Category: disability

Remembering the Holocaust – and the disabled victims who died in the T4 programme

Katharine QuarmbyLeave a comment

In this extract from my book, Scapegoat: why we are failing disabled people (Portobello, 2011), on Holocaust Memorial Day, I am sharing my analysis of how the T4 Nazi killing machine was inspired by eugenics enthusiasts in the UK and the US. It’s a grim read, I’m afraid, but important to remember why so many people died. Never again.

Extract from: Scapegoat: why we are failing disabled people (Portobello, 2011)

by Katharine Quarmby

The legitimisation of eugenic views through Europe and American ended in a logical, if horrifying outcome: the systematic murder of thousands of disabled people in Germany, after the Nazis came to power in 1933. The National Socialist Party wanted to create a pure Aryan nation, and eradicate the taint of the Jewish people (as well as homosexuals and gypsies) But a lesser known part of their moral thought was that “degenerate”, impaired Aryans should also be eliminated. In some ways what happened to Jewish people was a tragedy foretold in the slaughter of innocent disabled children and adults, used to perfect the killing technology that was then practised on the Jews. Racial hygiene, as Hitler called it, started with the social cleansing of disabled people.

The artist, Liz Crow, has spent the last two years investigating the process that lead up to what was known as the T4 killing programme, for her art installation, Resistance. She has identified a systematic “softening up” of the population so that they would be prepared for the programme.

One part of that campaign was to open asylums to the public (as in the Victorian freak-shows), to promote the racial hygiene laws. Thousands visited in the mid 1930’s, including many members of the SS. Each tour, Liz Crow says, “culminated in a lecture illustrating, via the inmates, symptoms and the necessity for eugenic measures.”

Another strand of the campaign was through film and posters, stressing the cost of disability (similar to the less systematic, but no less brutal campaign in the US). One example she has found, from a sequence in a Reich propaganda ministry film, shows disabled people lying in cot beds, with the strap line: “Life only is a burden”. Another, which combines the Nazi attitude towards minority ethnic groups and disabled people, is of a film of a black man holding out a begging bowl, with the strap-line: “Mentally ill negro English, sixteen years in an institute costing 35,000 Reich marks.” As Liz Crow comments: “what happened to this (disabled) community served as a prototype for everything that came later….Had people intervened at that point, presumably, what came next would have been, in some way, different…disabled people were the guinea pigs for the next phase.”

The first law that the Nazis passed on coming to power was the Law for the Prevention of Genetically Diseased Offspring, instituted on July 14, 1933. Those with deafness, schizophrenia and other “malformations”, such as learning difficulties were prevented from breeding by sterilisation. The law was based on the laws functioning in Chicago, drafted by Henry Laughlin. Indeed, there was much admiration in 1936 of Nazi doctors for American eugenicists – even awarding one an honorary doctorate.

Hitler and other leading Nazis were also much influenced by Sparta, where he admired “’the exposure of sick, weak deformed children, in short their destruction, was more decent and in truth a thousand times more humane than the wretched insanity of our day which seeks to preserve the most pathological subjects.” Nazi propaganda against disabled people increased, labelling them “unworthy of life”, “useless eaters” and highlighting their burden on society in print and films. Hitler’s Strength Through Joy campaign prioritised getting rid of the “syphilitics, consumptives, hereditary degenerates, cripples and cretins”. He wrote in Mein Kampf that “the lame and the defective are a scourge on humanity”.

The decision to eradicate disabled children started with Gerhard Kretschmar, and accelerated shortly afterwards, apparently when other families with disabled offspring also petitioned Hitler for permission to kill their children (although some German writers were advocating this solution as early as 1920). It is estimated that at least 5000 children, from newborn babies up to juveniles, were murdered. Some were starved, others gassed.

In July 1939 planning of the T4 programme (so-called after the street address in Berlin where it was co-ordinated) of mercy killings began. An experimental gassing procedure was carried out in the winter of 1939, and the Reichs-Committee for the Processing of Serious Genetic Diseases was also formed that year, collecting data on infants and ‘deformed newborns”. German doctors took part voluntarily in the programme, and the earlier, related programme of sterilisation. The German paediatrician, Hartmut Hanauske-Abel, who has examined many of the official documents relating to both programmes, suggests that they did so because they were convinced of the rectitude of eugenics, the programme was profitable for them and it released corpses for medical experimentation. (When he first published his findings in the Lancet in 1986, he was suspended from practising as a doctor in Germany. He later won an appeal against his suspension. )

He writes about the programme thus: “The practical experience obtained in the killing hospitals of T4 provides the core for the annihilation technology of the death camps, often implemented by the same technical and medical personnel.” He concludes: “Changes which today are interpreted as causing the downfall of the German medical community were at that time warmly welcomed by the widest segments of that highly educated biomedical and scientific elite.”

