The Third Reich's first genocide

Summary

History Extra Podcast Summary

Episode: The Third Reich's First Genocide
Release Date: June 8, 2025
Host/Producer: Immediate Media
Guest: Dagmar Herzog, Professor of History at the Graduate Center, City University of New York
Book Discussed: The Question of Unworthy Life

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Introduction

In this compelling episode of the History Extra Podcast, hosted by Immediate Media, Dagmar Herzog delves into the harrowing history of the Nazi regime's euthanasia program targeting individuals with psychiatric illnesses and cognitive disabilities. Drawing from her influential book, The Question of Unworthy Life, Herzog explores the origins, implementation, and long-term ramifications of these atrocities.

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The Nazis' Euthanasia Program

Herzog begins by outlining the scope and target of the Nazi euthanasia program.

[02:54] Herzog: "The Nazis killed approximately 300,000 people on grounds that this was a mercy death. In quotes. Euthanasia. That is a euphemism because in fact they were grotesque and cruel deaths..."

The program primarily targeted individuals with psychiatric illnesses, predominantly schizophrenia, and cognitive impairments. Herzog emphasizes that these victims were often long-term institutionalized individuals deemed unable to contribute to society.

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German Attitudes Towards Disability Before the Third Reich

Examining the pre-Nazi era, Herzog discusses the societal and institutional attitudes toward disability in 19th-century Germany.

[05:51] Herzog: "Germany was really precocious in setting up institutions for care for people with intellectual disabilities... taken as a Christian obligation."

Despite the early establishment of care institutions, there was growing ambivalence and stigmatization of the disabled. By the 1890s, societal acceptance of death wishes for disabled individuals began to take root, influenced by rising secularism and scientific rationalizations.

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Rise of Eugenics and Its Impact

Herzog explores the emergence of eugenics as a movement and its role in shaping Nazi ideology.

[10:01] Herzog: "Eugenics is an international movement... but in some cases that's done with better prenatal care or better nutrition, better after birth care."

While eugenics had varying applications globally, in Germany, it evolved into a sinister ideology advocating for the elimination of perceived genetic 'flaws.' Herzog highlights the flawed scientific basis of eugenics, particularly the misconstrued inheritance theories that fueled the movement.

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Nazi Propaganda and Public Communication

The episode delves into how the Nazi regime effectively disseminated their eugenic and euthanasia ideologies to the broader public.

[14:41] Herzog: "An unbelievable amount of energy, money and creativity is put into the propaganda... they are constantly making the argument that we will save money..."

Through censorship, control of educational materials, and emotionally charged propaganda, the Nazis ingrained stigmatizing views of disabled individuals, portraying them as economic burdens and societal imperfections.

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Escalation to Mass Murders and Gas Chambers

Herzog details the transition from sterilizations to systematic mass murders using gas chambers.

[18:44] Herzog: "They send children over to a clinic where supposedly they can be helped, but in fact where they're later killed."

Starting in 1939, the Nazis initiated the child euthanasia program, which eventually expanded to include adults. The introduction of gas chambers marked a horrific escalation, with over 70,000 individuals murdered between January 1940 and August 1941 using carbon monoxide.

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Connection to the Holocaust

Herzog draws parallels between the euthanasia program and the broader Holocaust, illustrating a technological and procedural continuity.

[22:54] Herzog: "There is a direct link in terms of technology transfer and in terms of the actual same perpetrators."

The methodologies and personnel involved in the euthanasia killings were later employed in extermination camps like Belza, Sobibor, and Treblinka, underscoring the interconnectedness of these genocidal actions.

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Post-War Recognition and Stigmatization

The discussion shifts to the post-World War II period, highlighting the delayed acknowledgment and continued stigmatization of euthanasia victims.

[24:36] Herzog: "It took until the 1980s and 90s to get the euthanasia mass murders taken seriously as a mass crime."

For decades, the atrocities against disabled individuals were marginalized within the larger narrative of the Holocaust. Efforts to seek reparations or recognition were often met with resistance, and institutions involved in the killings remained shrouded in shame.

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Contemporary Reflections and Ongoing Issues

Herzog reflects on modern perspectives, including the resurgence of anti-disability sentiments within Germany's far-right movements.

[35:04] Herzog: "There is now from the AFD Alternativi Verd, the new far right party, which has about 20% of the populace behind it. They are obsessively anti disability."

