“Merely Human:” Disability, Exclusion, and the Origins of the Nazi Euthanasia Program

Dr. Warren Rosenblum will explore how persons with disabilities were stripped of their status as members of the “national community” in Germany. A long process of marginalization and stigmatization, he argues, laid the groundwork for mass killing during the Third Reich. By promoting the asylum system, well-intentioned reformers made an unholy alliance with those bent on persecuting the disabled and fatally undermined their own power to resist. This lecture is based on extensive research in the German State Archives and in the holdings of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Speaker
Dr. Warren Rosenblum, Professor of History and Chair, History, Politics, and International Relations Department, Webster University, St. Louis

This program is made possible by the Campus Outreach Lecture Program of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum's Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, supported by Alan Solomon, MD.