Ep. 41: Nazi "Euthanasia" and its aftermath with Dagmar Herzog

The Nazis first targeted mentally and physically disabled Germans for mass killing, before they targeted Jews.  However, discrimination and ableist thought predated the Nazis and followed them into the postwar era.

In this episode, I talk with Dagmar Herzog about both the Nazi “euthanasia” campaign, but also the larger context of discrimination against disabled people.  We also talk about those who tried to care for these vulnerable people as well as those who lobbied for their recognition as Nazi victims and for their rights in general in the postwar era.

Dagmar Herzog is a Distinguished Professor of History and the Daniel Rose Faculty Scholar at the Graduate Center, City University of New York.

Herzog, Dagmar. The Question of Unworthy Life: Eugenics and Germany’s Twentieth Century (2024)

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You can find a complete reading list with books by our guests and also their suggestions here.

Transcript

Waitman Beorn (00:00.718)
Hello everybody. Welcome to the Holocaust History Podcast. I'm your host, Waipman Born. And today we're talking about the Nazi so-called euthanasia program, the program of mass killing and mass sterilization of mentally and physically handicapped, but also the ways in which this policy, this ideology drew on ideas before the war, but then also continued after the war and the people that tried to fight back against it. I think it's a really important

topic, particularly given sort of current events and thoughts about disability and assisted suicide and all kinds of other things. And I have with me Dagmar Herzog, who has just written a great book on this topic. And she's going to really guide us through this conversation. so Dagmar, thanks so much for coming on.

Dagmar Herzog (00:48.911)
It's wonderful to be here. Thank you.

Waitman Beorn (00:51.07)
can you tell us really briefly how you got into this topic? Where'd you settle on writing this particular book? Cause you've written lots of really great things on a sort of wide variety of topics.

Dagmar Herzog (01:02.979)
I mean, I was obviously thanks to Zeb Weiss, a historian of the Holocaust now for quite some time, and I've taught also history of sexuality for quite some time. And you can't really avoid getting into either eugenics if you're in history of sexuality. How was birth control defended in the early 20th century except through eugenic argumentation? And you can't get around studying the Holocaust without understanding the mass murder of people with disabilities as a precursor phenomenon. And of course there were.

120 men who got their training and practice in murdering people with disabilities who then after the bishop claimants August van Galen gave his sermon criticizing the killings in August of 41, he got transferred a few months later to Poland to build up three death factories, those that shall be born to Blinka, in which they committed basically a quarter of the Holocaust. So the story is clearly important, but

What I always noticed, and every time I taught history of the Holocaust, I always also did a component on the murder of people with disabilities. But I noticed a kind of awkwardness. There's a way in which, well, who was it who was killed? And people have sort of this vague idea that it's people with disabilities. So they sort of picture people who are crippled in some way physically.

And they don't really understand that it was people with cognitive disability and psychiatric diagnoses. They don't really get that. And then when they realized that they're like, Ooh, like they like the same dehumanization reflex that was there at the time kind of happens in conversations. Now it's like, intellectual disability, a conversation stopper. So that's one thing that happens.

When like what I would did, what are you working on now, Dagmar? And then I would say, I'm working on a history of intellectual disability in Germany. they go, mm. It was like an uncomfortable, polite silence. That's one reaction. And the second reaction, I noticed this a lot from students, was to rush into the breach to remind me and admonish me that of course eugenics was an international movement. And of course it was strong in the United States and we had sterilizations too. And it's like this, almost like a PC reflex.

Dagmar Herzog (03:18.607)
and this, but it also functions in a strange way as though people are still confused about their know they're supposed to think eugenics bad, but they also know that it was scientifically respected at the time. So there's a disorientation in response to it. And one of my main puzzles was basically why was eugenics in Germany so, you know, seductively powerful for people.

that also Christian charity caregivers joined in on it and so many people promoted it, given how scientifically shaky it actually was. I specifically the idea that intellectual disability is genetically transmitted across the generations is simply wrong. And many scientists at the time knew that. And yet, and still, what is this wellspring of disability hostility that fed that? That's what I sort of wanted to understand. First of all, it's like,

what were the motive forces that made it so successful despite its basic fictionality? And then I was incredibly interested because I studied post Holocaust memory for a long time, also post euthanasia in quotation marks memory, just, it took 40 years for anyone to care about either the sterilizations or the murders. And I thought, okay,

How is it that fascism does such long-term damage? What one of my characters calls the fascism in the heads. They basically, Nazism poisoned, you know, souls, hearts and minds, and it took a long time to get over. And then I was incredibly interested in recovering people who made creative arguments in defense of the cherishable value of disabled life. And I found them, but I was incredibly interested to trace them. thought, why has nobody done this? Why has nobody seen this as...

an ideological battle, way you can study the history of anti-Semitism or homophobia. Why can't we study the history of arguments over the value of disabled lives? So that's what I ended up doing.

Waitman Beorn (05:23.95)
And this is one of the things that I think is really interesting in the book, which is that we sort of see these continuities and breaks, which of course historians, we love continuities and breaks. This is like our jam. But it's interesting because obviously things like antisemitism and homophobia and even sort of antislavic racism and anti-Zyginism, these things all continue after the Holocaust, obviously. But at least...

for performative public sakes, they are sort of refuted. And there's sort of direct kind of continuities of these same ideas being justified because they've been in some ways discredited by the event. I know that's in a certain sense glossing over lots of details, but one of the things that, and we'll talk about this later, one of the things from the book, you see that actually some of the same arguments are reconstituted, but not,

There's no caveat. There's no asterisk. They're basically the same, the same arguments that are being made, you know, by the Nazis and, people even before then, which I think is really interesting, sort of the post, the post history of this. maybe we should start back with the way you start, which is the world before eugenics, which I think is actually really interesting too, because, you know, as someone that teaches the Holocaust and isn't obviously an expert in, in, in this, you know, I always start with eugenics and I never start when, in what I'm doing the

Dagmar Herzog (06:29.359)
Yeah.

Waitman Beorn (06:52.78)
the one or two lessons on T4 program in euthanasia, start with Bending and Hawk, who we'll talk about in a minute, but I don't start with what people were doing before, which is really stupid and I shouldn't do that, but now I won't. But can you tell us a little bit about the pre-prehistory of this?

Dagmar Herzog (07:05.615)
you

Dagmar Herzog (07:09.423)
Right. So that was one of the things that I wanted to figure out. And it turns out that there's good history and history of psychiatry and there's good history on the history of religious charities because Germany was precocious in institutionalizing people with cognitive impairments already. Tiny little experiments in the 1840s, 50s, but really it starts to take off in the 1870s and 80s all over Germany.

And these things grow like you wouldn't believe, like they're turned into little villages, entire counter worlds to modernity. And they're providing spaces of safety and protection, but they're also like, know, the way they care for alcoholics or they care for ex-convicts or whatever, they also care for the disabled and they also have things for physical disability people and so on. it's Germany also then has precociousness in developing remedial education.

Heelschulepädagogik, it's called in German. And actually hundreds of German cities set up remedial classrooms and then entire remedial schools. And you may be asking yourself, why is there so much disability that we need hundreds of institutions and hundreds of schools for slightly different categories of people because the institutions are for them more significantly impaired and the remedial schools, of course, for kids who are still living at home with their families and only coming during the day, right?

and they're more moderately disabled. They don't need round the clock care. And it's actually a delicate issue that there's this hierarchy of educability versus trainability versus quote unquote care cases. The bottom third of people who were basically ignored. I mean, they're housed and they're fed, but they're not otherwise engaged with. And the answer is poverty.

There's unbelievable amounts of malnutrition, insufficient vitamins and protein during pregnancy, but there's also the fact that environmental toxins and above all these fevers in the toddler years, encephalitis, meningitis, there are no antibiotics. So all these people were not, sorry, they were not genetically feeble minded. They became feeble minded because they had brain fevers when they were two.