Despite significant progress, including the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, Herzog warns of persistent and resurging prejudices that threaten the hard-won advances in disability rights and integration.

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Conclusion

Dagmar Herzog underscores the importance of remembering and acknowledging the full scope of Nazi atrocities beyond the Holocaust, advocating for continued vigilance against ideologies that devalue human life based on disability. She calls for ongoing education, integration, and the celebration of diversity to prevent history from repeating its darkest chapters.

[37:34] Herzog: "The radical generation ultimately not only restored the proper history and memory of what had happened during the Third Reich, but also settled accounts with the post war violence and neglect."

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Final Remarks

The episode serves as a poignant reminder of the depths of human cruelty and the enduring necessity of historical remembrance. Through Herzog's insightful analysis, listeners gain a comprehensive understanding of the Nazi euthanasia program's complexities and its lasting impact on society.

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Produced by: Jack Bateman
Additional Credits: Immediate Media

Transcript

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[Podcast Host]

Welcome to the History Extra Podcast. Fascinating historical conversations from the makers of BBC History magazine. Between 1939 and 1945, the Nazis killed nearly 300,000 people with psychiatric illnesses or cognitive disabilities. Some 400,000 more were forcibly sterilized. Historian Dagmar Herzog's book the Question of Unworthy Life examines how decades of eugenic theorizing and anti disability propaganda led so many people and institutions to become complicit in this program of sterilization and mass murder and explores why it took Germany so long to fully recognize it as a crime. I spoke to Dagmar to find out more. Before we get into anything else, I wonder if we can start with the central event of your book. What exactly was the Nazis so called euthanasia program and who did it target?

[Tom Brokaw]

So the Nazis killed approximately 300,000 people on grounds that this was a mercy death. In quotes. Euthanasia. That is a euphemism because in fact they were grotesque and cruel deaths and the people they targeted were primarily Those who were either having diagnoses of psychiatric illness, predominantly schizophrenia, although that was a huge umbrella term, or they were people with cognitive deficiencies. And above all, they were the long term, institutionalized. And they were people who could not work, they required the care of others, and that is why they were targeted for death. So it's predominantly people who have cognitive impairments or psychiatric illness or behavioral disturbances. It is sometimes also people with physical disabilities, but predominantly it's emotional and intellectual disabilities. And that's really important to understand because it's kind of been tabooized. The vague general term of disability has been used. But we need to understand that as people who were so disabled that they could not work, they could not contribute, and that is why they were targeted. This was all gussied up with the idea that it was racial hygiene, but in fact it was a dream of a disability free nation and an effort to strip imperfection out of the body politic. In addition, the Nazis sterilized coercively about 400,000 of their fellow citizens. They had fantasies of sterilizing many more, but that's what they did. And there is some overlap, maybe 10 to 15% between those who were sterilized and those who were murdered. We have to acknowledge that there's a slightly different target group. They were people who actually were able to work. Some of them were living outside of institutions. So institutionalized people sometimes were sterilized. But also there were many people who were functioning either young people who were going to a remedial school, or people who were functioning appropriately well in their lives and sometimes had children already or whatever. And they were targeted because they were considered subpar and an embarrassment to the nation. So those are two different groups, and the majority of those actually carried the label of feeble minded. Again, people who are listening to this can't see my raised fingers and the quotation marks. Of course, I'm also distancing myself from the term feebleminded, of course.

[Podcast Host]

And it's a really difficult topic to think about and to discuss. And I think one of the things that you do in your book is you help readers understand how Germany could have got to this position. So you take quite a long view of the subject, attitudes to disability before this period, but also afterwards, and responses to it. So let's start with that early period before. What can you tell us about attitudes towards disability before the Third Reich? How were severely disabled people cared for and viewed in the 19th century?

