Life Unworthy of Life: The Nazi Programs to Kill People with Disabilities

Eugenics, Episode #4 of 4. At the beginning of the 20th century, eugenics - the belief that the human population could be manipulated through selective breeding - was on the cutting-edge of modern science. Following the example set by American eugenic sterilization and anti-miscegenation laws, and empowered by the rise of the ultra ethno-nationalist Nazi party, German scientists helped Third Reich officials to implement a series of eugenic laws designed to craft the ideal German 'Volk.' But within a few years, these eugenic programs became far more radical, intent on the liquidation of the disabled population of Germany. Transcript of the episode is available at digpodcast.org

Sources for this episode include:

Henry Friedlander, The Origins of the Nazi Genocide: From Euthanasia to the Final Solution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995)

Patricia Heberer, "The Nazi Euthanasia Program," in The Routledge History of the Holocaust, ed. Jonathan Friedman (London" Routledge, 2011)

Robert Jay Lifton, The Nazi Doctors (New York: Basic Books, 1988)

Sheila Faith-Weiss, The Nazi Symbiosis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010)

Edith Sheffer, Asperger’s Children: The Origins of Autism in Nazi, Vienna (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2018)

Susan Bachrach and Dieter Kunz, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Deadly Medicine: Creating the Master Race (Charlottesville: University at Virginia, 2008) 

Special thanks to the US Holocaust Memorial Museum's Hess Seminar. 

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