Disability Studies and the Legacies of Eugenics

Potsdam Reading Session: July 21st

Readings:

Friedlander, Henry. The Origins of Nazi Genocide: From Euthanasia to the Final Solution. Chapel Hill: North Carolina UP, 1995. Chapter 5: “The Killing Centers” and Chapter 8: “The Handicapped Victims.”

Discussion/Exploration of our visits to killing centers:

(Transcript originally completed for accessiblity purposes and should not be considered a verbatim account of the proceedings. This transcription is meant to represent a general sense and may include gaps and mistaken information. Please request permission to quote)

Discussed: Slacking Up Spastics: The Persistence of Social Attitudes Towards Persons With disabilities – an article from 1995 from Issues in law and medicine by Hugh Gallagher

Permitting the Destruction of Unworthy Life – an English translation being passed around.

Friedlander reading, David Mitchell will facilitate

An interesting piece on killing centers given we were just there; David re-read it afterwards, as well as Brandenburg materials

Friedlander has created a helpful account in words of what killing centers looked like and where the processing began/ended

What did others think about Buchenwald and its relation to the killing centers?

Nicole went to Buchenwald 2 years ago, full of panic; went with fearful sense as a tourist, but interesting to go back seeing the killing centers and to see previously how little was left, but now to see how much seemed to be left and that the shower rooms were there and struck her (reading Bauman) that there was an assembly-line feature to it; she has no analysis, but it felt very pointed to see the end of the assembly line

David: Struck by the intact nature of the killing centers, but the destruction of the concentration camps; the effort to blow up the killing machinery in the CC’s suggested something about their concerns for the rest of the world’s opinions. That the CCs were not explainable, but the mental, disability asylums, etc. were explainable to the world; this is a possible analytic line

Nancy: at Buchenwald – total devastation; there was memory and respect and dignity even in the midst of devastation; at Hadamar – no dignity; they’re trying to create it but… In Buch, there is a healing process going on

David: where would you locate that process?

Nancy: In the dignity they’re trying to provide. Society is not aware of our population group’s story – and, even, was it such a bad idea?

Pam: The number of visitors to Buch. Projects a healing energy, but Hadamar is so hidden that it reflects murder as more of a medical procedure; once framed as medical it is hard to reframe it otherwise; In Buch the space was open and reframable as a non-medical setting; Hadamar had a facet of containment; the expanse of Buch was terrifying; but Hadamar was ‘held in’.

Debj: Spoke to my sister on the phone the night of arrival – felt ghosts in Bernberg and Hadamar, She had an awful feeling in her stomach.
The people at Bernberg and Hadamar were forgotten/asocial; at Buchenwald numbers were bigger (Jehovah’s witnesses, etc.); all the energy from the visitors has dissipated some of the ‘negative’ energy; We slept over the basement killing center at Hadamar. Bernberg was chilling –continuously run since 19th century; no library like at Hadamar; I looked at Friedlander last night– he doesn’t include the experiential only the factual; She, on the other hand, will always retain the ‘feeling’ at those places.

Kanta: Greater sense of healing at Buch, maybe this is a function of time? The effort to create a memorial is a factor of time. In the killing centers the establishment of a memorial is more recent. In Buch it’s set up as a memorial but in Hadamar it is still a functioning psychiatric center

Sally: Two graveyards – sets of grave markers. At Hadamar the children’s are separate; Buchenwald at bottom of hill more uniform with metal poles (5-6’) with forest… comments on what was meant to be eradicated ; not for holocaust but right afterwards.

Sumi: Buch/Hadamar –degree of deception with setting up these centers; issue of the location seeming invisible, not just that people walked by and ignored. But our efforts to raise awareness of the issues – connected here; Buch is horrible, but there is an openness to the human cruelty and destruction

Pam: imbeddedness of killing centers; According to Ernst Klee (sic?) as to survivors of psych clinics-- the numbers dying were higher after the war than during.

Nicole: lots of food during the war, but after it there was none … there was a real lack of food after the war and patients were at the bottom of the list

Sandy: Buch was not as powerful; real resistance; not healing (some things we can’t heal from; it’s a scar; scars are there for a reason; it would have been nice to know which were the invalids’ block; Jews had more centrality
Why didn’t they need to hide what was done to disabiled.

American Journal of Psychiatry by Foster Kennedy and endorsed by the editorials in the issue

Another quote …"killing involved only the incurable; substantial burden to society; life of little comfort to them; easing such people out of the world in a painless way was ok from a people both sentimental and hard pressed" – a quote from Nuremburg Trial Supreme Court Justice

David’s point is well taken

David: strands – important essay topic in and of itself; Paul Gilroy (Against Race) how do we commemorate essay – important to tease out; Gilroy’s argument is against race an essentialist argument perceived in left, liberal way … essentialist … If we think of Buch in its size/scale than it is interesting to tie in; Muller-Hill essay suggests the number of folk brought there to die; multiplicity/variety of Buch opens possibility of commemoration and the variety to groups; in the Psych institutions less commemoration was done; The Hadamar files show many reasons for why folk were there; Friedlander et al – little diversity of the people sent to the Psych facilities; The SC Justice quote minimized diversity and made it easier to essentialize the argument; there is so little connection to the apparatus

Friedlander on people – very clinical. Much distance between Friedlander and the people themselves ; you’re nowhere ….

