“Euthanasia” Propaganda

Two photographs of children with disabilities. On the left, two hands hold up a baby. On the right, two children stand side by side. — These images of children with disabilities comprised part of a series of propaganda images that were used in support of the Nazi eugenics program. The caption reads “The National Socialist state will prevent people whose lives are not worth living from being born in the future.” *United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of G. Howard Tellier*

The Nazi Eugenics Program

German “race hygienists,” physicians, and Nazi propagandists referred to people with disabilities as “life unworthy of life.” Such language served to justify radical measures that were taken against people with disabilities. Those measures included sterilization and mass murder. From its inception, the Nazi Party aimed to “cleanse” the German population of those considered biologically inferior. In the mid-1920s, Adolf Hitler outlined the tasks of the future racial state in Mein Kampf:

It [the state] has to put the race into the center of life in general. . . . It has to take care that only the healthy produce children. . . . It has to declare anyone who is visibly ill and has inherited a disease as unfit for procreation and it has to carry this out in practice.

The Nazi leader denounced those liberal thinkers who opposed the sterilization of “sufferers of syphilis, tuberculosis, hereditary diseases, cripples, and cretins” on the grounds that such opposition was a “crime” and a violation of those people’s rights.

Eugenics as Law

N/A — *United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, Md.*

This four-year-old child, Richard Jenne, was killed by medical staff at the Kaufbeuren psychiatric clinic in late May 1945, several weeks after Nazi Germany was defeated by the Allies. He was reportedly the last child murdered in the Nazi euthanasia program.

Once in power, the Nazi regime enacted eugenics into law. On July 14, 1933, the Nazi governments passed the Law for the Prevention of Offspring with Hereditary Diseases. This legislation affected individuals “suffering” from any of the following nine medical conditions: feeblemindedness, schizophrenia, manic depression disorder, genetic epilepsy, Huntington’s chorea (a fatal form of dementia), genetic blindness, genetic deafness, severe physical deformity, and chronic alcoholism.

The law established special hereditary health courts to determine whether the man or woman should be forcibly sterilized. Made up of leading physicians and scientists, the courts approved the sterilization of nearly 400,000 Germans between 1934 and 1945. Possibly as many as 20,000 people, primarily women, are thought to have died as a result of the procedures.

Propaganda in Support

Even before the law went into effect, the Nazi regime had begun planning a propaganda campaign to support it. The Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda as well as other Nazi and state agencies all acted in support of the sterilization measures. Nazi propagandists and “hygienists” used photographs, films, and other materials showing children with severe mental and physical disabilities as support for the regime’s forced sterilization and euthanasia programs.

In 1939, the German state required hospitals, clinics, and nurses to register all newborns who had congenital deformities. Two years later, physicians and other medical personnel were also ordered to report persons with disabilities. During the war, German physicians carried out the murder of between 5,000 and 10,000 infants and children.