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The methods used for mass extermination in the Nazi death camps originated and were perfected in earlier use against people with physical, emotional, and intellectual disabilities. This article describes the historical context of attitudes toward people with disabilities in Germany and how this context produced mass murder of people with disabilities prior to and during the early years of World War II. Several key marker variables, the manipulation of which allowed a highly sophisticated Western society to officially sanction the murder of people with disabilities, are examined. Important implications must continually be drawn from these sad events as we work with people with disabilities at the dawn of a new century.
Would you, if you were a cripple, want to vegetate forever? -Dr. Tergesten, in the propaganda film Ich Klage an! (I Accuse!, 1941)
Even given the passage of time and the necessary exposure of many people to commonly known historical events about Nazi Germany, some facts are more familiar than others. Historically, the focus has remained on the state-sanctioned genocide of the war years, which resulted in the extermination of Jews and to a lesser extent other populations, such as the Gypsies, political prisoners, and homosexuals (Yahil, 1987). In secular terms, images of death camps and the Nuremberg Trials represent the nadir of a humanitarian conflagration that began with the invasion of Poland in 1939 and ended with Germany's surrender and political and physical partitioning in 1945.
However, relatively little attention has been paid to significant precipitating historical events that served as a catalyst for what later became known as the Holocaust. These events, rooted in powerful societal and scientific perceptions of difference with parallel extensions in state policy and action, were intensified and codified with the rise of National Socialism and Hitler's assumption of power in 1933 (Aly, Chroust, & Pross, 1994; Friedlander, 1995). Official notions of difference, which would later find their most diabolical expression in the murder of the Jews, were first expressed in state-sanctioned killings of children and adults with a wide range of physical, emotional, and intellectual disabilities.
I draw on the relatively few but important sources available in English to illustrate a neglected historical aspect of perceptions of people with disabilities for several purposes. First, I provide...
