Film Review: A World Without Bodies
Review by Sandy O'Neill (SIMCHAO@aol.com)
A World Without Bodies
Produced by Sharon Snyder and David Mitchell
Brace Yourself Productions 11/01
In the early days of the Hitler regime, hundreds of thousands of people with disabilities, as defined by the Nazis, were forcibly sterilized. By 1939 and throughout the closing days of the Third Reich, people with disabilities were routinely murdered by methods that included the administration of lethal injections, gassing, shooting and deliberate starvation.
Rounding a corner on the University of California's Berkeley campus, it was clear I had located the correct room as a number of wheelchair users and others with noticeable disabilities squeezed into a classroom. The premier showing of a video on the topic of these Nazi crimes, assembled by two leaders in the disability studies field, David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder, was the draw. The screening was preceded by a lecture on the history of disability in film and an introductory talk detailing the Nazi crimes. The interest in these watershed events in disability history was confirmed as I spoke with other people, both those with and without disabilities, attending the event.
The rough cut of the new video, detailing the Mitchell and Snyder visit to the Bernberg (Germany) institution that served as one of the killing centers, juxtaposes their present-day tour of the institution with graphic visual and audio representations of historically negative images of disability. These images, compiled from an array of sources, reinforce the reality of the history of the oppression of people with disability as a normalized component of dominant Western culture.
This evocative video with its almost visceral imagery, can be a powerful tool in educating people not only about the events themselves but the history leading to them and perhaps most important, about the continuing impact of these events which decimated disabled communities across the European regions occupied by the Third Reich.
Strengths
The work and presentation are especially strong in that:
The topic is presented from a disability viewpoint.
This positioning enables a closer examination of the linkage of these murders and persecutions to the rise of eugenics. The video's examination of the effects of the worldwide rise of eugenics prior to the rise of the Nazi regime lays the groundwork for a focus on the subsequent impact of the "scientific" codification of some societal groupings as weakening the physical and mental fiber of the larger dominant society.
Prior to the rise of the Nazis in Germany, the United States and many other countries began passing laws mandating the sterilization and incarceration in institutions of all of those judged as genetically unfit to reproduce. England and the U.S. were the major places where work today identified as socio-biology began and was utilized to form social policy reliant on forms of Social Darwinism. Those who were targeted by eugenics included a range of people with disabilities that were believed to be inherent. The campaign also included those deemed social deviants, petty criminals, prostitutes, unwed mothers, and rebels. In this way, it can be said that all of these other populations were classified as degenerate which can be read as disabled.
The prejudices against people with disabilities underlying and preceding these specific actions need to be clearly asserted. Yet, telling the story of the disabled victims is not a simple matter of replacing or displacing the better known stories of the Holocaust. The relationship of disabled people, Jews and other populations in the Nazis' social construction of reality needs to be contextualized.
The video clearly confronts the lack of knowledge about these crimes.
The video's narration states that the parts of Bernberg facility used in the murders were pretty much untouched except for the removal of the ovens used for cremations, until a disability group began to reconstruct and prepare it as a memorial site in the late 1980s. The travelers speak about the constant omission of disabled people from the list of populations targeted by the Nazis. Researching the Nazi persecution and murder of people with disabilities involves writing about absences: the absence not only of information but also of the analysis of ableism and of the voices of the disabled individuals who were killed.
In the immediate aftermath of and even during World War II, newspapers, books and newsreels reported and commented on these events. Limited aspects of the Nazi campaigns against people with disabilities were addressed in early war crimes trials. My research has highlighted the fact that while these early accounts, including Holocaust survivor memoirs, brought to light some information about these events, over the years as the field of Holocaust studies grew, the crimes against people with disabilities were omitted or referred to only as an aside and a satisfactory explanation of the causes of these specific atrocities is not offered. Since the late 1980s, several books and articles have been published specifically on these issues, but more research is still needed.
Suggestion for improvements
Given these strengths of the video presentation, there are a few clarifications and matters of emphasis that could improve the overall work. These are:
Add an explanation in the narrative that the eugenics murders themselves took place in stages. T-4 represented only one initial stage of the killing of people with disabilities.
