Aktion T4

Quella di Asperger è una delle sindromi più celebri della storia della psichiatria novecentesca. Il suo successo è stato tale da oltrepassare i confini della clinica, tanto da essere oggi nota presso il grande pubblico come una variante dello "spettro autistico". Molto meno conosciuta è la vicenda di Hans Asperger, medico, cattolico e convinto uomo di destra, che formulò la diagnosi di «psicopatia autistica» per descrivere quei bambini con un profilo comportamentale caratteristico, in cui l'autismo era presente senza associarsi a ritardo mentale marcato. Il libro di Sheffer ricostruisce la sua storia di medico e il contributo offerto alle politiche eugenetiche naziste.

Abstrakt: Die maschinelle Vernichtung der Kranken in Deutschland begann mit dem Präzedenzfall Knauer. Der folgende Artikel beschreibt wie das Prozedere und die Methoden der Tötung aussahen. Abstract: The mechanical destruction of the sick in Germany began with the Knauer precedent. The following article describes what the procedure and methods of killing looked like.

This is an English translation of an article originally published in German on the T4 "euthanasia" program targeting disabled people during the Third Reich. The essay examines the contours of ableism in Germany that have allowed these killings to remain unreported and uncommemorated. The author focuses on the murder of his great-grandmother and its effects on four generations of his family. This essay provides a vital historical record as well as a model for reflecting upon and understanding the legacy of the Holocaust and the persistence of ableism.

Il primo sterminio nazista. Le vittime erano malati di mente, portatori d'handicap o semplicemente coloro che non rispondevano ai razzisti parametri nazisti. Circa 100.000 uomini, donne e bambini furono assassinati negli Anstalten nei territori del Terzo Reich.

