re: Stephen Hawking and the late Terri Shiavo. A question:
Both of them would have been killed. The Nazis ran a euthenasia program which murdered many Germans. The example I know best is the mother of the highly-regarded modernist composer Karlheinz Stockhausen. After the birth of her 2nd child in the 1930s, she lapsed into chronic depression, was institutionalized in 1933, and was then - as Stockhausen puts it - "officially killed" by the Nazis in 1941.