Kanta: Not much out there? She felt there was more at Hadamar –artwork on the walls

David: comparing it to other exhibits he has seen; Hadamar is one of the first; the data is there and available in the textual material

W: One methodological texts –

Brenda: Three deaf files – at Hadamar a story like Emil Plotz being sterilized – not just medical data, but who was going to pay, etc. Connect it to the space –both killing centers we visited still exist as functioning medical facilities, like as apsych hospital. Like a Vietnam Memorial in a Vet hospital – There’s an anti memorial active. Buch is very clearly set as a memorial

S: Gilroy helps here – argues against setting up a memorial esp in an active space; in a way what’s happening in Bernberg

A: Talked yesterday about the place of disabled today in Germany; said to several folk, “we didn’t find in our study of killing centers people plucked from their families and taken away; people killed had already been taken away before for some set of reasons; these memorials are about people who don’t have a place in society now; today there are psych institutions. Which are problematic; special schools; we heard yesterday and hear of cooptation getting nice, little charity services; no history or concept of legitimacy in society to begin with beforeNazi’s; and no legitimacy now; allowed to live in second class fashion; all the more reason to do the work we’re doing and has to be in context of what we’re doing; how will PwD live better;

D: Hadamar file by Adrienne and David – full of medical charts with condition, diagnosis, etc. With letters from mom/sister wondering why they had not heard from him in some time; in that file was an incredibly rich narrative of her time in the institution; but Adrienne is not right about T4 abandoning people – their family’s still connected; that file told D that even those institutionalized by family, they were still involved – was this the place they should be? A give and take with inst. Administrators; not just abandoned; people in the institutions and their families were still engaged.

R: the flattening of the various categories of PwD euthanized in T4; important to understand as an historical problem – a powerful trend of modernity – rationalization and bureaucratization constantly creates new categories; our categories of psych patient today is diff than 50 + years ago; defectiveness is different; physical disabilities are different; when we tell today the history and say psych inpatient, etc., it’s a different category ; historical presentism with loss of many categories lost esp. of victims of euthanasia; we imagine only the psych patient; also visual documents at Hadamar vs. Buch; Buch famous photos of the liberation; the photos with Ike visiting were unavailable at T4 sites; that one file with the medical photos –very different kind of documentation; with a difference in scale attendant; the visual material with physical objects did not exist at Hadamar/

S: Other Friedlander chapters give specific instances – a farmer, 6 young women classified as retarded … so much of the history is about numbers in Poland, territories, Soviet Union and other camps; disabled used as slave labor; German/Austrian govt doesn’t want to discuss these issues as reparations are still possible... so there is liability limitation to discussion; a lot of Rosemarie’s classifications were there at the time, e.g. schizophrenia… We got rid of the Jewish way of thinking … psychologists stepped in … Gallagher openly disabled person to bring out elements in the files …. We have to work with Holocaust Memorials to archive the fragile documents carefully

D: Rosemarie “feeble-minded” covers a lot of territory; when Nicole was talking several days ago; I don’t need to invent something new, just to further disseminate what we’ve seen; when Debj asked if there were people with physical disabilities… well yes … but they need to recall that

N: we’re unpacking essentialism and the way lives were recorded; society is only interested in anomalies; you have to refocus and underline the essentialism; we’re dealing with the inadequacies of the time

P: essentialism and psych diagnoses – understood differently, but essentialism insures that those with diagnoses in the 40s and 50s would still have retained their diagnosis 30 years later even though the accents/emphasis might have changed – they would have retained their institutionalized status; What would it have been like to see Buchenwald and tell the inmates "we’ll give you better food, but you can’t leave!" In exchange for your liberty we’ll provide everything else! (David)

D: Muller-Hill – important to show how expansive … How people classified as mental patients includes them in a category so expansive; eugenics is hostility toward the mean – not the average but the middle. That element is not understood and more research is necessary – not just issues of the marginalized.

A: Needs to qualify earlier statement; how did we learn of Holocaust in US/Canada – Diary of Anne Frank – many felt same way;

S: Japanese Canadian internment – an account/novel revealed it to many in Canada; a fictionalized account had a powerful effect

A: Holocaust Museum in DC, a main exhibit – given a card and asked to be a person with a story and a life ; we don’t have stories of lives out there and memorialized on walls, files, NO novels for school children to read; maybe we need to change this? We have to go write those novels … e.g. Nicole!

Sharon L. Snyder, Ph. D.,
Director, "Legacies of Eugenics" Summer Institute, Einstein Forum
Assistant Professor, Interdisciplinary Ph. D. Program in Disability Studies
Department of Disability and Human Development
University of Illinois at Chicago (MC 626)
1640 W. Roosevelt Rd. #207
Chicago IL 60608-6904 U.S.A.
E-mail: ssnyder@uic.edu Phone: (312) 413-1975 (Voice) Fax: (312) 996-0885