When one considers the long history of anti-Jewish attitudes and actions in Europe and the dramatic, destructive ways that Nazi antisemitism disrupted the lives of people like Peter Gay, Aranka Siegal, and Jack Pomerantz, one might conclude that Jews must have been the first targets for systematic murder in Hitler’s Germany. That, however, was not the case. Instead, the first category of people slated for mass killing were individuals deemed handicapped. Perhaps Nazi leaders believed they would encounter less opposition to attacks on that segment of the population; perhaps they thought it would be easier to keep such a program secret. Certainly initiatives came from within the scientific and medical communities, whose members played key roles in carrying out the killings. These are all matters open to research and discussion. What is clear is that attitudes toward people with disabilities in Europe developed in a manner rather different from what we have seen with regard to antisemitism. Nevertheless, here too Nazi ideology and practice built on existing prejudices in ways that were extreme but not unique.
It is hard to know exactly how the majority of the population regarded people with mental and physical handicaps in medieval and early modern Europe. Christianity, like Judaism, out of which it grew, taught compassion for the afflicted, and church as well as state law provided some protections for those who could not protect themselves. But there is also evidence, including many literary accounts, that the able-bodied often ridiculed, took advantage of, and abused those weaker than they were. Nevertheless it seems that in various ways society found places for those with mental and physical disabilities. The village idiot, court dwarfs, fools, beggars, and cripples were all familiar characters. They showed that, although life might not always be fair or good to those with handicaps, at least everyone recognized their existence and assumed that they, like the poor, were a permanent part of society.
By the nineteenth century the assumption that the disabled would always be present had begun to change, at least for many people in Europe and elsewhere. Scientific and medical advances together with Social Darwinist notions led to the idea that society could be engineered so that only the supposedly healthiest elements would reproduce. This way of thinking, and the pseudo-science that grew up around it, is often referred to as eugenics.
Eugenics became popular all over Europe and North America in the early twentieth century. Many places introduced programs to sterilize people considered undesirable. Even though the proponents of such plans claimed to be objective and scientific, they tended to identify people already viewed as outsiders as the least desirable “breeding stock” and to label them “feebleminded” or “degenerate.” For example, eugenics programs in some parts of the United States disproportionately targeted African Americans; elsewhere in North America native people were prime subjects. Europeans often focused on Gypsies and other itinerant people, and everywhere poor people came in for the closest scrutiny. In the wake of the First World War, many political leaders, interested in boosting the size and health of their populations—and their armies—promoted eugenics programs. Meanwhile, perennial problems such as crime seemed solvable to people who believed that criminal tendencies were inherited and that their carriers could be identified by physical characteristics.
Even many scientists, medical experts, and social workers who considered themselves progressive reformers supported programs to attempt to “raise” the quality of the population by “selective breeding,” with or without the consent of those involved. For example, in the 1910s and 1920s the British sex reformer Marie Stopes helped thousands of men and women learn about birth control and gain access to necessary technologies and supplies. One of Stopes’s arguments in support of legalizing birth control was the assumed need to curb the reproduction of people considered burdens on society. When a deaf man wrote to ask Dr. Stopes a question about reproductive rights she fired back an angry letter demanding to know why someone like him would even consider having children. Of course such efforts to “improve” humanity, even at the expense of those considered inferior, were different from attempts to build a Nazi-style “master race” that would rule the world. Still, by the 1920s, as notions about building a “better race” became mainstream, they served to legitimate more extreme schemes of exclusion, manipulation, and domination.
A look at one influential publication illustrates the radicalization of eugenic ideas after World War I. In 1920 Karl Binding, former president of Germany’s highest court, and Alfred Hoche, a German professor of psychiatry, wrote Permission for the Destruction of Worthless Life, Its Extent and Form. Binding and Hoche believed that World War I (1914–1918) had produced a marked increase in the number of “mental defectives.” As a result, they said, Germany was weighed down with people they called “living burdens.” They expressed shock at the tremendous care that was devoted to inmates of mental hospitals at a time when the country had lost so many young men in war. In their view the mentally ill were “completely worthless creatures.”
Binding and Hoche did not explicitly say that people who wanted to live should be killed, but their ideas still had radical implications. According to them, every human being’s worth could be measured in terms of contribution to the community and the nation. Some people, they suggested, did not really have any value. Although Binding and Hoche’s book was controversial, the mentality it expressed was widely shared in Europe and North America in the decades before World War II. Given this background, it is perhaps no surprise that Hitler’s regime would begin its program of mass murder with attacks on people deemed mentally or physically handicapped.
~~War and Genocide: A Concise History of the Holocaust -by- Doris L. Bergen
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