One nurse involved in the children’s killing programme, at the Hadamar facility, in northern Germany, one of the six institutions where disabled people were murdered, Chief Nurse Irmgard Huber, said at her trial in 1947: “The lives…are just as valuable as my life, but I couldn’t change anything there. I didn’t have any say. I couldn’t report anything. I avoided the matter.” Instead, she distributed sweets to the children before they went to the gas chamber.

No-one abroad seemed much interested – except other euthanasia enthusiasts.
In 1939, when Germany started to practice euthanasia against disabled children and adults, one officer in the American Eugenics Society commented it showed “great courage”. Indeed, it is estimated that by 1941 the numbers of those sterilised in the US had reached nearly 36,000. One doctor, Joseph Dejarnette, a doctor from the state of Virginia, commented that “the Germans are beating us at our own game.” In 1942 an article in the journal of the American Psychiatric Association called for the killing of all “retarded” children over five.

Hitler signed the order to start killing disabled adults on September 1, 1939, giving permission for those who were “incurable” to be “accorded a mercy death.”

Grey buses, with blacked-out windows, would arrive outside villages, local asylums and hospitals to take disabled people away. They were known to children as “the murder box” and mothers would frighten their children, saying that they would be taken away in them if they were naughty.

By the end of the war it is thought that around 200,000 disabled citizens had been murdered, among them the insane, the disabled, the tubercular and the retarded, as the Nazis called them.

The killing, one writer, Hugh Gregory Gallagher, commented, was methodical and scientific. “What was interesting and important about the killing program is not the mad-dog killers, but rather the careful, orderly and quite medical manner by which the full Germany medical and scientific establishment proceeded to kill its patients over a period of years.”

One witness recalled that when the killing first started, beds were made with fresh linen and warm blankets. When people arrived to be killed, they were given hot coffee and warm rolls. Of course we will never know whether this was genuine compassion for their fate, or a desire to make the killings easier to achieve. Soon, however, the numbers of those due for killing rose and the system became stressed. The Nazis started to reuse coffins (by designing them with a flap that opened in the bottom to allow the corpse to fall out) and started to dig mass graves, especially for children.

Some churchmen remonstrated. The Bishop of Limburg protested in 1941, writing to the minister of justice: ‘the citizens of Hadamar watch the smoke rise out of the chimney and are tortured with the every-present though of the poor sufferers’. Another, the bishop of Paderborn, said “among those unhappy beings who are destined to be killed or who have already been killed, there are many who aside from partial disturbances are mentally completely clear and who know what is going to happen to them.” However, one influential Catholic, Joseph Mayer, became an apologist for the Holocaust, writing: “moral law applies only to the mentally normal, rational individuals. Mental patients do not belong in the moral order, neither as subjects nor in terms of implementation.” Later he prepared a report saying that there were reputable moral arguments for and against sterilisation on both sides.

Before long, the regime was even killing World War One veterans and even shell-shocked veterans fresh from the Western front. However, this policy was short-lived, partly because it affected troop morale.

There were poignant scenes. In one village, Absberg, the villagers and abbess protested against disabled residents of the abbey being taken away in 1940. The abbess said a special mass for them, and one eye-witness reported: “They were seen as stirred up, like animals”, and refused to go. One woman said “I don’t want to go.” The people of the town gathered, and waved goodbye to their friends causing wide-scale disgust as the news spread. In another village, not far away, in Bruckberg, those who were about to die visited almost every house in town to say goodbye.

But the Absberg and Bruckberg protests, such as they were, did have an effect. The secret of the grey buses was secret no longer. The villagers of Absberg protested to their Bishop, Von Galen, who thundered from his pulpit that what was happening must stop. T4 was cancelled officially shortly afterwards, in August 1941. But unofficial killing continued thereafter – in what is known as the “wild phase” of the programme.

The banality and playfulness of the evil often perpetrated against disabled people, is best exemplified in what Hugh Gregory Gallagher claims happened when the staff of Hadamar were assembled, in the midsummer of 1941, to celebrate the 10,000 murder in the institution. The staff celebrated the anniversary with beer and wine, in the same room where the people had been put to death. The body of the murdered man was adorned with flowers and laid on a gurney, decorated with small Nazi flags. The hospital book-keeper, Mr Merkle, in the words of one witness, “turned his collar about, put his coat on backward, and intoned a burlesque eulogy of the deceased insane person.”

The physicians who participated in the euthanasia campaign have mostly never been successfully prosecuted. They did not stand trial at Nuremburg, unlike other Nazi mass murderers because their crimes had been, in the main, perpetrated against other German citizens, rather than foreigners. As a result, Professor William Seidelmann writes, “Absent from the dock were the leaders of the medical profession of the Third Reich, in particular the academic and scientific elite. It was this elite who legitimised the devaluation of human life and set the stage for medical crimes—crimes in which leading academics and scientists were either principals or accomplices.” There may have been another reason, too, for the paucity of trials. Liz Crow argues that the Nuremburg prosecutors were clear in their minds that what happened to the Roma, the Jews and other groups was abhorrent. “But they were confused about whether killing disabled people was a public service. The prevailing attitudes about disabled people, that they were inferior, pitiable and burdensome, defined their judgement.”

