In school textbooks it is rarely mentioned, even as a footnote, that the first victims of the mass and strategically devised persecution in Nazi Germany were actually people with disabilities. But to this day no historian has called it genocide, although it is factually established that the Nazis built the first gas chambers to systematically kill institutionalized people with disabilities. In those chambers around three hundred thousand people perished, yet that was merely a prelude to the most monstrous crime recorded in official history — the Holocaust in which six million European Jews were brutally murdered.
People with disabilities were unimaginably cruelly liquidated within the Aktion T4 program, which the Nazis launched in 1939 — before they began the “final solution” and the systematic killing of European Jews, including in gas chambers. For this bloody mission the Nazis primarily trained on people who had an intellectual or physical disability. The Nazis and their supporters justified that pogrom with the thesis that “people with disabilities do not have a life worth living.”
The Nazi program Aktion T4 was researched for twenty years by film director Cameron S. Mitchell, together with members of his family, and he immortalized his findings in the acclaimed and award-winning documentary Disposable Humanity. Director Mitchell describes people with disabilities as the first group of victims killed in the Holocaust, but the last to be remembered. He was, as he says, confused by how little was known about the Aktion T4 program, which later became the basis for the systematic killing of Jews.
— The erasure of people with disabilities is present at every level throughout history — said Mitchell.
— A monument to the victims of the Aktion T4 program was built in Berlin only in 2011, which made people with disabilities the last group of victims to be recognized in the city center. Another example of this is the Nuremberg trials where victims with disabilities were not the focus of the jury because they were not considered victims worthy of being regarded as human beings. I am very concerned that we do not know this history and therefore we are obliged to repeat it, even in this way in film.
— We must protect the most vulnerable, because they are the first rung on the social ladders. People with disabilities are the canary in the coal mine for fascist regimes — concludes Mitchell, bitterly, perhaps also because members of his family have various forms of disability.
His parents David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder are scholars who have devoted much of their careers to the study of disability. Their contribution to the creation of the film Disposable Humanity is huge and significant, not least because they helped research Nazi media propaganda in which it was repeatedly stated that people with disabilities were a group that was (sic!) a threat to society.
