Doing so does not detract from the fact that other groups were targeted such as the Roma or gay people or the mentally ill. Who benefits from denying these facts?
Hi, sorry - more myth busting from me (there is a lot of confusion about the actual victims of The Holocaust, and it’s not helped by the fact that Wikipedia is also totally wrong/ misleading).
The Holocaust was the industrialized slaughter of 6 million Jews and over one million Roma and Sinti by the Nazis and their collaborators. While the Nazis targeted many groups, only Jews — and in some countries, Roma and Sinti — were subject to extermination as per the policies of the Final Solution. *The Holocaust destroyed 66 percent of Europe’s Jewish population over the span of less than six years.
Now, the Nazis obviously persecuted and murdered other groups: black people, disabled people, Freemasons, Gay people, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Polish and Slavic citizens and POWs, political opponents and trade unionists, Catholic and Protestant clergy. But they weren’t earmarked for complete and utter annihilation like the Jews, Roma, and Sinti were.
Interestingly, the T4 programme — a campaign of forced sterilisation, then later mass murder through involuntary euthanasia— that you mentioned was abandoned in in 1941, bowing to public pressure (it elicited public protests), and also the fact many of its personnel were needed in occupied Eastern Europe for ever larger campaigns of genocide. So that is one instance where the Nazis did backtrack. I’m one of three — one older brother I already mentioned, another older brother who is profoundly autistic. It chills me to the core that autistic people would have been rounded up by the Nazis, experimented on and then murdered.
Then the Wannsee conference took place in 1942 which sanctioned The Final Solution and the wheels were set in motion.
*the exact number of Romani people that the Nazis and their collaborators murdered is not fully known, because population records of these two groups were not kept.