The American historian Dagmar Herzog has presented an intellectual history of eugenics over the last 150 years in Germany.
Training in eugenics: Opening of the exhibition “Hereditary Health – Hereditary Disease” in Berlin, 1934 Photo: Scherl/SZ Photo
Reading Dagmar Herzog’s “Eugenic Phantasms. A German Story” is almost unbearable in places. This has nothing to do with the quality of the book – on the contrary, it is a brilliant study – but rather with its subject matter.
The New York historian investigates the National Socialist genocide of people with disabilities and maps its history from the end of the 19th century as well as continuities up to the present day.
The reading is at times unbearable because Herzog uses extensive material, including images, to demonstrate with documentary sharpness the unimaginable horror that occurs when a group of people is denied their humanity and the ideology of the “usefulness” and “usability” of people gives this dehumanization a pseudo-legitimate veneer that has not been completely broken to this day.
Dagmar Herzog: “Eugenic Phantasms. A German Story.” Suhrkamp Verlag, Berlin 2024, 390 pages, 36 euros
The unique selling point of Herzog’s book is, on the one hand, that it does not present the “euthanasia” genocide in isolation and limited to the years 1939 to 1945, but embeds the underlying “eugenic” ideas in social developments and ideas that extend far beyond this in both chronological directions.
Background to Nazi mass murder
The devaluation and dehumanization of people with disabilities turns out to be deeply embedded in the collective DNA of modern German society and not just limited to Nazi ideology.
On the other hand, it is noteworthy that Herzog chooses an interdisciplinary approach to approach the mirror-image phenomena of “euthanasia” (good death) and “eugenics” (good birth). She draws on interpretations and theories from philosophy, sociology and psychology to reconstruct the phenomenon of hostility towards people with disabilities and its obsessive occupation.
The history of the Nazi mass murder, which Herzog examines in the first chapter, makes clear above all the interweaving of eugenic and racist ideas. The topos of the usefulness of people dominates the relevant discourses of the late 19th century and is reflected in debates about the distinction between useful and useless life and the effort to avoid the latter.
Although disabilities during this period increasingly appeared in socioeconomically weak environments and were caused by infectious diseases, poor hygienic conditions and nutritional deficiencies, the focus was not on improving these conditions; instead, doctors, economists and theologians were more interested in the alleged threat that this biological “inferiority” posed to society.
Racism and anti-Semitism
This biologization forms a direct parallel to racist and anti-Semitic ideas that saw a homogenous German “race” threatened by deviant or “inferior” elements. At the same time, these interpretations were inscribed with patriarchal moral ideas, in that disability was seen as the result of women’s excessive and extramarital sex lives.
A book published in 1920 proved to be extremely effective in turning such racial hygiene considerations into concrete murder fantasies (and their later realization). Book by the lawyer Karl Binding and the psychiatrist Alfred Hoche entitled “The authorization of the destruction of life unworthy of life”.
The idea propagated therein, that for economic and emotional reasons it was necessary to get rid of life that was “unworthy of life”, met with broad approval among the population, which the Nazis were able to build on directly from 1939 with the so-called Action T4 – before the onset of the Shoah, the technical “implementation” of which, the mass murder using the poison gas Zyklon B, was tested on people with disabilities.
Interestingly, in the second chapter, which depicts the period under National Socialism, Herzog only indirectly addresses the perpetrators of the murder of disabled people during Operation T4 and a second decentralized killing phase between 1941 and 1945. Instead, she first lets the victims of the “murders of the sick” have their say, such as the accusation of a “euthanasia” victim who shouted during his deportation: “Our blood be upon you!”
Justification of eugenics
Herzog also dispels a long-standing myth that the churches contributed to the end of “euthanasia” through their resistance. Instead, she shows that theologians were keen to justify euthanasia and that representatives of the Protestant church and its charitable institutions in particular were complicit in forced sterilizations and killings.
The extent and contempt for humanity of the National Socialist crimes is only addressed in the third chapter, which is devoted to the difficult attempt at legal prosecution. An important role was played here by the Frankfurt Attorney General Fritz Bauer, whose efforts to initiate an even larger trial on the “murder of the sick” based on the Auschwitz trials failed.
Significantly, much of German society in the 1960s reacted unwillingly to Bauer’s efforts, and his 800-page indictment initially disappeared into oblivion.
In the last two chapters, Herzog describes further developments in the treatment of “disabled” people and the gradual breaking down of their separation from public life in West Germany and the GDR. Although the “anti-postfascism” of the 1970s and 1980s ensured that a different image of humanity was established, the “eugenic phantasms” of the title can still be felt today.
Right-wing extremism today
The afterword to Herzog’s book therefore seems overly optimistic in some respects – for example, when she speaks of a steep and impressive learning curve since the “revolutionary change of perspective” in the 1970s or when she diagnoses that anti-disability statements by leading representatives of the AfD were met with “vigorous rejection”.
Right-wing extremist-motivated attacks on residential facilities for people with disabilities, such as the recent one in Mönchengladbach, and a medical care system that is designed to detect genetic abnormalities and selective abortions, tell a different story.
However, Dagmar Herzog’s book and its reading offer a crucial key to unlearning eugenic fantasies and a commitment to the radical equality of human difference. Because she shows us in a profoundly impressive way that dehumanizing ways of thinking and ideologies have murderous consequences and that different actions must therefore first and foremost begin with a radically different way of thinking.