[Tom Brokaw]

So Germany was really precocious in setting up institutions for care for people with intellectual disabilities. And they had people in psychiatric asylums, they had people who had physical impairments, but they also opened up institutions. Already in the 1870s and 80s there were hundreds, they were growing evermore, and they had large numbers of people with intellectual impairments. And they tried to put them to work and they tried to teach them quote usefulness. So one of the things they quickly ran into was a frustration about the so called incurability of idiocy in quotation marks. And so the effort was always to try to find ways to make people useful in quotes and teach them how to do some small job. And ultimately the vast majority of causes of disability were poverty and childhood diseases. In this era, before antibiotics, the mother has malnutrition during pregnancy, or they live in squalid conditions, or there are childhood fevers that can't be treated, that lead to meningitis and encephalitis and impairment, or there was a trouble in the birth process and there's cerebral palsy. So it's a situation in which it feels as though there are many people who are disabled. But that's also because there's a lot of poverty and everybody knows it. That 85 to 90% is well known are coming from very poor conditions. And then of course, wealthy people also sometimes there's a loss of oxygen in the birth process or something else goes wrong. And so there's always a few. And it's taken as a Christian obligation. And it's largely Protestants who start the whole thing. Germany starts early and it's the Protestants who run it. Basically by the 1890s already there are starting to be not only open ambivalence about how hard care is or can be, but also there are many remedial schools that are starting up where people are still living at home but going to school. There's competition between the institutions who would like to have the easier, more fun to teach kids. There's already a hierarchization going on. There are the people who are educable, the people who are trainable, and the people who are solely the care cases. Horrifyingly, already by the 1890s, there is a social acceptability to expressing death wishes, to hoping that disabled newborns and the long term institutionalized could simply be killed. And it's becoming okay, like a poet says it and a feminist activist says it and a biologist says it. And the Christian institutions are already on the defensive, realize they need to try to come up with counter arguments and don't quite know why or how to do that. And I Almost would say that there's a way in which disability is sort of the Achilles heel of Christian faith. At this moment. They really don't know how an all powerful God could permit this. And they're really on the back foot in an era of rising turning to science and rising secularization as many in the working class are socialists and don't even want to hear from the churches anymore. The churches are feeling multiply defensive at the turn of the 20th century and they start to feel embarrassed about how many people they have in their care that require care and already searching for ways to defend and don't quite know how. So that was a hard thing for me to learn because I was raised with the idea that there was a kind of sentimental paternalism and love for the most vulnerable and that the churches that that's what Christian charity does. And it was kind of shocking to learn that actually very few had a passionate defense of disabled life. And it took great courage to come up with that. And they could make that in Christian arguments or in secular arguments, but it was actually more the exception than the rule. And so they're already on the back foot by the time eugenics emerges as a coherent worldview.

[Podcast Host]

Well, that was what I was going to ask you about next. So we already have these ideas swirling around in the early 20th century, eugenics kind of booms onto the scene. Tell us for anybody who doesn't know a bit about eugenics and how it supercharges some of these ideas.

[Tom Brokaw]

So eugenics is an international movement. It's in the United States, it's in the uk, it's in Scandinavia, but it's also in Italy and Hungary and Romania. But it's different everywhere. I mean there's an idea that you could have healthy births and, and that you could improve the quality of a population. But in some cases that's done with better prenatal care or better nutrition, better after birth care. So there are places where it's built into a larger public health agenda. Medical doctors and other commentators knew full well that poverty was the main cause of disability and the diseases of childhood that they could not cure because they had no antibiotics. So they know that it's fevers and cerebral palsy. But they start to make the argument that intelligence works like Mendel's purple and white pea blossoms. The idea that you have recessive genes, a couple might look normal on both sides, but in fact they might produce a feeble minded child. And that's because they have recessive feeblemindedness, that they're passing on. So they invent this fiction of inheritability, of feeblemindedness, and they promote it even though they know that it's based on shaky foundations. And the way they try to make it plausible is they start to look at family charts, at kin charts, and look at parents and siblings and aunts and uncles and grandparents to find any, in quotes, irregularity. And that could be if you had an alcoholic grandfather or a schizophrenic aunt or there was a cousin who also went to a remedial school. Oh, that's a sign that your cognitive disability is inherited as, as opposed to random or environmentally produced. And so, precisely because the science itself is shaky, they seek to turn it into reality by blaming the entire family clan and thereby produce a sense of reality that there are families that are damaged. And the reason it looks plausible is, of course, poverty replicates across the generations. And there are people into the 1920s explaining this full well. But those same people who know that are often also the people who say, yes, the most severely disabled, we should just kill them. So there is a euthanasia strand that wants to just kill, and there is a eugenic strand that wants to prevent further births of people that are considered inadequate. And what's shocking in Germany and everything has to do with the loss of the defeat In World War I, is this unbelievable histrionic anxiety that the fate of the nation is at stake and that there may be not just 1%, 2%, but 10, 20, 30% of the population that is so subpar that they should be prevented from procreating. It's unbelievable, really. They are insulting a third of their fellow citizens and fantasizing that they could stop them from having babies.

