American historian Dagmar Herzog has published an intellectual history of eugenics in Germany over the past 150 years.
Eugenics training: Opening of the exhibition “Hereditary Health – Hereditary Diseases” in Berlin in 1934 Photo: Scherl/SZ Photo
Read Dagmar Herzog’s “Eugenic Phantasms”. A German Story is almost unbearable in many places. This has nothing to do with the quality of the book. It’s a great study. It has to do with the subject matter of the book.
A New York historian investigates the Nazi Party’s mass murder of disabled people and maps its continuities from the late 19th century to the present.
Herzog’s extensive use of pictorial material, including documentary clarity, to show the unimaginable horror that occurs when a group of people are denied their humanity and the ideology of their “usefulness” and “utility” exacerbates this dehumanization, making for an almost unbearable read at times, providing a pseudo-legitimate facade that has remained completely unbroken to this day.
Dagmar Herzog: “Eugenic Fantasy. A German Story.” Suhrkamp Verlag, Berlin 2024, 390 pages, 36 euros
The unique selling point of Herzog’s book is that, on the one hand, it does not limit the presentation of the “euthanasia” mass killings to the period from 1939 to 1945, but includes the fundamental “eugenics” concept in social development and ideas, extending far beyond that in both temporal directions.
Prehistory of Nazi genocide
It has been proven that the devaluation and dehumanization of people with disabilities is not limited to Nazi ideology, but is deeply woven into the collective DNA of modern German society.
Meanwhile, it is noteworthy that Herzog chose an interdisciplinary approach to approach the mirror phenomenon of ‘euthanasia’ (good death) and ‘eugenics’ (good birth). He uses interpretations and theories from philosophy, sociology, and psychology to reconstruct the phenomenon of hostility toward the disabled and compulsive occupation.
The history of Nazi genocide, which Herzog illuminates in the first chapter, clearly shows the interweaving of eugenic and racist thinking. The topos of human usefulness dominates the relevant discourse in the late nineteenth century, and is reflected in debates about the boundaries between useful and useless lives and efforts to avoid the latter.
During this period, disabilities were increasingly seen in socioeconomically disadvantaged settings, caused by infectious diseases, poor sanitary conditions and malnutrition, but instead of focusing on improving these conditions, doctors, economists and theologians were more concerned with the threat they posed: they represented biological “inferiority” to society.
Racism and anti-Semitism
This biologization has direct parallels with racist and anti-Semitic ideas that see the homogeneous German “race” as being threatened by deviant or “inferior” elements. At the same time, this interpretation is inherently patriarchal in its morality, seeing disability as a consequence of women’s excessive extramarital sex life.
A book published in 1920 by lawyer Karl Binding and psychiatrist Alfred Hoche entitled The Liberation of Life as It Is Not Worth Living proved to be enormously effective in turning such considerations of racial hygiene into concrete murderous fantasies.
The idea that it was important to eliminate life “unworthy of life” for economic and emotional reasons became so widespread that the Nazis were able to establish a direct foundation for it from 1939 onwards. Before the so-called Action T4 – the Shoah – a technical “implementation” of mass murder using the poison gas Zyklon B was tested on people with disabilities.
Interestingly, in the second chapter, which describes the phases of the National Socialist era, Herzog only indirectly mentions the perpetrators of the murder of disabled people during Action T4 and the second phase of dispersed killings between 1941 and 1945. For example, there is an accusation against a “euthanasia” victim who shouted “Our blood on you!” during the deportations.
Justification of Eugenics
Herzog also dispels the long-held myth that churches contributed to the end of “euthanasia” through their resistance. Instead, she shows that theologians worked diligently to justify eugenics, and that, above all, representatives of the Protestant church and its charitable institutions were complicit in forced sterilizations and murders.
The scope and inhumanity of National Socialist crimes are discussed only in the third chapter, which deals with the difficult attempts at legal prosecution. The Frankfurt Minister of Justice, Fritz Bauer, played a key role here, and his efforts to launch a larger trial for “murder of the sick” on the basis of the Auschwitz trials failed.
The point is that much of German society in the 1960s responded reluctantly to Bauer’s efforts, and his 800-page indictment initially faded into obscurity.
In the last two chapters, Herzog describes the developments in the treatment of “disabled people” and the gradual breakdown of the separation of disabled people from public life in both West and East Germany. The “post-fascism” of the 1970s and 1980s established a different view of humanity, but the “eugenic illusion” of the title is still felt today.
Right-wing extremism today
The afterword to Herzog’s book therefore seems in some ways overly optimistic, for example when Herzog talks about the steep and impressive learning curve after the “revolutionary change of perspective” in the 1970s, or when he diagnoses the failure of the AfD’s leading representatives’ anti-disability statements as having met with “a strong rejection.”
Recent right-wing extremist-motivated attacks on disabled people’s homes in Mönchengladbach and on medical prevention systems designed to detect genetic abnormalities and elective abortions tell a different story.
But Dagmar Herzog’s book and its reading provide a crucial key to forgetting the eugenic illusion and committing oneself to the fundamental equality of human differences. Because it shows in a very striking way that inhuman mental figures and ideologies have murderous consequences, and therefore different actions must begin above all with fundamentally different thinking.