The book entitled "Literatura polska wobec ludobójstwa" ("Polish Literature towards Genocide") is an attempt to recognise and demarcate a research area which has so far been either practically ignored or perceived fragmentarily by Polish literary studies. Crucial and recognised thematic areas within the 20th and 21st century Polish literature are: the literature of the Holocaust, regarding the extermination of Jews, and also the literature of the Second World War and German occupation, partially related to the issue of Shoah and also to the extermination of the Polish in concentration camps, and during the Katyn massacre and the Warsaw Uprising. There is already a large number of papers and studies that focus on various aspects of these research areas, including certain achievements in the field. On the other hand, however, there is still lack of thought and reflection upon the literature triggered by other acts of genocide and mass murder. No such reflection has been taken up yet, nor have there been any attempts to stipulate whether within the Polish literature there exist any works devoted to massacres other than the annihilation of Jews and the extermination of the Polish, i.e. felonies perpetrated by groups other than the Nazis (Germans) and the Communists (Soviets).
This book constitutes an attempt to partially fill this gap. And in terms of the manner in which it relates to literature that reacts to genocide other than the Shoah, it ought to be perceived as a reconnaissance. Such an ‘exploratory’ nature can be attributed to the chapters devoted to literary echoes of the massacre of Armenians by the Turkish, Nazi endeavours to annihilate the mentally and physically handicapped and Gypsies, as well as the Srebrenica massacre committed by the Serbs. Although these approaches are mainly thematological in their nature, they also include issues related to the genesis and function of this literature – aesthetic, cognitive, ideological and social. Literature happened to be the fastest form of commemorating the victims of genocidal violence, and quite frequently it remained, for many years, the only existing channel that could be accessed by relatively broad circles within society. Despite the domination of ‘the new media’, the works of literature and their interpretations did influence and still do influence the perception of particular crimes and felonies. Naturally, these works and their interpretations happen to be determined by politics and ideology, and this issue is also scrutinised here, for example, in the chapter devoted to the Baku-based background of Stefan Żeromski’s "The Coming Spring" ("Przedwiośnie") (the Bolshevik revolution and the Azeri-Armenian conflict) and in the final chapter of the book, focusing on the literary features of the Srebrenica massacre (and the war in the former Yugoslavia).
The purpose of this book, however, is not to draw a panorama of the Polish literature referring to all instances of genocide, or even to all genocidal events within 20th century Europe. It is beyond the author to manage a task of such proportions, since there is not even a limited bibliography registering literary works on the issue of the extermination of Armenians, the mentally handicapped or Gypsies (and, similarly, the extermination of Russian war prisoners). Most certainly, the catalogue of the literary works recalled therein and related to the aforementioned genocidal events is incomplete, despite the author’s best endeavours. Ironically, another research obstacle on the road to synthesis is not a lack, but an abundance of material. Namely, an enormous – and impossible to comprehend nowadays – corpus of (recognised and more or less effectively catalogued) texts and metatexts related not only to the Holocaust, but also to the effects of the murderous policy implied by the Bolsheviks and the Soviet Union: the October revolution, the Polish–Soviet War, deportations and labour camps, or the Katyn massacre. Naturally, it is significantly easier to include (and much more difficult to find) less numerous texts regarding more exotic (from the Central European perspective) genocide, e.g. the massacre of the Congolese by Belgians. The Polish reader could learn about this crime mainly through "Heart of Darkness" even though Joseph Conrad’s book is not the only source that mentions it for the Polish literature, another being, for instance, the recently published poems by Dariusz Tomasz Lebioda ("Leopold II" and "Belgian Congo"). On the other hand, letters from a journey by Henryk Sienkiewicz, published over a hundred years ago, indicates that mass murders committed in places like Africa and America were reflected not only in the 20th and 21st century Polish literature, e.g. in numerous reportages by Ryszard Kapuściński, but also in the works created in the 19th century. Presumably, recently initiated by postcolonial criticism, the studies on the Polish travel literature and reportage (past and present) are likely to reveal a relatively bulky set of already forgotten or previously undiscovered texts related to genocide. Surely, the massacres of Poles in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia, recalled by such authors as Melchior Wańkowicz, Włodzimierz Odojewski and Stanisław Srokowski, and more recent atrocities such as the Rwandan genocide, scrutinised by Wojciech Tochman in his reportage entitled "Today We’re Going to Draw Death" ("Dzisiaj narysujemy śmierć"), will have greater repercussions in the Polish literature than crimes committed by European – and in Africa also by Arabian – colonisers, since these are the areas within the Polish literature that have not been researched yet.
On the other hand, the chapters of the book devoted to the literature of the Holocaust ought to be perceived as an attempt to enrich and expand the state of research, and in some cases – as a correction of the existing conclusions. They focus on the literary work and legend of Władysław Szlengel, the most prominent Polish-writing poet in the Warsaw ghetto; peculiar manifestations of the reception of The "Locomotive" ("Lokomotywa") by Julian Tuwim, in the form of its ‘Holocaust’ paraphrases written by children locked in ghettos and concentration camps; memories by Leon Weliczker, a prisoner of the Janowska concentration camp in Lviv and a member of the ‘death brigade’; the genesis of "Medallions" ("Medaliony") by Zofia Nałkowska, who ‘processed’ documents into literature and contributed to the making of Professor Rudolf Spanner’s ‘dark legend’; a literary motif of ‘a trip to the museum’ (a former concertation and death camp) and the textual genesis of" Massacre of the Boys" ("Rzeź chłopców") and "Pigtail" ("Warkoczyk") by Tadeusz Różewicz, and more generally, the poetics of the so-called ‘tight throat’.
It is the author’s intention that "Literatura polska wobec ludobójstwa" ("Polish Literature towards Genocide") becomes, in the future, an impulse for other researchers to create a possibly comprehensive picture of, first Polish, and then world literature of genocide, patterned on the existing monographies and encyclopaedias of the Holocaust literature. The reasons for this are that mass murders ‘illuminate’ one another, that today we know more and more about them, thanks to historians, and that the literary works referring to these murders, the literatures that found these works, and the languages that found these literatures, correspond and communicate with one another better and, most certainly, more often, at least in the sphere of lexis regarding mass murders. A meaningful manifestation of this is the various ‘modulations’ of the word Holocaust, which nowadays refers not only to different signs of genocide, but also to the gradual annihilation of the animal world performed by men.


Key words: Polish literature of 20th and 21st century; genocide in literature; Armenian genocide, 1915–1923; killing the mentally and physically handicapped people by Nazis, 1939–1945; Jewish Holocaust, 1939–1945; annihilation of Gypsies, 1939–1945; Srebrenica massacre; commemorating the victims of genocidal violence.