[Podcast Host]

And so then when you get the rise of the Nazi party in the early 1930s, how do they grab hold of these ideas and use them to their own ends?

[Tom Brokaw]

The idea of a disability free nation has already been, I would say, erotically supercharged by a man named alfred Plutz in 1895, who writes a book which encourages pre and extramarital intercourse when the hope is that it can produce beautiful, strong, healthy, and, yes, smart children. That fantasy of a disability free nation and imperfection free nation is very exciting to the Nazis. And his ideas become Nazi policy, as it were. So their eugenics is inflected by a euthanistic dream. If we just keep killing off those who are ugly and imperfect, then we will be beautiful. And it seems exciting to people, especially after a tremendous economic crisis and the huge narcissistic injury of the Loss in World War I, there's this idea, we can't carry all these weak people. This is an embarrassment. We need to get rid of them or at least stop them from proc. It's almost like a second stab in the back method. So the generals can't admit that they militarily lost the war, and so they blame Jews and Social democrats on the home front for betraying the nation. And it is almost like a second stab in the back myth when they say 20%, 30% of our fellow citizens are a weight on the nation and we can't handle this. We need to purify the folk.

[Podcast Host]

And how are these ideas communicated to the public? We have the small layer of scientists, medical people and Nazi officials. But how are they getting these ideas across to everybody else?

[Tom Brokaw]

So an unbelievable amount of energy, money and creativity is put into the propaganda. So the Nazis, first of all, they shut down alternate views. People are censored. Doctors are threatened with the loss of their medical license if they were to publish a critique of these assumptions. A plurality views shifts to only one view. And that one view is promoted in thousands of seminars for every possible constituency. Medical doctors, special education teachers, also the Christian institution leaders, also social workers. It's put into children's textbooks with math problems. If these people didn't need to be cared for, then how much money would there be for working class families to have their own little house? Those kinds of questions are very much promoted to children. And they're taught the difference between a slow person who can still work, how wonderful that is, who is really good natured versus, quote, idiots as adults, still sitting in the sandbox like a child. And that's bad. And so they're really teaching stigmatization and exacerbating it. You know, there's all these posters which show a more visibly disabled person making like a huge number of criminal and damaged children and grandchildren versus some beautiful couple and they're, you know, fewer but more perfect children. So there's a lot of visual cues as well. But I would say the major messages are emotional and economic. So they're deliberately encouraging, disgusting. And they're constantly making the argument that we will save money and there'll be so much more money for everybody else if we can get rid of these people. There's not quite as much open talk about the euthanasia. Right. They're much more obsessed with promoting the sterilizations because they know that they can get away with in international optics. But there are also in Nazi magazines, propaganda about, oh, a family who has a wonderful eight healthy children and then one child is disabled. Really, isn't it sad? And this child should probably be generally put to death. So there is some talk about that as well. But they do it in a much more sentimentalized way so they're not advertising the killings, which only started in 1939 when World War II starts, because wartime is a good time to hide that that they're very much advertising the sterilizations.

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[Podcast Host]

Tell us about when these killings did begin, as you say, euphemistically termed euthanasia. How did that moment of escalation, which is a big escalation occurring, they're preparing.

[Tom Brokaw]

