Introduction
Over the last ten years I have written on the growing threat of Fascist and extreme Right-wing thinking and practice across Europe. My initial thoughts centred upon differences and similarities between the social, economic and cultural nature of the Weimar Republic and Britain of the 21st Century. The focus has primarily been on both state and societal responses to disabled people during periods of economic and social crisis. It was not long before I saw connections between distinct ideologies and socio-political practice. Too often commentators have had Nazi Germany as their template for speaking about the horrors in Europe during the 1930s, and as a consequence, they have neglected to fully examine pre-Fascist influences. This article offers some signposts by largely drawing on the work of Carol Poore and Mark Mostert.
Historical connections
In 1997 Dave Emory made a useful contribution to the discussion around the links between the three topics. In my opinion his starting point was interesting because it mirrors my own framework for addressing these issues. Emory wrote:
‘As the debate over physician assisted suicide intensifies in the United States and elsewhere, it is increasingly important to understand some of the far-reaching political implications of this issue.’
While I respect the right of individuals to have control over their own bodies, I am equality aware of instances where people have not only been denied the power to exercise this right, but they have seen various States and professions use policies and practice to end their lives without consent or with consent based upon values found within the eugenics and euthanasia movements. The right to self-determination by individuals may appear to be a Human Right, however, there are many social groups within numerous societies who believe this right is continuously under threat.
Their fears often relate to the histories of the relationship between the international eugenics movement and the international euthanasia movement. Emory explains that they had ‘a seminal influence on the Nazi racial laws and extermination programs. The Third Reich’s racial laws were profoundly influenced by American eugenics philosophy and legislation. In turn, the eugenics movement in Germany gave rise to the “T-4” euthanasia program, which was the beginning of and the operational foundation of Nazi genocide.’
What is often underplayed is the historical build up to the inhumane treatment suffered at the hands of the Nazis. Mark P. Mostert (2002) writes:
‘…. by the end of World War I, an implicit but palpable public perception of higher economic worth was attached to people without disabilities, and lesser worth was attributed to people with disabilities. Later, the economic worth of human life under the Nazis proved a key distinction for creating and sanctioning genocide against people with disabilities.’
The birth of Weimar Republic saw contrasting treatment of disabled people; there were those who were social outcasts or objects of charity, but there were also others who received competent medical care, rehabilitation for work, segregated education and the ability to lead ‘ordinary lifestyles’ (sic). In a society struggling to make the transition from authoritarian empire to democracy, the life possibilities open to disabled people oscillated between limited forms of stigmatized existence and more expansive choices shaped by solidarity. In the unstable Weimar Republic, ‘impairment’ became a focal point for socio-political and cultural controversies in newly intense ways and ascertaining the positions of disabled people in society was a means of measuring the success of the new democracy.
Carol Poore (2007) explained:
‘Discourses about medical treatment, rehabilitation, degeneracy, and eugenics were for the most part discourses of nondisabled people about what should be done to help, train, control, or eliminate disabled people. Furthermore, nondisabled Weimar artists and authors only created narrowly circumscribed representations of disabled veterans or workers that fit their political agendas and almost never depicted any other areas of lives …’
A dominant narrative found within all capitalist societies is that sick, older and disabled people are ‘burdens on society’ and this is particularly articulated during periods of economic crisis. A book by Karl Binding and Alfred Hoche (1920), titled: Allowing the destruction of life unworthy of life – debates views held by medical and rehabilitation experts, officials and cultural critics. During and immediately after First World War nationalistic feelings led to full support of disabled veterans however by 1929 a backlash was underway due to both disabled and nondisabled people’s reaction to how the Republic’s treatment of them was being perceived. Right-wing discourses on degeneracy combined attacks on disabled people considered ‘unfit’, ‘depraved’, etc. with attacks upon Marxists, as well as Jews, on the grounds of threats to racial makeup and stability of the nation.
How does this relate to eugenics and euthanasia? The discourse of eugenics known as racial hygiene in Germany has its roots in the way in which the notion of ‘burdens on society’ was viewed. Poore reminds us:
‘….shocked by the large numbers of healthy soldiers who had been killed or disabled and the socioeconomic crisis, voices from across much of the political spectrum, from conservatives to social democrats, began to advocate eugenic policies more strongly.’