Back in the UK, the return of the war wounded did increase public sympathy for the physically disabled and those with shell-shock and other mental health conditions. Churchill, too, had mellowed. One of his last acts as a war-time Prime Minister was to commit the so-called “mental millions” to support those returning from war, with their nerves in shreds. One third of servicemen invalided out of the army had been discharged on mental heath grounds. Disabled people had gotten angry at last: veterans from both world wars lobbied for the right to work through organisations such as the National League for the Blind and Disabled, holding sit-ins to force government to ensure their right to employment.

The end of the war did achieve two things for disabled people – it confronted Britain and America with the ugly reflection of their own ideas in Nazi Germany – and it created more sympathy for some categories of disabled people – though not all within British society. The many disabled war veterans, in particular, normalised physical impairment for many. And the end of the war was also the beginning of the end for the institutions – but with numbers reaching a record 150,000 in 1950, it was to prove a very long journey.


As for Gerhard Kretschmar, his identity was concealed from us for over fifty years, known only as child K in official terminology. His short and miserable life was hidden in the Stasi files in East Germany, and only came to light when a German historian, Ulf Schmidt, unearthed it, after the fall of the Berlin Wall and wrote about him in his biography of Hitler’s physician, Karl Brandt. Gerhard’s murder was recorded, not as euthanasia, but as “heart failure”, like so many others. He, of course, like those victims of mercy killings today, did not consent to his death. Few know of Gerhard’s life, or death. If it had not been for Ulf Schmidt we would not even know his name. Many of the other victims of T4 remain nameless even now. Astonishingly, those responsible for murdering their “patients” could escape responsibility – by claiming that the patients they had killed had a right to medical confidentiality.
The last victim of T4, Liz Crow says, was a four year old disabled boy, Richard Jenne. “The American forces moved into Bavaria, the last area they liberated, and they put a protective ring around the local institution for disabled people, not knowing about T4. He was killed. Four weeks after peace was declared.”

Too many of the victims of T4 remain nameless. And naming the dead, and what was done to them, matters. I believe that Gerhard’s story, Richard’s story, and those of other disabled people murdered like them, should be known and taught in British schools. They were human beings, not beastly burdens who should be put out of their misery. We owe it to them to remember them, and to give them their rightful place in our common history. For if we do not learn from history, we cannot guarantee that it will not be repeated.

2021 in review

Katharine QuarmbyLeave a comment

The pandemic dominated journalism this year and last, but I wanted to use this last post of 2021 to give a round-up of the work I’ve been lucky enough to carry out this year, what I’m doing next year – and to thank everyone with whom I’ve worked – whether as a collaborator, an editor or as an interviewee.

I’ve written on subjects ranging from disability, to environmental justice, to the history of forced migration, as well as the plight of Afghan nationals, both here and stuck in Afghanistan, in a rapidly deteriorating situation. I’ve worked increasingly on the rights of Gypsy and Traveller communities, in a year in which the right to live a nomadic life has been put under extreme threat by the Johnson administration – and looked at the effect of hostility on community members. I wrote a long-read about the ten year anniversary since the eviction of Dale Farm, considering its lasting legacy.

I was also lucky enough to be asked to work with the veteran disability rights campaigner, Alicia Wood, in co-creating a new website, Dying to Matter, which aims to memorialise the deaths of those dying in institutional care. Our launch article was my long-read about the death of Danny Tozer. It’s a hard read, and I want to thank Danny’s family for being so generous with their time. I hope it’s a fitting tribute to a much loved son. Do visit the website if you’d like to read more, or post a memorial of a loved family member who died in care. We will start to post them as soon as possible.

Friendship and family has been a real comfort this year. Books too, so I’m including a link to some of the books I’ve reviewed. I enjoyed books by Pat Barker, Nigel Farndale and Meg Keneally, among many others.

I also reviewed three books that, in different ways, explored the rich experience of disability and family – by Jan Grue, Jessica Moxham and Melanie Pearson. All recommended.

Talking of books, I spent much of my spare time this year finishing off my first novel, The Low Road, which tells the story of two young women who were convicted of grand larceny and eventually transported to Botany Bay in the 1820’s. It is based on a true story I uncovered in my Norfolk home town – more news on the book next year. This year I also looked at the history of transportation in a long read for Byline Times, asking why it has largely been forgotten in the UK, whilst it is remembered in Australia.