For several years already, quietly behind the scenes, so doctors know full well it's coming. But basically there's a letter sent in 1939 that tells all midwives and doctors to report misshapen or obviously disabled newborns. And there's then a process for turning those children over to a clinic where supposedly they can be helped, but in fact where they're later killed. So that's this child euthanasia program. And in subsequent years, it will actually take children all the way up to age 16. So they have to get people out from the. Out of the families. And they put pressure on the families to do that. But that's a separate matter from the casual order, not a law that Hitler does in the fall of 1939, and then backdates it to September 1st, the beginning of the war, in which he orders doctors to help other doctors choose who is incurably ill and therefore should have a mercy death. And the way that's been dealt with administratively is that every single institution in the country gets reporting forms in which they're supposed to write down every individual that they have in their care and how long they've been in the institution. Length of institutionalization is a sign that they should be killed. But they also ask what the diagnosis is. They ask what religion they are, so they find out who the Jews are or if they're foreign. And they ask if they can do work. And mechanical work, like peeling potatoes or mopping floors or pasting little bags or whatever, does not count. Over time, they tighten the rules even more so that really no amount of simple, repetitive tasks counts as work anymore. So ultimately, the decisions then, after all these reporting forms come in, are given to a set of 41 doctors who are the assessors, who, in groups of three, wade through these patient files, patients they've never seen, and make a decision about whether they should be killed or not. And then the notice comes to an institution to get ready to send a certain set of patients by name to be brought somewhere else. So they begin it with the idea that we're taking you to another place. They're not saying that they're coming to death. And initially, the institutions don't realize. They think that they would want to keep their good workers. And so they actually downplay how well someone can work. They don't understand that if you downplay how well someone can work, then they will be taken to death. Because they don't realize initially that it's about deportation to murder. Within a few months, it's pretty clear. And then the institutions are alarmed, and then they start filling out the forms differently. And in different regions of Germany, they come in a different sequence so that the alarm goes out and people are, you know, in desperate straits and try to save their own people and try to let family members know that they should take people home. They try to change diagnoses. There are ways that they try to protect or they try to make an Argument that a certain patient even at the door of the buses that come then to pick the people up, no, I need this person. They're a good worker and sometimes they're able to rescue an individual. But it's. The impotence is devastating. Basically they really can't do it. And what becomes clear, because there are six sites within German. Well, one is in Austria, which has been taken over by the Nazis. So that's within the larger German Reich. So there are six sites that have gas chambers and 70,000 people are killed in that first phase between January of 1940 and August of 1941.

[Podcast Host]

And this is the first use of gas chambers to murder people.

[Tom Brokaw]

That's right. And it's carbon monoxide.

[Podcast Host]

And the killing of disabled people in these gas chambers is sometimes spoken about as a kind of template for the wider Holocaust that would follow. Do you think that that's accurate?

[Tom Brokaw]

I do think that's accurate. But the empirical fact that 120 men who got their practice and training in killing the disabled with carbon monoxide gas chambers, and after one Catholic bishop von Galen in August of 1941 gives a sermon decrying the killings very eloquently, and it becomes international news. Hitler shuts down that gas chamber phase because he really needs the German public's support for the war on the Soviet Union, which he's just begun a couple months earlier. And he doesn't want the unrest in the populace because everybody knows, because children are telling each other, look, you're going to end up in the murder box. Or people see the brown smelly smoke coming over the fields. And so it's not a secret anymore. It's not looking so good. So those 120 men who had gotten their practice end several months later then being sent to Poland where they set up the death camps of Belza, Sobibor and Treblinka, really death factories. Unlike Auschwitz, which used Zyklon B, which is a pesticide, these three, which did a full quarter of the Holocaust, that's with using carbon monoxide. So in fact there is a direct link in terms of technology transfer and in terms of the actual same perpetrators. And that is incredibly important, that sequential connection between the Nazis first genocide of killing the disabled and the mega crime that we now call the Holocaust, or killing Jews. It's not the only way to think about the connection between the two crimes. But when that theory and that information is really promoted in the 1980s and 90s, it's a passionate effort to get the German public and the international public to care about the murder of the disabled.

[Podcast Host]

Well, this was an aspect of your book I found completely shocking. You say that it took until the 1980s and 90s to get the euthanasia mass murders taken seriously as a mass crime. Why do you think that was? And in the decades after the war, how was this aspect of the Holocaust, if we can call it an aspect of the Holocaust viewed, we can call.

[Tom Brokaw]