The perception that the war had killed or disabled many of the healthiest young German men gave a strong impetus both to post war advocates of eugenics, who opposed squandering the nation’s resources on the “unfit” and thus wanting to limit their reproduction, and to proponents of outright “euthanasia”. Among the key post-war messages was the division between acquired impairment (war) and congenital impairment (poverty, class, degenerate). Thus, as Poore states, ‘…while healthy, productive Germans had died on the battlefield, the unfit and unproductive had survived and procreated at home, frequently living off the meagre resources of the state.’
The backlash against disabled people in terms of how it was developed, and the language and imagery involved, has marked similarities to the ‘scrounger narratives’ found during the last period of New Labour’s government and the introduction of the Coalition’s Austerity programme around 2010.
Backdrop to the T-4 Programme
By 1918, a trend toward institutional contraction emerged. Many private and public asylums had closed. Others were transformed into convalescent homes for injured soldiers or hostels for refugees. The Depression began in 1929 and inpatient populations grew rapidly as many families of previously deinstitutionalized persons were no longer able to support them and as a result returned them to private and state-run facilities. By the late 1930s, there was open discussion among many asylum administrators about actually killing inmates. The distinction between voluntary euthanasia and involuntary killing was effectively eradicated, and an ominous term was coined for the first time: “life unworthy of life.“ In Binding and Hoche’s terms, they were “useless eaters” whose “ballast lives” could be tossed overboard to better balance the economic ship of state.
In speaking of those with impairments, and explicitly advocating involuntary euthanasia, Binding and Hoche wrote,
‘Their life is absolutely pointless, but they do not regard it as being unbearable. They are a terrible, heavy burden upon their relatives and society as a whole. Their death would not create even the smallest gap — except perhaps in the feelings of their mothers or loyal nurses.’
Mostert has identified what he called ‘genocidal markers:
Marker 1: Darwinism and the Biology of Determination
Marker 2: Eugenics
Marker 3: Forced Prevention of Impairment
Marker 4: Impairment Propagandized as Life Unworthy of Living
Marker 5: Impairment as Justification for Individual and State-Sanctioned Murder
Marker 6: Impairment as State-Sanctioned Homicidal Health Policy
It is important therefore to put the T-4 Programme in context and not view it was an isolated event. Rooted in powerful societal and scientific perceptions of difference with parallel extensions in state policy and action, these trends were intensified and codified with the rise of National Socialism and Hitler’s assumption of power in 1933.
By the early 20th century, scientists had amassed a great deal of pseudo-data portending to show differences between individuals, genders, and ethnic groups by rank ordering any population trait from superior to inferior. For example, individuals were judged as superior based on their race (White, with northern Europeans deemed superior to southern Europeans and Slavic ethnic groups) or their wealth (wealth was superior to poverty). In addition, levels of socially appropriate behaviour (law-abiding, self-regulating, restrained, and conformist) were judged superior to socially inappropriate behaviour (criminality or antisocial behaviour). Social Darwinism’s ideas of difference, therefore, in the form of eugenics, appeared to have immediate and effective application for a number of societal problems, such as “hereditary” social traits (e.g., socially inappropriate or criminal behaviour). Here the rationale was simple: All visible traits of human difference were genetically determined. Thus, just as eye and hair colour were genetically determined, so were drunkenness, sexual promiscuity, and other socially inappropriate behaviours. A simple extension of these perceptions led to the idea that an effective way of controlling or eliminating these problems was by sterilization, incarceration, or death.
Having established the concept of social heritability and its consequences for individual inequality, similar rankings of desirability were soon applied to entire groups of people, including grouping people by class. That is, the more “inferior” (i.e., lower class) the person, the more likely they would be to engage in undesirable social behaviour (e.g., sexual promiscuity) and often criminal behaviour (e.g., prostitution). This logic was then used to extrapolate that because many individuals from impoverished backgrounds committed undesirable social and criminal acts, and far fewer from among the wealthy, the entire lower class was characterized by criminality.
