Vol. 47 No. 16 · 11 September 2025
Nov 15, 2025
Between 1939 and 1945, Nazi genocide claimed the lives of nearly three hundred thousand people diagnosed with psychiatric illness or cognitive deficiencies. Not until the 1980s would these murders, as well as the coercive sterilizations of some four hundred thousand others classified as “feeble-minded,” be officially acknowledged as crimes at all. The Question of Unworthy Life charts this history from its origins in prewar debates about the value of disabled lives to our continuing efforts to unlearn eugenic thinking today.
Drawing on a wealth of rare archival evidence, Dagmar Herzog sheds light on how Germany became the only modern state to implement a plan to eradicate cognitive impairment from the entire body politic. She traces how eugenics emerged from the flawed premise that intellectual deficiency was biologically hereditary, and how this crude explanatory framework diverted attention from the actual economic and clinical causes of disability. Herzog describes how the vilification of the disabled was dressed up as the latest science and reveals how Christian leaders and prominent educators were complicit in amplifying and legitimizing Nazi policies.
Exposing the driving forces behind the Third Reich’s first genocide and its persistent legacy today, The Question of Unworthy Life recovers the stories of the unsung advocates for disability rights who challenged the aggressive victimization of the disabled and developed alternative approaches to cognitive impairment based on ideals of equality, mutuality, and human possibility.
Vol. 47 No. 16 · 11 September 2025
Alien to the Community
The Question of Unworthy Life: Eugenics and Germany’s 20th Century
by Dagmar Herzog.
Princeton, 312 pp., £30, November 2024, 978 0 691 26170 6
At ten past ten on the morning of 2 June 1948, Karl Brandt climbed on the black gallows in the courtyard of Landsberg Prison in Bavaria. An American military tribunal had sentenced him to death for crimes including ‘planning and performing the mass murder of prisoners of war and civilians of occupied countries, stigmatised as aged, insane, incurably ill, deformed and so on, by gas, lethal injections and diverse other means in nursing homes, hospitals and asylums during the Euthanasia Programme and participating in the mass murder of concentration camp inmates’.
As the executioner and his assistants completed their preparations, Brandt delivered an impassioned speech to the handful of journalists and officials standing in the courtyard. He had done nothing wrong, he declared. He had only done his best to help humanity – above all, German humanity. His death was an act of political murder. The Americans had no right to condemn him, least of all after they had killed nearly a quarter of a million people by dropping atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. As he ranted on, the executioner, who had warned Brandt to keep his remarks short, lost patience, placed a hood over his head, took a step back and pulled the trapdoor lever, sending him plunging to his death.
Tall, good-looking and married to a glamorous swimming champion, Brandt had been appointed Hitler’s escort physician in 1934 after he had used the surgical skills honed on victims of mining accidents in the Ruhr to treat a Nazi official injured while driving in the Führer’s motorcade. A member of Hitler’s inner circle from then on, Brandt was in 1939 ordered by him to investigate a petition by the parents of a severely disabled child asking for the infant to be killed. Brandt approved the murder and supervised it himself. This led to his being appointed to run what was termed a ‘euthanasia’ programme, Aktion T4, carried out with Hitler’s authorisation under the cloak of the war. On Brandt’s advice, first children, then adults were rounded up from their homes and from institutions, taken to killing centres in mental hospitals and gassed with carbon monoxide.
In the summer of 1941, after Clemens von Galen, a Catholic bishop, condemned the murders in a series of public sermons, copies of which he distributed across the country, the gassing teams were transferred to new sites in Eastern Europe, where they set up the gas chambers in which millions of Jews were killed. But the ‘euthanasia’ programme continued in secret, by means of lethal injection, starvation and the denial of medical treatment. Up to three hundred thousand victims, most though not all of them German, had been killed by the end of the war.
The ‘euthanasia’ programme was preceded by an even more widespread programme of compulsory sterilisation. After attaining power Hitler lost no time in issuing a Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring: it came into effect on 1 January 1934. Four hundred thousand people were subjected to forcible sterilisation – a practice common in countries from Sweden to the US, and used in some places well after the end of the Second World War, but nowhere so widely as in Germany. Behind the programme lay a belief that the quality of the German race had been badly affected by the First World War, in which more than two million soldiers, thought to be the best and bravest of their generation, had lost their lives. It was urgently necessary to replenish and rebalance the race, a goal that for the Nazis involved not only encouraging the ‘fit’ and healthy to have more children but also preventing the ‘unfit’ and unhealthy from reproducing. In Hitler’s mind, this was part of Germany’s long-term preparation for victory in the struggle between races. The effects of Nazi eugenic policies would not be immediate, but no matter: he was planning the ‘thousand-year Reich’. Medical opinion in Germany was overwhelmingly in support of what doctors deemed to be a scientifically informed policy aimed at improving the quality of the population.
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https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v47/n16/richard-j.-evans/alien-to-the-community
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