It an aspect of a Nazi's larger genocidal project. For sure. I'm really interested in the problem of fascism lingering in people's hearts and hearts. I mean, that is what this is about, right? The Nazi propaganda exacerbated pre existing prejudices a thousandfold. And those prejudices lingered in the post war period in both west and East. There's ongoing prejudice and stigmatization. And basically the populace identifies with the perpetrators and not with the victims. Shame continues to be heaped on the victims and institutions that are caring for those people who are the traumatized survivors of the deportations, who were either through luck or through their ability to provide some kind of quote unquote, productive work and managed to survive. Those institutions are still covered in shame and are embarrassed. And there is no language for vigorously, passionately defending the cherishable values of disabled rights and disabled lives. And that was one of my main motivations in writing the book, was looking for people who were the, as I would call them, undehumanizers. The ones who came up with creative, courageous arguments for why we need to actually be an equal and reciprocal relationship with people who are weak and vulnerable. That was what interested me the most that I was looking for. And that's what I found. But they're few and far between because actually fascism does infect people's souls and it takes a long time. And what happened after World War II is that the elites all buckled down and defended themselves. So the doctors are initially brought to trial in some cases and they either say, well, I thought it was legal even though they knew it wasn't, but they say I thought it was, or they say, well, I had to kill some in order to save some. Like if I hadn't been part of it, even more would have been killed. That actually works where they say, basically, I wasn't aware. Like there's the whole German legal clause of ignorance, of illegality, and that's what they used. There are many, many ways and it works. And so there's amnesties, but there's also petition campaigns from the public. We love this doctor. They couldn't possibly be a criminal. We need to bring them home. And the politicians are under pressure from the populace. In the media, there's coverage of. One example is a horrible doctor who killed many, many, many disabled children. And he's totally sentimentalized, poor man. He needs to go home to his dad and his children. You know, it's just like unbelievable the amount of syrupy sentimentalization and ongoing stirring of disgust at these victims. So this just takes forever. And it's not until the 1970s and 80s that a young generation of radicals in social work and medicine and in education says, we don't want to live this way. This is not okay. We think that what goes on in the institutions is disgusting. We need to break those down and move people into supported living arrangements in normal neighborhoods. We need to integrate children with disabilities into regular classrooms. And children need to learn solidarity and empathy. There's no reason that we can't have integrated classrooms. And basically we need to have people who are disabled visible in public life. And. And there is a movement of physically disabled people, whether they have polio or cerebral palsy or muscular dystrophy. All of those cases of people, they got together and they had a militant movement starts in the late 70s. It's very influential in the course of the 80s. And to their everlasting credit, leaders emotionally identify with the fate of people with cognitive disabilities and argue on their behalf. And so there's a whole generational revolution in thinking about disability. And they're really the heroes of my book. A large chunk of the book is actually also about communist East Germany and, you know, the post war democratic West. And I have basically people who created oases of love and care and remarkable therapy and remarkable education on both sides. And I really want to honor those people. That was a huge motivation for me was to recover them and restore them to the historical record. My whole point is how you get out of this abyss. But it takes 40 years before anybody cares. And it also takes 40 years before anybody can vigorously defend the survivors of the course of sterilizations who are totally traumatized and have been trying as individuals sometimes to get their diagnoses reversed, sometimes actually to get the surgeries reversed or to get some sort of reparation for the physical violation, the mutilation that was done to them and the curtailment of their lives. And they are rebuffed over and over and over again. And one of the great tragedies is the Protestant church, because before the Nazis come to power, rejected the idea that one should murder the disabled, had compromised on the idea that, yes, one should sterilize them. And therefore they are complicit way into the post war period in repudiating and rebuffing any request to acknowledge the harm done to the sterilization survivors. So that's a huge problem, that those who should be the moral alternative to Nazism end up contributing to the ongoing stigmatization.

[Podcast Host]

So there are many people implicated. Eugenics was not unique to Germany, as you alluded to earlier. You know, it had its proponents in Britain, it had its proponents in the us. Why do you think in Germany eugenics escalated to this level of mass murder when it didn't happen elsewhere?

[Tom Brokaw]

