Life unworthy of life

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Not to be confused with Wrongful life or Wrongful birth.
This poster (published in the NSDAP's Office of Racial Policy's monthly magazine Neues Volk around 1938) urges support for Nazi eugenics to control the public expense of sustaining people with genetic disorders. The poster says: "This person who suffers a hereditary disease has a lifelong cost of 60,000 Reichsmarks to the National Community. Fellow German, that is your money as well."
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The phrase "life unworthy of life" (

Nazi designation for the segments of the populace which, according to the Nazi regime, had no right to live. Those individuals were targeted to be murdered by the state ("euthanized"), usually through the compulsion or deception of their caretakers. The term included people with serious medical problems and those considered grossly inferior according to the racial policy of Nazi Germany. This concept formed an important component of the ideology of Nazism and eventually helped lead to the Holocaust.[1] It is similar to but more restrictive than the concept of Untermensch
, subhumans, as not all "subhumans" were considered unworthy of life (Slavs, for instance, were deemed useful for slave labor.).

The "euthanasia" program was officially adopted in 1939 and came through the personal decision of

extermination camps where cyanide gas chambers were purpose-built to facilitate the extermination of the Jews, Romani, communists, anarchists, and political dissidents.[3]: 31 [4][5]

Historians estimate that 200,000 to 300,000 people were murdered under this program in Germany and occupied Europe.[6][7][8][a]

History

The expression first appeared in print via the title of a 1920 book, Die Freigabe der Vernichtung Lebensunwerten Lebens (Allowing the Destruction of Life Unworthy of Life) by two professors, the jurist

University of Leipzig) and psychiatrist Alfred Hoche from the University of Freiburg.[9] According to Hoche, some living people who were brain damaged, intellectually disabled and psychiatrically ill were "mentally dead", "human ballast" and "empty shells of human beings". Hoche believed that killing such people was useful. Some people were simply considered disposable.[10] Later the killing was extended to people considered 'racially impure' or 'racially inferior' according to Nazi thinking.[11]

The concept culminated in

racial policies
.

Development of the concept

According to the author of Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton, the policy went through a number of iterations and modifications:

Of the five identifiable steps by which the Nazis carried out the principle of "life unworthy of life,"

extermination camps and, finally, to mass killings in the extermination camps themselves.[1][11]

See also

References

  1. ^ a b Lifton, Robert Jay (23 July 2005). "The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide". holocaust-history.org. Archived from the original on 12 November 2020. Retrieved 23 August 2021.
  2. ^ Ley, Astrid (2021). "Euthanasie" und Holocaust. Brill Schöningh. pp. 195–210. Retrieved 31 October 2023.
  3. OL 1885658M. Retrieved 23 August 2021 – via Internet Archive
    .
  4. ISBN 9780807846759
    .
  5. ISBN 1566635659
    .
  6. ^ "Exhibition catalogue in German and English" (PDF). Berlin, Germany: Memorial for the Victims of National Socialist ›Euthanasia‹ Killings. 2018.
  7. ^ "Euthanasia Program" (PDF). Yad Vashem. 2018.
  8. ^ a b Chase, Jefferson (26 January 2017). "Remembering the 'forgotten victims' of Nazi 'euthanasia' murders". Deutsche Welle.
  9. ^ Cover of Die Freigabe der Vernichtung Lebensunwerten Lebens (Allowing the Destruction of Life Unworthy of Life) at German Wikipedia.
  10. ^ Dr S D Stein, "Life Unworthy of Life" and other Medical Killing Programmes. UWE Faculty of Humanities, Languages, and Social Science – via Internet Archive.
  11. ^
    OCLC 1645522. Archived
    from the original on 4 August 2009. Retrieved 23 August 2021.

Notes

  1. ^ As many as 100,000 people may have been killed directly as part of Aktion T-4. Mass euthanasia killings were also carried out in the Eastern European countries and territories Nazi Germany conquered during the war. Categories are fluid and no definitive figure can be assigned but historians put the total number of victims at around 300,000.[8]

External links

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