Disabled people, many of whom displayed inappropriate behaviour or abnormal physical appearance, were among the groups of people thus classified. Based on these perceptions of difference, the next logical step was to control and eventually eradicate undesirable biological and social differences through eugenics. Prior to World War I, the German eugenicists concurred with their American and British colleagues regarding a scale of human worth, dividing the German population into those who were superior (hochwertig) and inferior (minderwertig). Thus, eugenics asserted that the “feebleminded” (a generic, inaccurate term covering everything from mental retardation to alcoholism) were almost always so because of inherited inferior characteristics.
The two genocidal markers of Social Darwinism and eugenics were firmly in place in the professional and lay psyche when the National Socialists, under the leadership of Adolf Hitler, were elected in January 1933. Thereafter, German acceptance of humanitarian inequality mixed with Hitler’s racist convictions to produce the political ideology of the “Thousand Year Reich,” a major component of which was the elimination of those deemed inferior. Furthermore, these two markers became the bedrock of increasingly coercive official policy, eventually killing thousands of disabled people. These two genocidal markers were then enacted in the real world, first by involuntary sterilization.
One of the first official acts undertaken by the Nazis was the enactment of a sterilization law in 1933, less than 6 months after their election. Grandly titled the Law for the Prevention of Genetically Diseased Offspring, it decreed compulsory sterilization for persons characterized by a wide variety of impairments. The law also established a mechanism for deciding who should be sterilized, which consisted of 220 regional Hereditary Health Courts, each made up of a judge and two physicians. People in or recently discharged from institutions were particularly vulnerable to this law for obvious reasons.
The 1937 film Opfer der Vergangenheit (The Victim of the Past) had gone much further, comparing healthy, ideal German citizens with institutionalized people with severe impairments and adding that Jewish mental patients were creations in violation of natural law. By 1938 the tide of public and official benevolence toward people with disabilities had begun to turn. The public mind now characterized people with disabilities as a separate, different, often criminalized group of less economic value than their counterparts without disabilities. German literature and art soon depicted lives unworthy of living in a host of propagandistic projects. The war, Hitler reasoned, would provide both a distraction and an excuse for officially killing those deemed undesirable. One such factor was the use of propaganda to convince the public of the desirability of some lives over others.
Current perceptions of impairments and euthanasia, aided by propaganda, profoundly affected the German public. By the late 1930s, requests for mercy killing were being received by Nazi officials. To this point, Nazi involvement with mercy killing, while implicit, appears to have been muted and uninitiated by the state. However, social perceptions of impairment being radically altered, it was widely acknowledged that significant impairment was a legitimate justification for murder.
On August 18, 1939, prior to the German invasion of Poland, which began World War II, the Committee for the Scientific Treatment of Severe, Genetically Determined Illnesses produced a secret report, disseminated to all state governments, requiring all midwives and physicians who delivered infants with obvious congenital impairments to register these children and the nature of the impairment, ostensibly to clarify certain scientific questions in areas of congenital deformity and mental incapacity. The directive applied to children up to the age of 3 across Germany, these new requirements were officially added to other information routinely required by the state at the birth of any child. Failure to report these cases resulted in substantial fines. It would also later require teachers to report these impairments among their students in schools. Information on the registered children was returned to the Reich Health Ministry in Berlin, where a panel of three professionals sorted the children’s records into three groups.
Children included in the first group, their records marked with a minus sign, were permitted to survive. Inclusion in the second group, designated by the phrase “temporary assignment” or “observation,” meant that a decision on the child’s fate was to be postponed until a later date. Children in the third group, designated by a plus sign on their records, were identified for “treatment”, “disinfection,” “cleaning,” “therapy”, or “selection”, all Nazi euphemisms for extermination. Unanimous votes were required for each child. Those designated for extermination were transferred to one of 28 facilities, among them several of Germany’s oldest and most respected hospitals, where they were housed in specially designated killing wards. The Nazi authorities took great care to inform parents that their children would be safe in special wards at the clinics, which would “provide all available therapeutic interventions made possible by recent scientific discoveries”. These assurances were always given with the caveat that such endeavours were also fraught with mortal risks.