Well, I thought about that a lot and part of it is in fact the complicity of the Protestants. I mean, I'm the daughter of a Protestant theologian and I was raised with, of course, stories of Christian courage and, you know, love for people who were vulnerable. But instead what it turns out is that in the wake of World War I, a little brochure is published in 1920 by a lawyer, Carl Bending, and a psychiatrist, Alfred Hocha. And the book is called Permission to Annihilate Life, Unworthy of Life. And that booklet is basically bundling the ideas, the death wishes that have already been out there, but it's giving a concrete proposal for how to do it. So it actually suggests that you're going to have a commission. They want one lawyer or two doctors later. The Nazis only use three doctors, no lawyer. But basically they want a commission to go around in the institutions and choose who is incurable and should be killed. So they're giving a concrete template for what the Nazis actually then later do. And this book is much discussed and the Protestants get together and publish all these different counter arguments. But they have trouble saying why not kill? Because in their defensiveness, or maybe it's their disinhibition and ambition, they end up actually doubling down and agreeing that the disabled are disgusting and that they are a burden economically. They end up reinforcing that from the supposedly moral point of view. And they come up with this outrageous theory that the reason there is so much disability is because of the sexual sin that is spreading in Weimar, encouraged by the media Jews. So they mix their antisemitism and their conservative Christian discomfort with the sexual liberality of the Weimar Republic. And they say that that sexual liberality is the reason why there is so much disability. So it's pretty intense, but it's what draws the conservative older Christians who would otherwise have been uncomfortable with sterilization. So they come to then massaging the facts in order to make this compromise. Well, no, no, no, no. We don't want to kill them, but we do want to prevent them. And so you can watch in the course of the 1920s, conservative Christian charity directors gradually grudgingly agreeing that really they should support the sterilizations. And then when the Nazis come to power, the Protestants enthusiastically endorse the sterilizations and come up even with theological arguments for why it's the right thing, why God wants you to get sterilized. They are hugely complicit. They are both, in a sense, preemptively obedient. They add to the stigmatization and then they double down after the Nazis are in power and they enthusiastically sterilize. I mean, it's the Protestant hospitals where the sterilizations happen. Catholics of course object because they object with any intervention, reproduction, but they ultimately permit the sterilizations as well. So that's a source of enormous moral complexity that has long term consequences. You asked me about why Germany and why Germany is absolutely the narcissistic injury of the loss of World War I. Boom. They lose the war, they thought they were the greatest nation, and suddenly they are not only militarily defeated, but also economically stressed. And it's just really easy to histrionically say that the life of the nation is at stake because we're carrying so much weakness and vulnerability. The medical doctors are very much participating in a histrionic discourse that the life of the nation is at stake. But what's interesting to me is the fact that the Protestants crumble quite so easily. They don't agree to killing. They say they're against it, and of course they are, but they can't come up with that kind of sovereign, sassy response. So that was pretty devastating. And then of course, they're doubly shamed then after World War II because they've been a complicit in the stigmatization, but also because they were utterly powerless then when the ruthless Nazis show up with their buses to drag people away. And that's of course a terrible thing that they couldn't protect. And it makes the motivation to lie and rationalize and cover over and redirect strong. So that adds to the sense of, I don't even know how to describe it, the leaden sense of shame that hangs over those institutions in post World War II, period. So there's just a huge awkwardness and that takes a long time before a younger generation says, that's outrageous, we could do this differently.

[Podcast Host]

And finally, Dagmar, you've explained how it took some four decades after the war for this to be really taken seriously and examined. But we're another four decades on from that now. How do you think that we should be looking back on this today?

[Tom Brokaw]

Well, that radical generation ultimately not only restored the proper history and memory of what had happened during the Third Reich, but also settled accounts with the post war violence and neglect. And until, let's see, it was 2017-2021, there was a commission of historians who were hired by a combination of the churches and the federal government to do a study of the violence in both communist east and democratic west in the post war period. And they have produced a book called Suffering and Injustice, Leiden Unrecht, which is amazing. And there have been mea culpa apologies at some of the largest institutions which have now been transformed by those young radicals into much more decentralized, much more egalitarian places. So there's been a huge learning curve. There was a wonderful movement to integrate schools. And ultimately, of course there is the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, which was ratified by Germany in 2009 and which has been very productive also in changing laws and encouraging a notion of disability as about self determination and participation in daily life. But there is of course now from the AFD Alternativi Verd, the new far right party, which has about 20% of the populace behind it. They are obsessively anti disability. And it's really shocking. No other far right party in the world is quite so fixated on the issue. And the thing that they are most upset about in the new growth of disability rights is the notion of inclusion of children with intellectual disabilities in mainstream classrooms. It's striking that this is a major thing. Every party platform of the AfD and all the different regions obsesses over this. They want to stop inclusion and the question is why are they anxious? Is it once again, this obsession with being a smart nation like this has been the thing all along, since the 1890s. Is it still happening? I think it's multifunctional for them, but it is very striking that they continue to play to this idea of wanting to be a superior, beautiful, healthy, strong and smart nation. A large chunk of the book is actually also about communist East Germany and you know, the post war democratic West. And I have basically people who created oases of love and care and remarkable therapy, remarkable education on both sides. And I really want to honor those people. That was a huge motivation for me was to recover them and restore them to the historical record.

[Podcast Host]

That was Dagmar Herzog professor of History at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. Her book on this subject is the Question of Unworthy eugenics and Germany's 20th century. Thanks for listening. This podcast was produced by Jack Bateman.

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