Dagmar Herzog (09:30.463)
their bodies were not well able to handle it because their mothers during pregnancy didn't get a lot of protein and vitamins. I mean, it's all like, and they're living in, the other thing that's happening is a lot of people are moving from the rural areas into the cities. Some cities are quadrupling in size. People are living in unbelievable squalor. you know, if you imagine you have epilepsy, who's going to take care of a kid if everybody's off in the factory during the day? It's like, intense. So of course,

people are then brought to institutions. And initially the Protestants are in the lead all through. The Catholics joined the game by the 1890s in part because of the Kulturkampf, because they're driven out of the education of so-called typical kids. And therefore they take in more people with disabilities. And there are some large Catholic institutions, but basically the Protestants dominate the field. And they very much present it as Christian love.

And that is, think, for many of the original directors, a motivation. But they're quickly, because they're frustrated that you can't cure cognitive disability, and therefore, they decide they're obsessed with usefulness, nützlichkeit. They want to make everybody useful. They want to make them able to work. So if they can teach them to peel potatoes or mop floors or do something in the fields or in the kitchen or in the laundry, then they are very pleased with themselves.

But of course that's tautological, because in the end, they're just basically doing jobs that keep the institution going. And whoever is a good worker would actually be the best person if they could leave and go back out into the world with supports. But they want to keep them, of course. And so it becomes a money thing. And ultimately, it's a poverty management thing. And the Prussian state and then the other states start to also contribute it. They don't only just live on donor money anymore, or some philanthropist who gave them a lot.

Waitman Beorn (11:08.439)
But they want to keep them in the, yeah.

Dagmar Herzog (11:25.209)
some Duke or something, but then it becomes like a government subsidy thing. And what is so shocking to me is how early, already in the 1890s, it's becoming socially acceptable to express death wishes to, you know, very well-known people like the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, but also scientists, zoologists, and botanists like Heckel.

who has been saying this since the 1860s, but keeps doubling down on it. Plutz is a doctor and a biologist also. And then there's a psychologist, Elisabeth Yost, and then there's a feminist and a poet, and there's so many people, and they're all saying, we should just kill them. Out of pity, because they cost so much, because their life value is negative. So it's already out there, and the Christian charities are already scared. Like, I can tell that

in their notes to themselves, like their publications and their minutes of their annual meetings and so on, they're already realizing they need to come up with counter arguments for what the value of disabled life is, and they're confused. So there's a, it's almost as though disability is the Achilles heel of Christian faith, because they're confused. If God is all powerful, why is all the suffering happening? And they really don't know, and they're already on the defensive. So they can say, you know, one of the

Ten Commandments is thou shall not kill, they need to come up with the better arguments. And some people do. There's a man named Friedrich von Borderschwing who himself, very pious man, ran Beatle near Bielefeld. It's the largest of all the institutions, mostly for epileptics. And he initially had sort of said, wow, if you have epilepsy, what sin did you commit? You know, it's a chance to be remorseful and

look into yourself and think about what you could have done better or differently. And he drops that. And he starts to have this whole sentimental paternalist thing about basically he prints photographs of people who can't work and communicates how much he loves them. He says it's a privilege to serve. The lowest path is the best. And it's really theologically radical in the sense that he demonstrates that he cherishes these people.

Dagmar Herzog (13:47.457)
and that they're love worthy even when they're not able to work. And that becomes a major touchdown later because that sentimental argument is the only precious counter to what becomes an ever more defensive also among the Christians, my God, we're being accused of the folk dying because we're basically keeping these people alive. So you can track that.

Waitman Beorn (14:09.774)
And there's also the interesting thing you talk about as well is sort of the class piece where, you know, if you're a wealthy or well-to-do person, you know, these things don't happen to rich people, you know, they don't have, but they do. And so then, but so then they're, yeah.

Dagmar Herzog (14:15.309)
Yes.

Dagmar Herzog (14:25.988)
They do 10 to 15 % are, you know, wealthy people also you could have loss of oxygen in the birth process. So you have cerebral palsy incredibly common, you know, the medical conditions that would happen now. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Waitman Beorn (14:36.558)
But then you have this two tier system of like, if you're wealthy, you can put your child in a nicer institution. But then you point out something that's really interesting as well, which is that there's sort of a, I don't know how to put it, but like, know, there's like a tax where the institutions will make money off of the wealthy, the patrons, giving them the top level care, and then take some of that money to pay for the people with the lower level care.

Dagmar Herzog (14:44.355)
Right. Yeah, exactly.

Dagmar Herzog (14:59.001)
Exactly. Right. Right. Yeah. Almost every one of those institutions and in a way it's incredibly impressive. They get the best architects. You do the most beautiful, airy, sunlit buildings. And this is actually showing concern for working class justice. There is an amazing place called the Kamanhof, which is started by Jews and Christians together.

and they have the absolute best everything, the best kitchens, the best gymnasium, and the best workshops for everyone. And they also have a pension, which is where the wealthier people get a single room and better food. And indeed, what they're charging those families helps to pay for all the poor kids. And it's great. So it's it's important to recognize that also prosperous people have disabled children. That's like important to...

understand, but it's also crucial that in fact the vast majority are poor. It's important to understand that the reason it looks to people as though feeble mindedness passes through the generations is because poverty replicates across generations. But that becomes really dangerous as soon as psychiatrists enter the picture, which they do in the 1890s. They never gave a shit about,

Waitman Beorn (16:13.336)
Right.

Dagmar Herzog (16:24.911)
cognitive disability before, they always said psychiatric illness, mental illness is our remit, not mental disability, but it becomes financially valuable once the Prussian state allows, basically says we need medical people in charge at every institution, including the ones written on lecture disabled. And all the pastors and teachers are like, what? You guys don't know what you're doing. There's nothing you can do. And they're like, yes, we can research this. And suddenly it's...

They're creating entirely new categories of reality like psychopathic inferiority, which is at the borderline between normalcy and not so normal. Anybody could get that. It's a subjective diagnosis. It has enormous consequences.

Waitman Beorn (17:07.34)
And so then I guess that brings us to maybe one of the breaks and maybe this is artificial and something that people like me sort of impose when we're setting up teaching, but the bending and hawk moment where you kind of have, I guess people sort of saying the choir part out loud and then justifying it from a legal and psychiatric medical scientific position.

Dagmar Herzog (17:31.951)
Right. So Bending, Carl Bending is a lawyer and Alfred Hoche is a psychiatrist and they make Common Cause and write this little booklet in 1920, which you start your segments on history of euthanasia with. And the interesting thing about them is that they're not just expressing death wishes, they're coming up with a concrete plan.

So they have a recommendation. This is how we're gonna do it. We're gonna have a commission, two doctors and a lawyer will go through the institutions and choose those people who are truly incurable and those are the people that are gonna be killed. And look at all this money we're gonna save. And they have two strategies. They exacerbate disgust. They talk about how these are not even real human beings. They're the opposite of human beings. They're so gross. And they talk about all the money you're gonna save if you don't have to feed them. And they embedded all in a larger argument in defense of

assisted suicide. So it's like they sneak it in and the defense of assisted suicide is directed against the Christian churches who claim at that point still to be against self-determined dying. And so it's all, but that's not the real point of the thing. The real point of the thing is to come up with a justification and a concrete suggestion, a template for how to do the killing. But to me, the revelation was

Why is it that there's eugenics everywhere? And actually, Bidding and Telha are not a eugenic thing. They're not about the sterilizations. There's like one little footnote. They're really about euthanasia. They're really about the killings. Okay. And they're really about the most severely disabled, not about the moderately disabled people who are running around and making more babies. That's not their thing. They're really talking about killing the institutionalized. And I realized suddenly that of course the difference between Germany and all the other countries is that Germany lost World War I.

The Narcissistic Wound, this idea that it's a national humiliation, an injury to national pride is enormous. And that book, if you look at it again, is shot through with this idea we need to recover our manly heroism and finally have the courage to kill. this, yeah.

Waitman Beorn (19:38.222)
I was going to say, of the things that struck me when I was reading this book was another book that I've just, it's one of these books that was just sort of foundationally important to me, which is Paul Lerner's Hysterical Men, right? Where, and he writes about PTSD, we wouldn't call it that then, but we call it that now, particularly for, and in the context of that book, Soldiers, but many of the same arguments that you come across with regards to utility and

Dagmar Herzog (19:50.349)
Yeah, yeah.

