Setting the Stage for Life Unworthy of Life – The 1930s

Part 2 in the 10-Part Series “Is Any Life Unworthy of Living?”

Mark P. Mostert, Ph.D.

Hitler had alluded to the Jewish Final Solution in Mein Kampf (1924), echoing many of the themes of Binding and Hoche’s 1920 ideas, including that the disabled were a state burden who could not contribute economically.

As noted in Part 1, when the Nazis came to power in 1933, they seized the moment and immediately began mobilizing two key areas: (a) formalizing policies to purge Germany of people with disabilities and others judged undesirable, and (b) turning German public sentiment against those with disabilities to support the death actions that were to come.

In terms of the law, they first enacted the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring (1933), which forced sterilization on people with so-called hereditary diseases such as schizophrenia, epilepsy, blindness, deafness, “feeblemindedness” and severe physical deformities. Approximately 400,000 people were sterilized with the complicity of doctors and health professionals across the country. This was followed by the Marital Health Law that prohibited healthy Germans from marrying those who were considered genetically defective.

These laws slowly propagandized the population against people with disabilities. Furthermore, eugenics was by then the “scientific” order of the day, promulgated by the medical and helping professions and university faculty. Universities quickly implemented courses on eugenics, emphasizing the economic drag that people with disabilities were to the German economy, and that society was starkly divided between desirables and undesirables.

Among the intelligentsia, lawyers created legal principles and test cases that supported the banishment and death of those deemed unworthy of life. The German media also largely supported eugenic practices. Especially prominent in selling the death propaganda were many in the arts community of playwrights, actors and other highly visible cultural personalities. German cinemas were filled with movies espousing eugenic ideals and that death was preferable for those defined as disabled by the state.

It took a legal “test case” to create the perfect storm for legitimizing formal death centers to kill Germans with disabilities: A farmer who had killed his severely emotionally disabled son defended his actions by arguing that the family was suffering undue stress due to his son’s behavior. The Nazis sensationalized the murder and subsequent trial, in which his defense lawyers justified the murder as being an understandable and logical outcome of a teenage life that was, essentially, not worth living. The father escaped serious jail time.

Soon, the propagandized population was submitting requests to the government imploring the Nazis to kill their offspring for all kinds of illegitimate reasons. The Nazis seized these events to enact an official killing program organized and carried out by the state called the Aktion T4 Program: Death for the most vulnerable, courtesy of the German government.

Mark P. Mostert, Ph.D., is senior researcher for Able Americans, a project of the National Center for Public Policy Research. Part 1 of the 10-part series “Is Any Life Unworthy of Living?” can be read here. Those wanting to be notified of future installments in the series should subscribe to the Able Americans email list.