What the Nazis called Aktion T4 was a euthanasia program, officially started on August
18th, 1939. The registration operations for individuals with physical or mental handicaps
were followed by forced sterilization and transfer to clinics organized to kill. In this
article, I try to explain the mechanisms that allowed the memory of Aktion T4 to be
preserved and passed from one generation to the next; memories of the “merciful death”
of approximately 70,000 “lives unworthy of life,” that find themselves embedded in
family records and family history. In the first section, I summarize the discussion that
resulted from the theories of Charles Darwin and Francis Galton. Even if those theories
do not in any way allude to the consequences that we have witnessed decades after their
publication, they started a debate about the value of life and the legitimacy of human
intervention in the selection of hereditary character traits, as well as the concept of race
and the different methods and forms of theories and eugenics that were later adopted in
Europe and in the United States. In the case of Germany, translated into Rassenhygiene,
those concepts flowed into the Nazi project of purification of the German people.
Through interviews with families who had a relative interned in one of the program's
clinics spread across the Reich territory between 1939 and 1945, I investigate the
evolution and passage of memories stored within the family sphere, paying attention to
the generational steps and processes of trauma. These stories are born from a complicated
process of reconstructing these memories via interviews. Their recollections were full of
painful silences and negations, similar to the thought process which led the victims to
live in a condition that they could not understand, and separated them from the world
before they were each made to face a solitary death, far from any contact with their
families. The trauma that I analyze concerns actions that had been carried out by previous
generations; in the majority of cases, younger generations were not aware of the destiny
of their murdered relatives and therefore tried to rebuild the stories of people who they
never had the opportunity to meet. I examine the problematic relationship of those being
interviewed with the end-of-life issue and also the sense of guilt which is generated by the
awareness of crimes that were committed. Aktion T4 was not a crime committed outside
the national borders, nor a crime that extended beyond the private sphere to the “others.”
Instead, it existed within the most central and intimate place of Nazi culture: the family.

La memoria del programma di eutanasia nazista Aktion T4, che tra il 1940 e il 1945, tra le sue diverse fasi,  portò all’omicidio di circa 300.000  “vite indegne di essere vissute”, è forse ancora oggi la più problematica tra le memorie dei crimini nazisti e quella la cui elaborazione è più difficile, per la società tedesca. 
Basandomi sull’indagine che sto portando avanti per la mia ricerca dottorale, attraverso interviste a famiglie tedesche che hanno avuto un parente internato e ucciso in una delle cliniche del programma, ho osservato come a imbattersi in quello che esse stesse definiscono “segreto di famiglia” sia stata la generazione dei nipoti o pronipoti delle vittime, che hanno tentato di lottare contro i silenzi delle generazioni precedenti, le omissioni e talvolta anche contro la volontà di cancellare il ricordo dei parenti uccisi, per ricostruire la storia nascosta della propria famiglia.
Se in alcuni casi infatti, non sono state conservate fotografie delle vittime o ne è stato cancellato il volto, in altri esse sono state addirittura ricordate con nomi diversi.
La trasmissione della memoria dell’uccisione dei portatori di handicap fisici e mentali ha messo in moto dinamiche tali che rendono questo caso specifico molto diverso rispetto alla trasmissione di eredità traumatiche relative ad altri crimini nazisti. Le famiglie di queste vittime si definiscono infatti, al tempo stesso, parte di due gruppi opposti: se l’essere tedeschi li investe di quella colpa collettiva, “metafisica”, di cui parlava Karl Jaspers, l’aver avuto una vittima tra i propri famigliari gli permette di potersi schierare al fianco delle vittime del Nazismo e quasi li solleva dal peso della responsabilità tedesca.
Nel mio articolo, riflettendo su questi temi, illustrerò parte dei dati raccolti fino ad ora cercando di analizzare come e con quali caratteristiche questa memoria famigliare è stata tramandata, alterata, cancellata e quello in cui il trauma ha agito nei passaggi generazionali: l’ "eredità silenziosa" che ogni generazione ha ricevuto dalla precedente, nella quale il "non detto" è stato uno strumento utile e necessario per elaborare il dolore.

The cruelty of crimes committed by the Nazis during World War II is beyond belief. Ethnic cleansing focused mainly on the Jewish community and has been spoken of the loudest since the end of the war, but this was not the only course of eugenic thought. People who had been harmed by birth-the disabled and mentally ill, were not spared the torturers wearing German uniforms. Th is article presents the circumstances involved relating to the activities of AktionT4 in Germany and the territories under German occupation, and performs a legal analysis of these activities in the light of international law in the so-called Doctors' Trial, the fi rst of the follow-up processes to Th e Nuremburgh Trial. Th e author introduces the legal bases of the sentences issued in the trial and highlights the process of shaping the responsibility of individuals in international law. Th e participation of Polish law enforcement agencies in prosecuting crimes against humanity committed on the patients of psychiatric hospitals and care centers in Poland, is also addressed. Th e proceedings in this case have been ongoing to this day, now conducted under the auspices of the Institute of National Remembrance.

The author of this paper uses autoethnography to explore some of her experiences being born with the congenital malformation syndactyly, calling the process her deformography. She engages in this process for two reasons:  a) to move syndactyly out of the medical literature, and b) as a step in a self-empowering process towards acceptance. In so doing, the paper explores social ideologies of difference that have affected her in her lifetime, with particular focus on Ancient Sparta and Nazi Germany. The paper concludes with the author’s realization that although she understands how difference “works” on a cognitive level, she has more to do on her healing journey.