Dagmar Herzog (19:54.489)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Waitman Beorn (20:08.366)
what is the goal of treatment for these veterans? It's really to make them economically viable, which again is taking place most of it in the context of post-loss World War I Germany, where economy is a thing, you know? And then there's of course anti-Semitism in there as well, you know, in this idea of manliness and the fact that if you suffer from PTSD, it's because you are inherently, it's an inherent thing, not an environmental thing. You know, it's a systemic thing. Anyway.

Dagmar Herzog (20:19.235)
Right, right.

Yes.

Waitman Beorn (20:37.218)
I think it's interesting to sort of, because those things are sort of now running parallel streams with the movement that you're talking about. But also not eugenics yet, because they're not, it's not about eradicating the people who are predisposed to this.

Dagmar Herzog (20:53.101)
Yeah, yeah, it it I mean, I would say their euthanistic plan is running in parallel with a trend with a rising notion of eugenics, which is obsessed with the idea that actually intellectual deficiency is transmitted. And there's a development of a reverse causation argument. It's already coming up in the context of World War One. And it gets like out of control after the defeat. And it's interesting to me that

You know, like Emil Kreipelin, one of the most famous German psychiatrists in 1919, even before their Bittinger-Holgens book comes out, says, I can no longer feel pride in being a German. There are too many horribly disabled, weak people, and we cannot carry this anymore. This histrionic idea that the survival of the nation is at stake, that's German, and that's a post-World War I defeat.

reaction and it's almost I would I don't say this in the book, but I would say it now having read more sources even since I finished it that this is almost the second step in the back legend. Yeah.

Waitman Beorn (22:00.034)
I was going to say that's what it sounds a lot like is we need to find a reason other than we got our asses kicked, you know.

Dagmar Herzog (22:04.601)
That's right. Right. It's not it's not the military generals fault. You know that that's not it. No, it's because we had all these, you know, horribly disgusting people that we had to also take care of. And I think that what's also interesting is a difference between Germany and the rest is that in the United States, maybe there is somebody who argues that maybe 10 percent of all Americans should be sterilized. But

In Germany, it's escalating 20%, maybe even 30 % of my fellow human beings are so subpar they should not be making babies. That's intense. I mean, that's a level of self-loathing among those who soon thereafter will want to be the master race that needs to be registered. That's distinctive.

Waitman Beorn (22:47.052)
And is there, is there the same, the same thing in this moment in history where, cause in the U S as I understand it, you know, a lot of a lot, some of the sterilizations are based on really not anything to do with cognitive disability, like promiscuity or single, single motherhood or, or things like this that are just, yeah. Well, yes. mean, like, right.

Dagmar Herzog (23:02.991)
Those are so blurred. That's moral feeble mindedness. So in the case of boys, it would be petty crime or in the case of girls that would be sleeping around. But of course, the thing about sleeping around is the fear that these are going to be babies that are going to be part of the public charge, right? That basically they're going to be making more people. I'm not saying there's no genetic component. Of course, there's some, we all know this, that there's always an element.

Waitman Beorn (23:20.216)
Right.

Dagmar Herzog (23:29.721)
but so much of the context is one of poverty and it's simply lack of the ability to heal certain things because they don't have the antibiotics yet. And they know that. And so because they know that, but they're busy trying to reverse causation and blame the poor for their own predicament, they start to come up with this idea of looking at clan charts. And if you can find some irregularity somewhere.

Waitman Beorn (23:54.466)
Mm.

Dagmar Herzog (23:56.557)
You know, there's somebody alcoholic, there's somebody epileptic, there's somebody a little bit nutty. They were like an institution because they had a nervous breakdown. see, that's a sign that your cognitive disability was inherited. So there's, and then of course, imagine academics competing with each other for wanting to have, you know, government funding and an institute. know we're so familiar with the emotional dynamics of what that would look like. I will do a study that will compare this group of cognitively disabled people at this institution with this group and see.

what was inherited and what wasn't. So they're kind of creating a realness through their kind of false premise questions.

Waitman Beorn (24:33.484)
Right. And I mean, I'm imagining or I'm remembering this, this amazing, you know, it's one of the, it's from the American eugenics stuff, but you know, it's, it's the family tree with like, you know, that says like feeble minded, feeble minded, you know, moron, idiot, drunkard, you know, and it's an attempt to sort of, pathologize things that are not necessarily, or most often not, you know, genetic, as you point out, you know.

Dagmar Herzog (24:41.721)
Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Dagmar Herzog (24:57.263)
Right. So I just want to say among scholars in Germany, particularly there's like this huge historiographical controversy about whether eugenics and euthanasia are related to each other or whether they're actually separate tracks. Like there's famous people on both sides of this. But one thing that I noticed, of course, is that contemporaries are lumping them together all the time. And what happens after Binding and Helfa published that book in 1920 is that the Protestants

Waitman Beorn (25:10.094)
Hmm.

Dagmar Herzog (25:27.257)
who run the charity organizations who are in any event already ambivalent about their own residents suddenly are on the defensive and are trying to argue, explain why not kill, but they fail. They say one should not kill, but they don't give very good arguments for why not because they participate in exacerbating the disgust and the stigmatization. And they come up with this florid theory that the sexual sin

the licentiousness of the Weimar period encouraged by the media Jews, there's their anti-Semitism, is what's producing so much disability. If people would stop sleeping around, then there wouldn't be so much idiocy. So they're trying to hook this new rising scientific thing that they've always been skeptical of because it's secular to their traditional sexual morality in the hopes that it'll give them more authority and immunize them against the accusation that they're responsible for the death of the folks.

Waitman Beorn (26:25.134)
And we should probably be hopefully a little clear that, you know, as I understand it, euthanasia in its, it's sort of like, it's positive sense is a voluntary thing that an individual decides, you know, an individual of sound mind, you know, decides I want to choose the manner and timing of my own death. And that really nothing that we're talking about is actually euthanasia though. That's the word that gets used by lots of different people. Yeah.

Dagmar Herzog (26:36.333)
Right. Yeah.

Yes.

Dagmar Herzog (26:52.195)
Right, this is why I put it in quotation marks all through the book. And that's the thing that Germans now do too, because it's a euphemism for what was really basically killing people against their will in every single case.

Waitman Beorn (27:04.428)
And it's something that, know, again, we'll get to this, I'm sure, later in the conversation, but, you know, it's one of the things that gets thrown up as a roadblock now by people who are opposed to things like assisted suicide and, you know, death with dignity and that kind of stuff.

Dagmar Herzog (27:15.277)
Because they're afraid that it can be misused in cases of people who can't speak for themselves. And that's one of the dilemmas for history of intellectual disability. Of course, there are people who can speak for themselves who in the Third Reich weren't listened to. Basically, they were like, we're going to kill you anyway. I mean, it's intense how many people actually were quite eloquent and quite able to work and nonetheless were killed. And the churches were like, this wasn't part of the plan. What are you talking about? But yeah.

Waitman Beorn (27:19.862)
Right. Yep.

Dagmar Herzog (27:46.209)
It's justified by being snuck inside there.

Waitman Beorn (27:49.28)
And maybe we should then, that's a good segue to move into very quickly sort of what happens during the third rake with regards to the ways in which we both depart from and follow on with some of the ideas that you've talked about already into sort of the, and again, I'm using scare quotes here, euthanasia program or the T4 program or the killing and sterilization of the mentally disabled.

Dagmar Herzog (28:10.553)
Yeah. Yeah.

