"When fascists adopt classical education, … they rely on the flattened, instrumentalized version of it, which does nothing to challenge the practice of viewing people solely in terms of their productive capacity—in the case of women, the capacity to produce children, and in the case of men, the capacity for labor. The Nazis, for example, who praised the virtues of an education in Western civilization, were also responsible for the mass extermination of disabled people. According to the distinguished historian of Nazism Nikolaus Wachsmann, the main criterion in selecting which disabled people should be gassed was "the patients' ability to work: anyone regarded as unproductive would be killed.""