Vjera Biller (*1903 in Đakovo, heute Kroatien, +1940 in Hartheim) gehört zu einer ganzen Generation ‚vergessener’ Künstlerinnen, die in den 1920er Jahren große Erfolge feierten, jedoch nach ihrer Verfol-gung durch das NS-Regime in Österreich völlig aus dem kollektiven Gedächtnis und dem Kanon der Kunstgeschichte verschwunden sind. Biller tritt schon mit 16 Jahren erstmals als Künstlerin in Erschei-nung und stellt 1919 erfolgreich gemeinsam mit der ungarischen MA-Avantgarde in Budapest aus. Zwischen 1921 und 1922 zählt sie zu den aktivsten Künstlerinnen des Berliner Sturm-Expressionismus. Ihre von der Ästhetik des Primitivismus sowie vom Leitmotiv des Kindlichen geprägten Arbeiten, in denen sich eine Auseinandersetzung mit der eigenen jüdischen Herkunft artikuliert, werden hier ge-meinsam mit Werken auch heute noch hinlänglich bekannter, meist männlicher Avantgardisten wie Alexander Archipenko, Marc Chagall oder Paul Klee gezeigt. Ab 1924 ist Biller eine der wenigen Frauen, die sich innerhalb des Zenitismus – der von Ljubomir Micić ins Leben gerufenen jugoslawischen Avantgardebewegung in Belgrad – etablieren kann.
Billers Leben und Werk, allen voran ihre charakteristischen Kinderfiguren, die ihren Erfolg über Län-der- und Gruppengrenzen hinweg begründet haben, stehen im Fokus dieser Präsentation des kürzlich erschienen Buches von Dr. Mirjam Wilhelm mit dem Titel Vjera Biller und das Kindliche, Bielefeld: transcript, 2022. Es wird ein Schlaglicht auf Billers facettenreiches, jedoch während des Zweiten Welt-kriegs größtenteils zerstörtes Oeuvre geworfen und im Sinne einer (Kunst-)Geschichtsforschung ex negativo die wichtigsten Aspekte dieses Fragments vorgestellt, in denen sich Zeitgeschichte des 20. Jahr-hunderts geradezu symptomatisch verdichtet. Die ‚vergessene‘ Künstlerin Vjera Biller wird dabei aus ganz unterschiedlicher Perspektive mal als transeuropäische Avantgardistin, mal als New Woman, mal als Exilantin und schließlich als vom NS-Regime im Rahmen des „Euthanasie“-Programms Verfolgte wieder sichtbar gemacht.

Wie auch an anderen Orten des NS-Terrors in Oberösterreich wurde die Erinnerung an die Verbrechen in Schloss Hartheim lange Zeit fast ausschließlich von ausländischen Verbänden getragen. Das Schloss diente in der „Normalität“ der Nachkriegszeit als Wohnhaus. Die österreichische Öffentlichkeit zeigte wenig Interesse, an diesem Ort eine Gedenkkultur für die rund 30.000 Ermordeten – psychische kranke und behinderte Menschen sowie KZ-Häftlinge und Zwangsarbeiter/innen – zu etablieren. Die Nutzung des Gebäudes als Wohnhaus stieß bei Opferangehörigen und –organisationen auf großes Missfallen. Erst 1969 mündeten die Bemühungen um ein würdigeres Gedenken vor Ort in die Einrichtung von zwei Gedenkräumen durch den Eigentümer. Es waren immerhin die ersten Gedenkräume an einem der sechs Mordstätten der „Aktion T4“.
Aus dem Behindertenbereich und durch Bemühungen um Reformen in der Psychiatrie kamen in den 1980ern neue Impulse für eine würdige Erinnerung in Hartheim. In dieser Zeit waren auch verstärkt Bemühungen wahrnehmbar, die Opfer der NS-Euthanasie als gleichberechtigte Opfer des Nationalsozialismus anzuerkennen. In den 1990ern konnte in einem in Bezug auf den Umgang mit der NS-Zeit veränderten Klima der Verein Schloss Hartheim gegründet werden, der die Landespolitik für die Schaffung eines Lern- und Gedenkorts gewann, welcher wiederum 2003 eröffnet wurde.
Der Beitrag soll den schwierigen Weg hin zur Schaffung dieses Lern- und Gedenkorts darstellen und die Konflikte vor dem Hintergrund der allgemeinen Tendenzen in der Auseinandersetzung mit den NS-Verbrechen, insbesondere mit der NS-Euthanasie, in Österreich beleuchten.