Dagmar Herzog (28:15.757)
Yeah, so pretty early after they take over power, the Nazis passed the sterilization law. And of course, they wait till they signed the concordat with the Catholic Church and then they publicize the sterilization law. the Protestants, because in their defensiveness in the 1920s about why not kill, have come up with what I consider a foul moral compromise, which is, at least we're going to be in favor of sterilization.

when the law passes and initially they're thinking voluntary sterilization, but the minute the law passes, it's a coercive law and actually the Protestants get on board and enthusiastically sterilize. they, Protestant church is deeply complicit with the fact that 400,000 of their fellow citizens are sterilized. I mean, they offer the Protestant hospitals, they encourage people to turn people over to the sterilization courts so that they will be tagged as somebody who should be denied the right to reproduce.

and they offer additional religious justifications for the sterilization. So they make it seem moral. They really are part of it. And that has long-term consequences because they're entangled in the crimes. And that's why they have such trouble after 45 in actually, you know, calling out the crimes against the disabled because they're part of the problem. That's incredibly consequential. But the other thing that happens is, of course, once

World War Two starts and already in the run up, the year before that, there have been moves to start putting the child euthanasia program in motion and then also the actual T4 program, which is the six gas chambers on German and Austrian soil, which are basically, with the exception of one of the buildings, are beautiful sanatorium that had been turned into killing centers. The churches are utterly powerless and the charities are powerless. So I would say

There, no one does more than Christians, Catholic and Protestant to try to protect and protest, but they have no power. mean, basically they're utterly slammed because the Nazis just say, you don't want to turn in those reporting forms, we'll just take over your institution or we'll come and we'll choose the people ourselves that we want to kill. The level of impotence is mind blowing and devastating.

Dagmar Herzog (30:41.259)
So, you know, obviously the Catholic bishops write letters to various government officials, the Protestants write letters and try to meet with government officials, but none of that's public. So we all know of those letters now and we teach those in our classes, but those weren't published till after the war. I what the public knows is rumors and everywhere they're living, if they're near Pernod's on the stein or near Grafenek or near Hadamard, they're seeing the gross.

brown black smoke from the crematoria. It's falling across the fields. It's falling across the village. They know what's happening. Children know. Children are like, you're going to go to the murder box now. Like they'll joke with each other. Everyone knows what's happening. Catholic Bishop, Agus, Clemens August von Galen gives that sermon in August of 41, but he is known for a year that the killings are going on. And there are debates among the bishops with each other. Some people are, we shall see. mean, in

times of great political repression, what do people do? Some people are cowed and say, we shouldn't go public. We don't want to have a bigger battle with the government. When others say, no, we need to speak up and mobilize the populace. And they're fighting with each other. Galvin is somebody who wants to take a stand and he finally just does it. And he's triggered by a whole lot of other things that are going on that are causing pressure on the Catholic church. But it's interesting that he makes a slippery slope argument. He basically

when he gives that sermon is not giving a passionate argument in defense of disabled life. He's saying this could hit us when we're all, when we're elderly and demented and can't work anymore or frail. And he says it could hit wounded soldiers. So he's basically getting his congregation and then by extension the entire German public, cause the Royal Air Force drops copies of the sermon and it becomes a major thing. You know, there are underground copies that are transmitted by the resistance movement.

And he say, imagine your beloved lovers, brothers, husbands, sons that are out on the Eastern Front. If you're afraid of that, if you're afraid that they might be killed, you must be against this. So it's an enormous act of courage. He could easily have been arrested, imprisoned and executed, luckily, because of the international optics Hitler decided against that. Didn't want and actually Goebbels, of all people, says I need the support.

Dagmar Herzog (33:10.859)
of the German public and of the Catholic Church for the war on the Eastern Front, gets the Soviet Union. So they make a decision just to shut down the gas chambers. And then, of course, in the second decentralized phase of euthanasia, there's double the kill rate by poison, by medication, overdose, and by starvation. But nobody knows that for a long time afterwards. But it's just interesting to me that

Actually, Golan himself did not give a defense of disabled life. He gave a defense of the worry that there would be a slippery slope to the elderly and to wounded soldiers.

Waitman Beorn (33:47.906)
Right. Like the mistake would be if they started killing healthy people, you know, like that's the danger is, yeah.

Dagmar Herzog (33:52.717)
Right, right, right. But that shows you how deeply the idea that disabled life was not worthy of life had already entered everyone's hearts.

Waitman Beorn (34:02.988)
Right. mean, like it's a given that you're like that these people should be. the danger is that there might be other people other than these people, you know. And, you know, I think a nice a nice segue into sort of moving into the postwar, you know, is that these killings take place after after liberation. mean, I think even though one of the institutions you mentioned, Egelfinger, I did my undergraduate thesis on Nazi doctors.

Dagmar Herzog (34:06.115)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, it's intense.

Waitman Beorn (34:31.106)
And so some of the stuff's kicking around in my head. But I feel like, and it might've been egging far, but several of them, know, the Americans sort of rock up to one of these asylums, you know, weeks and months after either the war is over or the town has been liberated and the doctors and the nurses are still killing people. And they're just kind of like, what is going on? And I think, and maybe that speaks to your comment earlier that the killing rate increases, you know, because these are people that are not being forced.

Dagmar Herzog (34:42.873)
Yeah.

Waitman Beorn (35:00.066)
to do this. It's decentralized and they're doing it on their own.

Dagmar Herzog (35:00.941)
Right, it's no longer being run from Berlin at all. It's basically, I mean, there are attempts from Berlin to reorganize it at some certain points and that partially works, but basically these are independent doctors and nurses making decisions every single day on their own recognizance. And some of them are doing it by systematic starvation where they're experimenting with not giving people fats and vitamins and just see what happens over time. And they're measuring their weights and so on. That's the eagle thing, horror thing.

And these people are just crazy in their inventive delight in figuring all this out and feeling justified in doing it.

Waitman Beorn (35:40.994)
Yeah, I mean, and that speaks to sort of, again, this, I think that's one of those continuities, right? That this is not sort of an invented Nazi sort of thing, you where people are sort of have to kind of grudgingly or deal with or get over themselves to do it. You know, these are things that they actually probably would have done otherwise because they think it's the right thing medically to do.

Dagmar Herzog (36:01.411)
Yeah, they've totally rationalized it. Any cognitive dissonance they might have had, they've completely trampled that down. mean, they are totally feeling justified in what they're doing. They have no sense of remorse at all. And if the argument with respect after the war, after they've been caught and once again lost militarily and are annoyed by Victor's justice, if the argument with respect to killing Jews was, I was following orders, the argument with respect to the disabled is, I thought it was legal.

Waitman Beorn (36:29.942)
Right. mean, and this, and this is again, you know, like moving into the next part, which again, like a lot of, a lot of the book takes place. Your book takes place in the post-war period, but I think it's, it's absolutely a hundred percent relevant to the Holocaust because it deals with these issues. Right. And so then we move into the post-war and can you talk a little bit about, about the attempts to sort of punish this, which speaks directly to what you just mentioned, you know, sort of how do, how, how was it done and how were people making arguments that they shouldn't or were

Dagmar Herzog (36:53.519)
Yeah

Dagmar Herzog (36:59.917)
Yeah, I mean, in both East and West Germany, Soviet zone and then early GDR and in the Western territories and then the early FRG, there are, of course, trials both run by allies and then run by Germans themselves. And a few people do go. There's a few death sentences and there's a few people who do go to prison, but it's over so fast. And basically there's

amnesties and drop charges and general exculpation. the major strategy is this German law that basically says if you didn't know it was illegal, you can get off. Right. So this idea that they were unawareness with regard to the illegality of the deed is the terminology. Unvermaitbarer Verbotsirrtum.

Waitman Beorn (37:51.246)
Okay.

Dagmar Herzog (37:52.047)
Classic. If you didn't know it was wrong. And then there's another strategy, which is to say I had to kill a few in order to save the others. if it hadn't been me, there would have been a worst Nazi taking over and killing everyone. And those are major trial arguments. I had to stay part of this procedure so that I could save more. And then, of course, there's the favorite German one, which I'm too frail to stand trial. And they continue practicing for another 30 years.

And then, you know, in Eastern, the Soviet occupation zone, there's immediate testimonials from local mayors or whatever. He's really a good anti-fascist. He was internally opposed to this whole thing. And in the West, it's like he's really a good Christian. He was internally opposed to this whole thing. So people adapt right away to whatever their new regime is. But the bottom line is that the

Nazi exacerbated propaganda against the disabled has done such damage to everybody's moral orientation that there is massive public support for the perpetrators, hundreds of signatures on petition lists to get them out of jail. Politicians are under pressure to basically create amnesties, and they do. And there is ongoing shame, basically poured on the victims and their families because of this whole

know, excuse me, bullshit thing of the clan charts, which basically blamed an entire family for being deficient. That shame attaches to anybody who had a disabled child. And that continues into the post-war period. And imagine what it be like to bear a child with Down syndrome or cerebral palsy in the post-euthanasia nation. Like the immediate assumption is you did something wrong. So it's a weird mix of inherited original sin or something, like if there's something you did or.

