Academic literature on the topic 'Aktion T4 program'

What the Nazis called Aktion T4 was a euthanasia program, officially started on August 18th, 1939. The registration operations for individuals with physical or mental handicaps were followed by forced sterilization and transfer to clinics organized to kill. In this article, I try to explain the mechanisms that allowed the memory of Aktion T4 to be preserved and passed from one generation to the next; memories of the “merciful death” of approximately 70,000 “lives unworthy of life,” that find themselves embedded in family records and family history. In the first section, I summarize the discussion that resulted from the theories of Charles Darwin and Francis Galton. Even if those theories do not in any way allude to the consequences that we have witnessed decades after their publication, they started a debate about the value of life and the legitimacy of human intervention in the selection of hereditary character traits, as well as the concept of race and the different methods and forms of theories and eugenics that were later adopted in Europe and in the United States. In the case of Germany, translated into Rassenhygiene, those concepts flowed into the Nazi project of purification of the German people. Through interviews with families who had a relative interned in one of the program's clinics spread across the Reich territory between 1939 and 1945, I investigate the evolution and passage of memories stored within the family sphere, paying attention to the generational steps and processes of trauma. These stories are born from a complicated process of reconstructing these memories via interviews. Their recollections were full of painful silences and negations, similar to the thought process which led the victims to live in a condition that they could not understand, and separated them from the world before they were each made to face a solitary death, far from any contact with their families. The trauma that I analyze concerns actions that had been carried out by previous generations; in the majority of cases, younger generations were not aware of the destiny of their murdered relatives and therefore tried to rebuild the stories of people who they never had the opportunity to meet. I examine the problematic relationship of those being interviewed with the end-of-life issue and also the sense of guilt which is generated by the awareness of crimes that were committed. Aktion T4 was not a crime committed outside the national borders, nor a crime that extended beyond the private sphere to the “others.” Instead, it existed within the most central and intimate place of Nazi culture: the family.

El ascenso al poder del nacionalsocialismo en Alemania y sus consecuencias ha sido una fuente inagotable para la inspiración de producciones cinematográficas. Sin embargo, el programa Aktion T4 más conocido por plan de eutanasia nazi, no había sido tema principal de una película hasta fechas recientes. Niebla en agosto (2016) y La Sombra del pasado (2018) son dos cintas que abordan los métodos empleados para el control y eliminación de las personas con discapacidad o, mejor dicho, de aquellas personas que no cumplían los cánones de la raza aria y además eran una carga económica para el estado alemán. Las leyes de esterilización, primero, el programa de eliminación de bebés nacidos con alguna clase de discapacidad y, por último, el programa Aktion T4 que seleccionaba y ordenaba el asesinato de las personas ingresadas en instituciones son las tres fases de un calculado plan de exterminio. Psiquiatras, personal de enfermería y otros médicos y sanitarios fueron los diseñadores, colaboradores y ejecutores de ese crimen contra la humanidad que fue, sin duda, un ensayo para el posterior genocidio judío. Todavía hoy se reclama en Alemania verdad, justicia y reparación para las casi 300.000 personas víctimas de esos crímenes olvidados.

Revisamos a ideologia nazista, essa de cunho nacionalista, anticomunista e antissemita. A estranha hierarquia das raças e busca da pureza e supremacia do sangue ariano que foram ideias lançadas de forma retórica por Hitler no seu livro Mein Kampf – Minha Luta –. O programa Aktion T4 de assassinatos de pessoas doentes ou indesejáveis peça fundamental no aparato estatal do III Reich que colocou em prática as ideias eugênicas da pseudociência de Galton. Os estertores finais do Reich que deveria durar mil anos. O artigo, portanto, abre ao leitor o cenário perverso e cruel da eugenia nazista num dos mais sombrios períodos da nossa recente história.

According to Vera Moser, the first professorship of healing pedagogy, Heilpädagogik at the University of Zürich in 1931, established pedagogy of the disabled as an academic discipline. Through the definition of the smallest common denominator for all disabilities, which Heinrich Hanselmann called “weakness of the soul,” a connecting element of “imbecility, deaf-mutism, blindness, neglect and idiocy” was established. Under Nazi rule, school pedagogy advanced to völkisch, nationalist special pedagogy, shifting from the category of “innate imbecility” to a broader concept of disability. As an outcome of these programs and policies, 300,000 people with disabilities were killed as a part of the “T4 Aktion.” Within just a few decades after World War II, special pedagogy expanded its sphere of influence through professionalization and institutionalization in West and East Germany and across Europe. This paper explores how special pedagogy aligned itself with the Nazi regime’s discourse and policy on eugenics and race hygiene, leading to the murder and mass sterilization of “disabled” children and adults. It probes questions regarding the extent to which the professionalization of special pedagogy has drawn from the Nazi-era terminology of the deficient and foreign to legitimate the contemporary migrant bias in German and Austrian special pedagogical care.