An entire bureaucracy of sham organizations was then created to execute this new project. Surreptitiously headquartered in an unmarked, nondescript villa in Berlin, the program was named Aktion T-4, after the villa’s address at Tiergartenstrasse 4. Between January 1940 and August 1941 about 70,000 people were killed under the T4 programme. Many were sent to gas chambers, others were killed by lethal injection. The programme was ostensibly shut down in 1941, partly after church protests, but it continued in secret. Historians estimate that between 200,000 and 300,000 people who were either psychotherapy patients or physically impaired were killed altogether. The records show that as the war progressed, and nondisabled men and women became scarce behind the front lines, the Nazis made a cynical adjustment in their measurement of patients’ value.
Convergence of Conditions
Political, intellectual, and social conditions were ripe in Germany in the late 1930s to translate theoretical ideas into action. Forced sterilization would have been less likely had it not had the support of the government, medical and other science professionals, and at least by their silence, the German public. The official act of sterilization, therefore, melded perception of difference, frenzied optimism over the possibilities of genetics, a pressing need to curtail inappropriate social behaviour, and the willingness to destroy people with physical, emotional, and intellectual impairments. Expressed concerns over economic, social and culture fuelled ‘scapegoating’.
Circumstances can quickly change and historically, power, ideas and values have been transformed when vacuums or instability exist.
Some Implications for the Present
- The global economic crisis
- The re-emergence of the far Right across Europe
- Massive cuts in service provision and benefits
- Mass media construction of ‘strivers’ and ‘shirkers’, ‘deserving and undeserving’ claimants, notions of ‘vulnerability’, etc.
- Growing concerns of withdrawing Rights, disability hate crime and shift back towards institutionalisation
Disabled people being increasingly being framed by their societal and economic worth. For example, their worth becoming part of profound and difficult debates around abortion, stem cell research, and euthanasia. The reality that rapid advances in genetic and other medical research have ascribed new and different notions of worth, not always positive.
Euthanasia has been legal in Belgium since 2002 but has, since its enactment, been prohibited for patients under 18. While euthanasia is legal in a handful of countries in Europe, Belgium is the first country in the world to lift all age restrictions on the practice. In 2012, Belgium recorded 1,432 cases of euthanasia = a 25% increase from 2011.
Baroness Warnock stated that “Dementia sufferers may have a ‘duty to die’” – 2008. Elderly people suffering from dementia should consider ending their lives because they are a burden on the NHS and their families, according to the influential medical ethics expert Baroness Warnock.
The central focus of the growing Fascist movement across Europe is anti-immigration, anti-Muslim and anti-European Union, however where Fascist parties are in power there is evidence of attacks on groups of people who were previous victims of Fascist hatred. This study highlights links between the present and the past: Intolerance, Prejudice and Discrimination: A European Report, authored by Andreas Zick, Beate Kupper, and Andreas Hovermann (Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, 2011).
The study is based on survey research in eight countries (Germany, Britain, France, Netherlands, Italy, Portugal, Poland, and Hungary). Particularly interesting are the results on anti-semitism, anti-muslimism, and homophobia. Here are the opening paragraphs of the authors’ foreword:
Intolerance threatens the social cohesion of plural and democratic societies. It reflects the extent to which we respect or reject social, ethnic, cultural and religious minorities. It marks out those who are “strange”, “other” or “out-siders”, who are not equal, less worthy. The most visible expression of intolerance and discrimination is prejudice. Indicators of intolerance such as prejudice, anti-democratic attitudes and the prevalence of discrimination consequently represent sensitive measures of social cohesion.
Ideologies, cultures and practices from past historical eras can be re-visited or re-worked in order to create ‘specific’ sets of ‘seeing’; e.g. perceptions of, and attitudes towards, “disability”. Definitions of “disability” are historically specific involving material conditions and social constructions. Support for the ideas of the eugenics and euthanasia movements are gaining popularity again.
Carol Poore (2007) Disability in Twentieth-Century German Culture University of Michigan.
Mark P. Mostert (2002) Useless Eaters: Disability as Genocidal Marker in Nazi Germany,The Journal of Special Education
David Emory (1997) FTR #32 Part I: Fascism, Eugenics and Euthanasia http://spitfirelist.com/for-the-record/ftr-32-part-i-fascism-eugenics-and-euthanasia/
More Than A Left Foot 