It's like a mystical notion or there's an idea that there is a genetic deficiency. And people hold those beliefs way into the seventies.

Waitman Beorn (39:55.822)
And I was gonna say, it-

think one of things that's interesting when you look at post-war criminal prosecutions is that it often says something about how the society views the crime. And so for example, when I was working on the Wehrmacht, the fact that they weren't prosecuting Wehrmacht people says something about sort of this idea of the Germans being the victim of the war and the POW system situation and all of that. And I'm wondering if you can sort of contextualize what you just said in the context

Because it sounds like, there's something going on with your ordinary German, you know, that they are up in arms about this in a way that they're not making the same argument that, well, I thought the Jews were, you know, evil and needed to be murdered. know, like there's a different justification and there's a different pressure point that is causing people discomfort in a way that they're not. some of them do step up and say that, you know, the anti-Saxon group commanders are being unfairly prosecuted, but it's much more of a

of Victor's justice thing than a they were right kind of argument. is that, you talk a little bit about that maybe?

Dagmar Herzog (41:01.615)
Right, right, right.

Dagmar Herzog (41:06.553)
So, I mean, this maybe gets us into the question of what's the relationship between euthanasia and the Holocaust and what's the relationship between anti-disability, hostility and anti-Semitism. Because in the 1960s, when I talk about this in my introduction, when the philosopher and sociologist Theodore Adorno writes his famous essay, Education After Auschwitz, which is one of his most sorrowful searching attacks ever.

He mentions euthanasia for like two seconds. And he mentions it as an example of something that triggered protest, because he was thinking of the churches. And it turns out that after World War II, especially in the West, not only was Golan's sermon, but all those letters that bishops had written behind the scenes were published immediately. See, we protested. And also the Protestants had, there's a very courageous guy, Paul Gerhard Browne.

Waitman Beorn (42:01.411)
Mm.

Dagmar Herzog (42:05.529)
who was close friends with Fritz von Bordelschwing, who had written a memorandum, which he sent to Hitler pretty early on, in which he showed already in the summer of 1940, I know what's going on here. We know that you guys are killing these people. And this is outrageous. And so all those things are being published, it's because they're showing that they were manly resistors and the Christian resistance, supposedly, by writing these letters.

Christian resistance to euthanasia stands in like a synecdoche for Christian resistance to Nazism as a whole, which of course was non-existent. mean, sorry, there was no protest about the treatment of the Jews. There was no, not officially from either Christian church. And there really wasn't much for the disabled either, but they present that as their huge thing. In fact, they supported a genocidal war. In fact, they...

supported Hitler in every kind of way. So it's really a strategic move, but it confuses people in the aftermath. So by the time Adorno says, you know, inability to identify with others is the reason that something as horrible as Auschwitz happened among otherwise ordinary people. But C in euthanasia shows that you can protest and then he's all depressed and he says, but that must be because it was just one's own group.

And so it's interesting that he assumes that there's a huge contrast that people protested because it was, you know, Aryans, non-Jewish Germans, therefore one's own group, and that's why there was concern. And so he's assuming that Jews are that other that you can't stand up for. But he's wrong, of course, right? Because in fact, he just thinks that there's this contrast, but in fact, they didn't do much with the disabled either, right? So that's an interesting, for him, it's a contrast.

And that's certainly what I was raised with, this idea that the Christians protested on behalf of the disabled, but they didn't protest on behalf of the Jews, right? And then what happens in the course of, you know, our beloved Henry Friedlander, Ashford survivor, historian extraordinaire, who wrote Origins of the Nazi Genocide, which he publishes in the mid-90s, all through the 80s, he is researching in the perpetrator trials. And he is the one who's saying,

Dagmar Herzog (44:25.241)
Jesus, the killing of the disabled is absolutely the precursor. In fact, he thinks it's part of the same Holocaust. He argues that the killing of Roma, the killing of Jews and the killing of disabled are all people who are biologically marked and therefore they are part of the Nazi genocide. He is part of a wider movement also of activists, journalists and scholars in England, in Germany and in the United States who are basically hooking

the little genocide of euthanasia to the big genocide of the Holocaust. And I see that in his case, it's like he seriously has come to understand what the connections are between the perpetrators and the attitudes. But for the activists Germans, it's really a passionately intended strategy for undehumanizing the disabled for insisting that their suffering should matter.

If you can hook it to that big crime and show how closely they're connected and it's the same perpetrators and there's actually overlap and that the killing of disabled Jews is actually a first installment of that mega crime that we now call the Holocaust, then you can understand that this is really killing human beings. It's really murder and not like some other thing. And so this establishment of a connection, a sequentiality between euthanasia and the Holocaust is a major move in the course of the 80s and 90s.

And I would say to this day in the memorial landscape now at all the different T4 centers and in any, anything that's written about disability in the third Reich, that point gets made. There's an insistence on hooking it to the Holocaust in order to try to communicate the intensity of what happened. And then there's what I think, which is not mutually exclusive, but it's what I've come to understand. You're the one who raised Egelfinger, which is this.

psychiatric clinic near Munich, that place where Gerhard Schmidt, who was the psychiatrist who took over right after the war, wrote what I still think is the most important book called Selection in the Institution, Selektion in der Heilandstadt. It should be translated into English because it's amazing. And he's the one who says, he writes it in 1947, but his colleagues in the medical profession suppress it, like literally lose one of the copies of the manuscript on purpose and write to the presses and tell them not to publish it. Like they're really

Dagmar Herzog (46:45.441)
intent on having him not cast aspersions on the German medical profession. But then he finally publishes it in 1965, 20 years later, and it makes the argument that racism and under-Nazism had two dimensions and they're mutually complementary. Racial hatred against Jews and racial fear about imperfections in the would-be dominant group. And that makes so much sense.

because it's really, and he stresses how pathetic Binding and Hoche and their racial arrogance was, this idea, we just get rid of the imperfection and then we will be again that wonderful German folk that we think we should be. And I think that calls attention, this notion of complementarity, that it's two halves of the same coin is also important then for Giesel Abach, who's the most important historian in the 80s of the sterilization campaign.

who demonstrates that those were all coercive sterilizations and stresses that there is two kinds of racism. There's what she calls anthropological against Jews, blacks, and Roma. And then there is hygienic racism, which is against the imperfection within the would-be dominant group. And she has this wonderful quote, that master race had yet to be produced. It didn't exist yet. I mean, she's absolutely right. It's a fantasy of wanting to be a folk that is

strong, healthy, beautiful, and smart. And what I'm struck by is the amount of ruthlessness and the elaborateness of what was put in place in order to try to make true this fantasy.

Waitman Beorn (48:21.1)
Yeah, I mean, and it speaks to something that I've always sort of thought, which is that the term Holocaust is increasingly sort of counterproductive in some ways. You know, I like to use the term the Nazi genocidal project because I think that that encompasses in a much more comfortable way, lots of different programs of killing based on essentially genetic ideas or racial ideas without without having to do this sort of, you know, and you see that you see today with

with the term genocide, where sometimes people feel like they need to tie that to their cause in order to make whatever their cause is, know, severe enough or important enough when you may not have to. I think that sounds like kind of what you're suggesting with regards to the disability people who are, you know, understandably trying to bring people's attention to something and are seeking the gravitas of of couching it under

Dagmar Herzog (49:15.279)
Right? Right.

Dagmar Herzog (49:20.067)
Yep, yep, yep, yep. I mean, it makes total sense that people are wanting to get the suffering of those for whom they are speaking taken seriously. And I want to honor that as a historical phenomenon. But I also want to say it's crime of its own kind, and it shouldn't need to be hooked to the big Holocaust in order to be taken seriously. But that means we need to confront much more.

Waitman Beorn (49:20.928)
under the holocaust to do that.

Waitman Beorn (49:41.633)
Right, absolutely.

