Persons with Mental or Physical Disabilities

The Mentally and Physically Handicapped: Victims of the Nazi Era provides additional information about victims with disabilities.

The T-4 "euthanasia" program, a Nazi plan to murder persons with physical or mental disabilities, is described clearly in this article.

Book review of The Origins of Nazi Genocide. Henry Friedlander argues that "euthanasia was not simply a prologue but the first chapter of Nazi genocide."

Photo of five Jewish prisoners with disabilities who were photographed in Buchenwald for propaganda purposes.

Photo of prosthetic devices on display at Auschwitz.

More information on the T-4 and 14f13 murder programs.

"History of Deaf Holocaust Victims" by Sharon Ann Soudakoff discusses deaf victims of the Third Reich and projects to remember this group. A bibliography is included.

This page at "The History Place" also examines the Nazi "euthanasia" program.

Correspondence and testimony related to the "euthanasia" program.

Story of Helene Melanie Lebel, a woman who showed signs of mental illness and was murdered by the Nazis.

Map showing the "euthansia" centers in Germany 1940-45.

Photo of Hartheim Castle, a "euthanasia" center where the Nazis murdered persons with physical or mental disabilities by means of gassing and lethal injection.

Hitler's Unwanted Children, a 34-page PDF document on child "euthanasia" in Nazi Germany.

Bibliography

Burleigh, Michael, and Wolfgang Wipperman. The Racial State: Germany, 1933-1945 (London, 1991).

Gallagher, Hugh G. By Trust Betrayed: Patients, Physicians, and the License to Kill in the Third Reich (New York, 1990).

Lifton, Robert J. The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide (New York, 1986).

Müller-Hill, Benno, Murderous Science: Elimination by Scientific Selection of Jews, Gypsies and Others; Germany 1933-1945 (Oxford, 1988).

Proctor, Robert. Racial Hygiene: Medicine under the Nazis (Cambridge, MA, 1988).

Pross, Christian, and Götz Aly. The Value of the Human Being: Medicine in Germany, 1918-1945 (Berlin, 1991).

Weindling, Paul. Health, Race and German Politics between National Unification and Nazism 1870-1945 (Cambridge, England, 1989).

Bibliography source: The Mentally and Physically Handicapped: Victims of the Nazi Era, published by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Used with permission.


| Victims | Perpetrators | Bystanders | Resisters | Rescuers | Liberators | Survivors |

A Teacher's Guide to the Holocaust
Produced by the Florida Center for Instructional Technology,
College of Education, University of South Florida © 1997-2013.

Timeline People Arts Activities Resources