Autistic Self Advocacy Network is taking a wait-and-see stance, cautioning against letting fear take hold.
“We also wanted to address the fears we are seeing in the community around how this database could be employed against our community in areas beyond research,” ASAN said in a statement published on April 24. “We recognize that the current climate—fostered in large part by RFK Jr. himself in his recent remarks—has caused a lot of understandable fear in our community. However, there is no indication at this point that this database is going to be used to target individual autistic people or “round up” members of our community. If any information comes out to suggest that they are even moving in that direction, you will hear loud and clear from us about it, and we will be on the front lines fighting it.”
Personally, I have seen no single reason to offer this administration the benefit of the doubt, considering the slipshod and aggressive manner in which it has allowed unvetted contractors to plunge into databases across the entire federal government with Elon Musk and his DOGE hit squad. Further, this administration is hell-bent on gutting every possible cent that goes to actually helping Americans—Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, SNAP etc.—and federal funds spent on people with disabilities is in their sights. So what’s the next step? A new “medical” ward at CECOT?
Or worse?
*names have been changed at the request of the interviewees in order to protect their identities.