Dagmar Herzog (49:46.637)
what it is about us as human beings that social Darwinism and eugenics and good genes and IQ and all those things, they're back, know? Like that's how you recognize a fascist when you see one. I mean, this idea of survival of the fittest and ruthlessness and might makes right, that's this incapacity to tolerate vulnerability and to want to trample on that. That is definitively something we need to theorize as carefully as we've theorized

antisemitism or antisyclism or homophobia. We need to think about it more.

Waitman Beorn (50:19.47)
And it's absolutely something that, know, again, for those of us that are still hanging on to Twitter and other places, you know, you see this all the time with like, you're a midwit or you're low IQ. low IQ, like Kamal Harris was accused of being low IQ, right? Which is like this weird like code word for, you know, inferiority, right? You know, it's, yeah, you know, it's a...

Dagmar Herzog (50:32.003)
Yeah. Yeah, that's right.

Dagmar Herzog (50:38.361)
Yeah. Yes, right. It's not weird at all. It's deliberate.

Waitman Beorn (50:45.518)
It's one way to sort of avoid the most direct racist sort of claims, it's pretty clear. It's a dog whistle frog horn.

Dagmar Herzog (50:50.637)
Yeah, but it's actually trying. Yeah, we need to be careful. It's a huge new thing. Like I am struck by how much the new right-wing movements in Germany and in the UK and in the US are actually now all working with this idea of IQ and are quite fascinated with this question of whether the Nazis had high IQs and so on. You know, I'm really struck. It's just, it's going through social media like wildfire.

Waitman Beorn (51:19.726)
and but before we get to that except i want to talk about another part of the book that i think is really interesting and it is is the struggle of these disability activists and and what and you know in both west and east germany rights of the one of the problems with with being a story like you is whenever you do this period if you look both germany's germany and west germany issues should if you're gonna be good at it which means that which is masteries of two separate environments and so i'm curious if you can tell us first of all you know what what are the you know

Dagmar Herzog (51:27.907)
Yeah.

Dagmar Herzog (51:38.233)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Waitman Beorn (51:48.674)
disability activists have sort of been fighting for this general idea of recognition of the personhood of people who are disabled, you know, from the beginning. what are they specifically trying to fight for and against in the post-war area, post-war period?

Dagmar Herzog (52:04.313)
Right, so the situation is totally different in East and West in the sense that in the East, the GDR to its everlasting credit is anti eugenics and communicates that. whereas in the West that continues, the idea that disability is hereditary continues in the West way into the seventies. But in the East, they pretty clearly say, no, no, we know that the vast majority of disabilities are caused by

know, loss of oxygen in birth process or, you know, some accident that happened subsequently, they know that. But the GDR is a workers state. And so they're pretty good for the moderately disabled in the sense that there was a, there were day programs that were established for people with moderate disabilities. They weren't allowed to be in school. So there's actually a law that does not allow you to educate people.

who are cognitively impaired, there is the responsibility of the Ministry of Health, not of education. Margaret Honecker at Education doesn't want them. So she, the people with severe disabilities are hidden from public view. So the GDR loves to present itself as socialist humanist, and we're so great, and we take care of our fragile, vulnerable members, and we help everybody rehabilitate so they can work. And we help everybody.

who has disabled children so that the mothers can work, so everybody can work. But in fact, those who cannot work are either given to the otherwise strongly distrusted churches, but with like no funding. Like I think it was like 1.70 like, East German Deutschmarks per day per person. Like it's, can't live on that, right? I mean, basically these institutions that tried to be a good oasis had to build their own vegetables and, you know, have to do all this stuff.

had to employ their own residents. Again, this is the old tradition in order to do the work in the fields and the kitchens and so on. It's intense. And they put totally irresponsibly in both West and East, people with cognitive impairments were placed on psychiatric wards as cheap labor. It's totally intense. So it's total mislocation. I mean, it's horrible. Conditions are really bad on both sides. But the thing is that in the East, can't, there's no public sphere.

Dagmar Herzog (54:24.803)
where you can scandalize conditions. There's no permission to, there's no parent organization. I mean, there are parents who within the Protestant church start a few little day programs or whatever, a self-help thing. But basically there is no way to do something like in the West, the Lebenshilfe, which is a nationally networked parent organization, nothing like that. So the terms are different. And what's really interesting is that in West Germany, reparations law,

literally says, you can be recognized as a persecutee of Nazism on grounds of race, religion, or political worldview. Where did the disabled fit? Political worldview? No. Religion? No. Now, maybe it's race, but, then there's arguments among activists. Should we basically agitate to get racial hygiene as another category into the reparations law? Or could we perhaps maybe see

disabled people as also racially persecuted. And that's where he's Lopax argument. And in fact, they are racially persecuted because it's an attempt to extirpate imperfection in the dominant group that counts in the East. That doesn't work in the East. have to say it's class tyranny. You have to play to the Marxist Leninist in the government. And so it's really interesting to me because both are true, of course, because of the long history of disability and poverty. Of course, the Eastern activists are right.

And there are amazing, amazing human beings in the East who create alternative OASIS of care. They're not supported by anybody. They're just like these magical little spaces. And in the West, there is basically horrendous. mean, the conditions are horrendous. The neglect and abuse is appalling also in Catholic and Protestant organizations, institutions in the West. But the thing is that by the time the conscience objectors to military service get in there,

and the children of the elite are finally inside these institutions providing their alternative care, they end up protesting. And there's a whole generation of radical young doctors, nurses, social workers, psychologists, occupational therapists. There's a whole generation that says, we're not doing this. We're going to treat these people like human beings. We can do better. And there's a revolt within the West. It just takes longer in the East because of the repressive political conditions before that can happen.

Waitman Beorn (56:44.498)
I'm curious, going back briefly to the reparations piece, because obviously whenever money gets involved, people then become very interested in definitions and who qualifies and this kind of stuff. so I'm curious, where do, I guess, predominantly homosexual men, right, who are also sterilized, do they get, mean, because they've all essentially, in terms of what's happened to them, it's identical.

Dagmar Herzog (56:54.607)
Yeah, very.

Waitman Beorn (57:11.95)
to what happened to someone who is mentally handicapped. But the reasoning is much more fuzzy. Do they sort of, are they working, is there a group working together in terms of we've all been sterilized, we deserve compensation, or is it sort of like a different search for reparations?

Dagmar Herzog (57:32.271)
It's different because a lot of, not that many, I mean, there were of course horrendous castrations and sterilizations of men accused of homosexuality, but that is not a major feature of their persecution, right? The larger thing is of course the imprisonments and concentration camps and the deaths there, the murders there. So I would say there is a moment when everybody is in cooperation and that is 1987 and they're all invited.

to representatives of every group. Romany Rose is there for the Roma. Gisela Bach is there for the sterilization survivors together with Klaus Dörner, who is the main important psychiatrist, activist and historian. And Ilza Kokula is there on behalf of women, is there on behalf of the male homosexuals. And there's also people there for...

people who had defected from the army. And so they're all the so-called forgotten victims. And of course, they're not forgotten victims. They're aggressively repudiated victims, but they are in fact all invited to address a Bundestag committee that day. And there are also people who are problematic, like a man named Helmut Erhardt, who had been on the sterilization courts as a psychiatrist. And he's constantly arguing against Gisela Bach and saying that she's all wrong. And then in fact, the sterilization survivors are so disabled, they don't even know they were sterilized.

They've just been talked into being upset about it. he has totally it's nothing like the real suffering of the Jews. It's not like he really cares about Holocaust uniqueness, but he's constantly trying to make this distinction and definition and say, no, the Jews were really persecuted. But in fact, the disabled know that was medically necessary to sterilize them. And you wouldn't want to have to look at all those clans again to figure out to research it would cost so much money to research who had been

appropriately sterilized and who not. I mean, these are the kinds of arguments that were made. So it's a major turning point that moment. But other than that, of course, there had been insurgent efforts in the post-war period in various German towns to gather people together who were sterilization survivors and to try to either, you know, in some cases, individuals tried to get the surgeries reversed. In other cases, people tried to mobilize and insist that they deserved recompense as persecutes.

Dagmar Herzog (59:53.657)
but they're defeated over and over and over again because they're defeated as, were, it was medically necessary because you are an unworthy person is what people get told, right? So in every case. And of course, homophobia continues and homosexuality continues to be illegal until 1969. So a lot of those people are re-jailed. I mean, it's not a safe space.