Turning to next year, I’ll be continuing with my work on environmental justice and looking at how health intersects with planning and housing for my project for the Paul Hamlyn Foundation. You can read more about that work in my previous post from just a month or so ago.

I’ve also teased out some of the intersections between low traffic neighbourhoods, environmental justice and marginalised communities, in an article for the Times – I hope to look at this area of work again, in my wider work on what environmental injustice looks and feels like.

My dad and me, as a very young adopted child

I’ve also returned to my own roots, thinking through my own family history of trans-racial adoption and asking more urgent questions about this government’s handling of children at risk of harm, abuse and neglect, and interrogating whether the profit motive is a fit one for boosting protection within our care system. I looked in detail at concerns around transparency, independence of the ongoing review of care and accountability in my latest article. In other articles for Byline Times I looked at the recent murders of two small children and asked about what good system change would look like.

Lastly, I want to point up an article I wrote for the Guardian in December 2020, just over a year ago. It looked at the effect of hate crime on Gypsy, Roma, Traveller and other related communities, including the high levels of suicide.

I hope that next year will be a happier, easier one for everybody. This year has been hard. Unfortunately it has convinced me even more that we need investigative journalism more than ever, as we live through dark times, with political mismanagement, to say the least.

Why are we restraining and secluding so many disabled children?

Katharine Quarmby1 Comment

In March this year (2021) the Equality and Human Rights Commission is expected to release the findings of a long-awaited inquiry into the use of what are called restrictive interventions in schools. Paused due to Covid, it will doubtless show the widespread use of disturbing techniques, including restraint that harms, isolation booths and other forms of enforced isolation. It will also show patchy information about the use of the techniques, as schools are not under any duty to record those interventions – even when they harm a child. I have been investigating the use of these interventions for over a year, talking regularly to campaigners, lawyers and regulators – and have done some freedom of information requests in schools as well – of which more later. This is another shocking example of how we are failing disabled people.

Disabled children are the most likely to experience these interventions. There are many aspects to restrictive interventions that are disturbing, but one particularly harrowing finding is that children as young as three have been subjected to them. The lives of disabled children matter as much as the lives of non-disabled children and the UK has long led the way in calling for the inclusion of disabled children in mainstream education. But factors including underfunding and poor training of teachers in knowing how to support disabled children at moments when they find school difficult may have contributed to frequent separation of children with special needs from their non-disabled class mates. This de facto segregation starts early, and means that disabled children’s experience of education diverges early from other children – even in what appears to be a mainstream setting. This leads to a parallel life for disabled children in which many are traumatised by their experience of education. At transition, when children become young adults, oftentimes they then experience a crisis – and end up in other institutions, such as assessment and treatment units (ATUs). They then get restrained and secluded again. I’ve written about the awful state of our ATUs previously.

That journey of harm starts in school – so what can we do about it? As I said, I submitted FOIs to schools across England before the outbreak of Covid-19 to find out more about monitoring, reporting and incidence. I am not going to release those results in full as they are already out of date. Schools won’t be the same after the end of lockdown. But what was clear from the FOIs was that few schools monitor their use of restrictive interventions, many do not report their use to parents or carers and incidence varies widely across schools. Different practices are also in play, depending on the training that schools receive from external providers. Some children have ended up with horrific injuries, including broken limbs and severe trauma. One child had their vision impaired as a result of restraint. Many end up with mental health impacts that then, as I said, may lead them to moments of crisis later in their lives – so that they end up experiencing similar restrictive interventions in ATUs, secure children homes, prison or mental health settings.

It’s time that a light was shone on the use of these practices in schools – and schools need to monitor them properly, report them in detail to parents and carers and be aware that these are hugely traumatic to experience. Of course teaching staff must also be protected from harm, but there are other ways of managing behaviour that don’t cause physical and mental harm.

Beth Morrison, who has campaigned to highlight the damage done by such techniques in schools, is in many ways responsible for the EHRC kick-starting this inquiry. Disabled children and their parents owe her a debt of thanks for her work. Other key figures include Nick Hobbs and the Children’s Commissioner for Scotland, Bruce Adamson and other parent campaigners including Deirdre Shakespeare and Elly Chapple. All of the parents have fought for the harm done to their children by restraint to be recognised and also for others affected. This has been a parent led campaign to reveal harm and create change – I hope the EHRC will honour their involvement and transform educational practice in this area for the next generation of children.

For me, as a writer and journalist who has investigated human rights abuses for many years, this investigation has opened my eyes into the rights of disabled children. I offered work on this important topic to most mainstream newspapers. Few of them replied and none of them thought it was news-worthy enough to make space for on the news pages. It doesn’t matter who suffered as a result of these interventions – even when Paris Hilton has spoken out about her experience and campaigned to highlight the issue it receives very little focus. It says a lot about how the media thinks of disability – and disabled children in particular – that this subject has received so little media attention.