Waitman Beorn (01:00:18.574)
And so how do the, I guess ultimately they do win, right? mean, the disability rights advocates that you mentioned in the book, you know, these people, I mean, it's, you know, it's, yeah, it's, again, it's like everything with the Holocaust, you know, it's, I guess it's better than nothing, right? But.

Dagmar Herzog (01:00:28.559)
Too little, too late. Right. I mean, it's important that the suffering of the survivors of the sterilizations got acknowledged because those are the, know, as Gisela Bach tried to explain to me, they're the not so disabled. These are people who eloquently fought against being sterilized. They are not like people who are, you know,

totally without capacity to speak because those people wouldn't be sterilized, they would just be killed, right? It's a different category of humanity. But the contempt and the shame and the trauma that people lived with is unbelievable. So one of the things that happens that day in 1987 when they're all in front of the Bundestag committee is that there actually are two survivors of the sterilizations who speak also, Fritz Nieman and Clara Novak, and their stories are really, powerful. But again,

that ex-Nazi psychiatrist Helmut Erhard comes and says, well, I mean, it's hard to separate with people like that what they've been talked into afterwards. Was that really their experience? Right. I mean, the level of elite condescension towards the vulnerable is less and less and less. And so the triumph really, the people that I honor the most, my heroes on both sides of the wall in East and West are those who said,

We can have a revolutionary different perspective on disability. We can see, we can stop with the pecking order, the hierarchization of human value. We can see even the most disabled person as our equal and we can be in mutuality and reciprocal relationship with them. And we can see their possibility at every moment, like engaging therapeutically or educationally is everybody deserves that. So in the East, it's actually kind of classic, but in the East it's...

Christian dissenting doctors, pediatricians who run this amazing institution called the Katarinenhof near the Czech and Polish borders. They're the ones who come up with this notion of developmental care that everybody, also the so-called care case people deserve to be developed. They deserve therapeutic engagement and it is our responsibility to provide everything for their wellbeing and create a sense of safety and belonging for them. And in the West it's Marks's special education teachers.

Dagmar Herzog (01:02:50.841)
who are constantly red-baited for their Marxism, but what's really, I'm convinced, most threatening about them is they're also influenced by Martin Buber, the philosopher of education, the Jewish, also interested in mysticism person, who has this notion of I and thou, and this idea of a reciprocal relationship between teacher and pupil, which they, that I-thou feeling of equality and...

and relationality, but also the sense that it's the teacher who's responsible for adapting to the people, bringing, nurturing the best in them. They bring that to working with the most severely disabled. So it's that radical egalitarianism that I think is what's most threatening about them and why they keep getting red-baited, but they really are amazing. And they inspire a whole generation of de-institutionalizers who want to dismantle those huge institutions and move everybody into smaller family size.

supported living arrangements. They motivate a school integration movement, which is really beautiful, which is 50 years ago already. There have been wonderful experiments and inclusive schooling that work great. And yeah, and they basically show that it's possible to be different. They have a revolutionary different concept of human existence.

Waitman Beorn (01:04:04.514)
And this is one of things that I think is so interesting when we look at these, these, and I hate this term, but the sort of the other victim groups, right, of, of, the Nazis, you know, and, you know, again, you would, you would never have, even if someone believed it, no one would come to before the Reichstag or the Bundestag and say, you know, but he actually is Jewish and we know the Jews are bad. And so like, you know, that that's why they were victimized, right. In a way that they will, or maybe they will.

Dagmar Herzog (01:04:11.629)
Yeah. Yeah.

Dagmar Herzog (01:04:29.455)
Actually, I have written a whole chapter about post Holocaust antisemitism in Colbert Freud, so could read about. Seriously, the debates about PTSD, the debates about whether you deserve reparations for mental health damages after, know, the actually ex-Nazi psychiatrist came and said, anybody with a healthy constitution should be able to get over three years in Ashwoods within six months of the latest. mean, and they're totally, they're oversensitive. Yeah.

Waitman Beorn (01:04:35.096)
But I mean, but you know that.

Waitman Beorn (01:04:44.216)
Right.

Waitman Beorn (01:04:54.222)
I mean.

But I mean, you take my point, right? That, you know, they're not, they're not going to come and say that, you know, well, actually the world Jewish conspiracy is true and therefore, you know, this person, this person should be exonerated for working in Auschwitz in a way that, that people do continue to say after the war, well, the gypsies are criminals, they're just criminals. so, so these things sort of live in a way that, that sort of the crazy Nazi anti-Semitism doesn't live at least in sort of the accepted public sphere. And it's interesting.

Dagmar Herzog (01:04:59.951)
What's this?

Dagmar Herzog (01:05:04.663)
Yeah. Right. Yeah.

Dagmar Herzog (01:05:13.923)
Right, right, yes, right, right, right, that's right, right.

Waitman Beorn (01:05:27.534)
that these people's battles have to continue. mean, the battle against endosymmetism obviously continues, but not in the same way. But these people were sort of fighting the same battle again, you know.

Dagmar Herzog (01:05:34.415)
That's right. It's all about power. It's all about power. You have to have, you know, good lawyers, good arguments, and a lot of leverage. And people who were in these vulnerable other groups had no leverage.

Waitman Beorn (01:05:51.202)
And so how does this compare, you know, because one of the things like, you know, my, daughter's school here in the UK, you know, she has kids with, different needs, you know, and, and, and they're in the classroom, you know, and they, and they have like an additional teaching assistant if they need to sort of help them with, with stuff. And so it's exactly what, what you've described as sort of what the, what the Germans came up with. How does, how does this compare to sort of now, you know, is, is, is this something that people look to Germany after the, you know, and said, they're, they're doing it right or.

Dagmar Herzog (01:06:04.559)
Right.

Waitman Beorn (01:06:21.366)
Are other countries and systems not doing this? What is sort of the modern impact?

Dagmar Herzog (01:06:25.487)
What's weird about Germany is that there has been a revolution in attitude in the sense that in the first decades of the 21st century, we really have seen a changed language and an effort to undo disability hostility, which is really impressive across a lot of venues. And Germany ratified the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities in 2009.

that was supposed to lead to inclusion in classrooms. But because Germany has this obsessive adherence to a three track class stratified educational system that they're very attached to, at age 10, kids are divided into going to gymnasium and then they'll go on to university or they're going to Realschule where they'll be white collar workers or they're going to Hauptschule, they'll be blue collar workers. There's this class tracking and occasionally a poorer kid or a

migrant kid, whatever makes it into Kama'a, even makes it, but not too many. I mean, it's striking that this stratified system has persisted for so long and efforts to create GazapShulin that mixed the kids. And the American style have sort of happened here and there, but not too much. It's that there's always also been a fourth tier below that, which is the learning disabled school. Germany is invested in its segregated schooling system.

for the moderately disabled. And then there's even like a fifth tier for the significantly mentally disabled, along with like schools for the blind and for the hearing impaired and so on. And this obsession with segregation means that actually special ed teachers are deeply invested in maintaining the segregated system, right? And so that is distinctive German, like other countries in Europe do not have this. It's a real problem because they're like totally into it.

And so also parents are like, do I want my kid to be in a safe space where the teachers are experts on their dealing with their disability or do I want them to be, you know, in a chaotic classroom with people who are going to be mean to them and where they can't follow what's going on on the board and all that kind of stuff. So it's a, it's a big problem. And what the radicals of the seventies and eighties proved is that you have to change education for everybody.

Dagmar Herzog (01:08:46.339)
You got to stop having people looking forward at a board. You have to do things in small group work. You have to mix different age grades so that like seven to nine year olds are in a class together and everybody is working in solidarity with each other and collectively solving a problem. You have to treat all the subject areas, biology, math, language together. Like basically you have to work on things that interest kids.

and be in interaction with them and everybody's working on their own things. So I have now gone to visit a lot of schools where inclusion is happening. And you can see that in the schools where there is a commitment to anti-racism, to welcoming refugees, to understanding the kids are from bilingual backgrounds and some of them are traumatized and they're living in fear of deportation or at least their parents deportation, all those things. If you start from that premise and you just transform how you deal with the kids from the get-go, it works beautifully.

In the places where they're still having this hierarchical thing and then there's like one kid with an impairment with an adult beside them, they stick out like a sore thumb and the kids don't actually learn the solidarity. So what's happened is there had been a move since they ratified the UN convention towards shutting down the segregated schools and doing more inclusion. because people, the teachers themselves aren't trained in creative inclusion, they're resistant.

special ed people want to keep their segregated spaces and parents are just like totally freaked out because they want their kids to be happy. It's a big mess. I would say that the AFD, so Alternative für Deutschland, the far right party has made no other far right party in the world is as obsessed with saying mean things about disabled people as that party is. They're obsessed. But they know that they can play to people's anxieties about their kids' education.

And so they're probably the leading edge of the attack on inclusion. There is not a single party platform that doesn't attack inclusion, the very thing that's demanded by the UN Convention, but it's working because it taps into much broader anxieties that people have about their own children.

Waitman Beorn (01:10:58.99)
And I wonder if that's something that is common to other far right sort of movements in the modern day period around the world.

Dagmar Herzog (01:11:05.817)
I mean, look, you know, Donald Trump has said about his own nephew's child. mean, his nephew, Fred Trump, adores his child, William, who is 25 years old and significantly disabled. But Donald Trump says, why don't you just let him die and move to Florida? So, and he has said that also during his prior presidency when Fred brought a whole bunch of parent activists to the White House to talk to him about, you know, especially kids with complex medical needs, basically you need money for that.

and you need to actually organize something. And he thought, you my uncle is president right now. Maybe we can get some action on this. And Donald Trump listened politely. And then when those parent activists left the room, he called his nephew back and he said, those people that expense the shape they're in, maybe they should just be led to die. So that euthanistic impulse.

I don't think that's unrelated to the nonsense about Kamala being low IQ. I think the whole thing is, or the idea that we have good genes in this country. There's the racism against the migrants. And then there's this idea that we want to only have the smartest and the best. you you love.

Waitman Beorn (01:12:15.214)
Well, then there's also this, I think that plays directly into this great replacement theory thing too, of the white genocide and this idea that, you know, because implicit, implicit in the fact that white people are being outbred or that's the implication is that they're being outbred by inferior people. And that's, that's sort of the, that's the bad thing, right? Is that not only are white people not having enough babies, but the people that are having more babies are worse and genetically inferior. then

I mean, implicit in that this is where you sort of had that blend of race hygiene with with sort of eugenics and.

Dagmar Herzog (01:12:46.787)
Right. Yeah. Of course. mean, the bell curve mentality. All right. I understand. But the trouble with it, the difference is slightly there in the United States that we also have a strand of anti-intellectualism in the US. It is not as fair in terms. Yeah. I mean, you know, we love the college uneducated, you know, whatever. mean, there's there's a deference to the not college educated and there's a suspicion of intellectuals, but that co-exists with this

Waitman Beorn (01:12:58.764)
Of course. More than a strand, I would argue.

Dagmar Herzog (01:13:16.651)
Now, I would say, renaissance obsession with high IQ. mean, Elon Musk is now and Rameswamy together are advertising for high IQ people to help them figure out what to cut in the federal government. So this weird way in which it's like flattering the merely average, you you are high IQ, you could be doing this, you know, it's coexisting with assumptions that those people coming over the border are somehow low IQ, or those people who are breathing too much.

Waitman Beorn (01:13:28.267)
Right.

Waitman Beorn (01:13:44.11)
And also, I think also a place you see it is with, I guess you would call them sort of the moderately, you know, mentally handicapped, I guess that might even be too strong, but people, know, ADHD, dyslexia, know, dyspraxia, different ways of learning. I see sometimes that that is ridiculed along with like the blue haired cat lady and the DEI and all of that, as if, again, which is a way of sort of devaluing, you know, this idea that, gosh, you know, has,

Dagmar Herzog (01:14:05.849)
Right, right.

Waitman Beorn (01:14:13.932)
the rate of ADHD really increased or people just making it up kind of thing, know, whereas it's actually, or are we just better able to recognize it, you know, and therefore that's why the rates are going up.

Dagmar Herzog (01:14:16.985)
Right, right.

Dagmar Herzog (01:14:23.695)
So we can see a shift in the American Republican Party from the last 15 years from a sentimental defense of Down syndrome children, right? Remember Sarah Palin? I remember actually a different kind of trisomy that a Senator Santorum from Pennsylvania had as a child. I mean, there was a sentimental move. There was a major part of the...

anti-abortion movement was very concerned with abortions on grounds of fetal anomaly. So we were living through a sensitive moment, and that's gone. It's over. We now have a feral argument that is all about the strong is the better and the mocking of those who are in some way vulnerable. Exactly as you're saying, this confusion about is that really a vulnerability or is that just simply ADHD so you can get more time on your test?

Waitman Beorn (01:15:16.716)
Yeah, yeah. Or like what they did to Tim Walz's son, know, and the way he's reacting is... And again, there's the... I mean, this is a conversation for whole other podcast, but there's also obviously the masculinity piece and the sort of, you know, what makes one a manly man and like, you know, all of this is in some ways tied up with these ideas as well.

Dagmar Herzog (01:15:20.995)
Yes, yeah.

Dagmar Herzog (01:15:31.403)
Yeah, right.

Dagmar Herzog (01:15:37.155)
Yeah. I mean, we are now living through the ascent of a feral right. It's very different from the sentimental right.

Waitman Beorn (01:15:46.38)
Well, I don't want to leave on that awful down note, but I mean, this is what we do. So maybe we could end with maybe a slightly more instructive question, which is the one I always ask with everybody that comes on the show, which is if you could recommend one book on the Holocaust that's been influential for you or that you recommend for our listeners to check out, what would it be?

Dagmar Herzog (01:15:52.431)
you

Dagmar Herzog (01:16:10.607)
It's actually Omar Barta's novel. So it's called The Butterfly and the Axe. It was published in 2023. And I think it's mind-blowingly good. And I will definitely be teaching it in the future. And I was surprised. But obviously, he spent decades researching the Holocaust that really came to fruition in his book, Anatomy of a Genocide.

Waitman Beorn (01:16:14.166)
Alright, well there you go.

Waitman Beorn (01:16:38.478)
Mm-hmm.

Dagmar Herzog (01:16:39.021)
Right? So we studied a lot about Galicia, now Ukraine. But what you understand is that every little bit that I know from his work and other people's work, including your Marching to Darkness, including my student Miranda Brether, who's working on Jews in hiding in Poland and the involvement of Polish village elders and organizing manhunts and so on, Jan Grabowski's work, all of that stuff about the multi-layered inter-ethnic

fabric of those societies and the mix of resentments. Every little detail has been carefully researched and then put into this novel. So it's an unbelievable ability that students will then have to understand the emotional texture of the relationships between people and what led to participation of local non-Jews in the killings. So I really recommend it.

Waitman Beorn (01:17:32.498)
And also, you know, the role and feeling of an historian and a family member, you know, kind of because he embodies those. for those listeners, that's episode one of the Holocaust History Podcast, as with Omar Bartov talking about his about his novel. So you can you can go listen to episode one and hear all about it from the horse's mouth. And it's a great conversation because he really gets into sort of how and why he wrote that book. And it's something that

You know, I've been thinking about a lot in terms of, you know, when does an historian, someone that is, you know, very much, I think, wedded to our ideas of fact, when do we turn to fiction because we just can't express something about the past in our sort of oeuvre, to use a big word, but, with the way that we normally do it. And I think that that's kind of partially what he's doing there.

Dagmar, thank you so much for coming on and for our listeners. Again, please, if you can take a minute and give us a rating and a comment on Apple podcasts or on Spotify, let us know how it's going. Obviously I use the word like and enjoy in scare quotes because the topics that we talked about are not particularly enjoyable. But if you're finding the podcast meaningful, you know, please leave us a note and let us know.

And again, once again, Dagmar, thank you so much for coming on and talking about your book. I will put this in the show notes. So thanks so much for coming on.

Dagmar Herzog (01:19:06.063)
Thank you so much for having me at St. Otter.