Because the focus is on the tour of the Bernberg facility, T-4 is emphasized. However, this can lead to underestimating the scope and intent of campaigns against the disabled and become confusing. The narrative uses the figure of 240,000 casualties. However there is general agreement that the specific T-4 program resulted in only about 70,000 deaths.
T-4 was an organized program directed at all of those classified as degenerate. It followed the nationwide sterilization campaign which also utilized hereditary health courts and panels of physicians and lawyers who decided who would be deprived of their reproductive capability. A somewhat separate program processed disabled children into killing centers while troops in occupied countries regularly killed inmates of various institutions. Additionally, when the T-4 program was officially halted, doctors and other medical personnel continued killing their patients on their own decision.
The various stages involved in the killing overlap. Taken as a whole, they also clearly describe a determination on the part of the Germans to rid the area they controlled of as many of those they deemed worthless as they possibly could. Even when the Nazi troops were hurriedly withdrawing from the occupied territories, a unit stopped to kill all of the residents of a home for Soviet "retarded" children. (Scheerenberger, 1989) The fact that these murders continued even after World War II had ended (Burleigh, 1994, Noakes and Pridham, 1988, Gallagher, 1995) clearly speaks to this.
Be specific about the fact that "mental" patients comprised the majority of those known to have been killed.
From the earliest days of the Reich's sterilization until after the war ended, those classified, as 'mental' patients were the primary targets among the disabled population. In fact as Saul Friedlander states:
But only part of the sterilized population ultimately survived. For mental patients, sterilization was often but a first stage: During the late thirties, they were the group most at risk in Nazi Germany. (page 209, emphasis added.)
The Nazi categorization often included those with cognitive and psychiatric disorders as well as many of those they defined as asocials.
Include the fact that many people with disabilities and some of their allies resisted however they could.
Many accounts include information about people with disabilities resisting being taken to the killing centers on an individual and small group scale. As word of the killing centers used in the T-4 program became widespread in Germany there were some protests by Church hierarchy and others. As mentioned above, the program was officially halted but the killing went on in other ways.
As we recover our history around these events, the accounts of resistance need to be known. Particularly given the emotional impact of this video, this aspect needs to be mentioned. This would also assist in allowing scholars in the field to understand the full and complete humanity of people with disabilities then and now. A World Without Bodies is an important new contribution to the field.
Further Information
The video is 31 minutes in length and is now undergoing the final cut. It will be available from the producers and details are available as follows: David Mitchell, Ph.D. program in Disability Studies, Department of Disability and Human Development, University of Illinois at Chicago; tel 312 996 1508; fax 312 996 0885; email dmitchel@uic.edu
Author's Notes
1/As noted in the text, this was the premier showing and still a rough (not the final) cut of the work. This meant, for example that the captions weren't completed yet. The written script didn't introduce all of those involved although the video's narrative mentions five people participating in the trip. Two or three wheelchair users are seen in the video. Because this is not the final product, this review won't focus on these technical aspects, except to note that I left undecided about the music played to accompany parts of the video. It seemed discordant at times but also served as an emphatic call to remain at attention.
2/ The concomitant rise of statistics as a field is also both implicated and intertwined with the history of eugenics.
3/ For example, the Nazi designation of Jews as "diseased" and therefore undesirable has an underlying prejudice toward the diseased/disabled while designating the disabled as "useless eaters" parallels the labeling of Jews as a parasitical population. Also, in Germany when the mandatory sterilization law was put into force, because race and ethnicity were viewed as signifying immutable group characteristics, Jews, Gypsies, and people of African heritage were placed in the same net by the use of different yet overlapping rationales.
4/ My own and other research give details about the fact that both official government documents and popular press in the United States and England contained information about the Reich's so-called "euthanasia" program.
Additional author's notes on Killing Programs/Phases
The euphemistically termed "euthanasia" laws began to be implemented in 1939 as soon as World War II began, supplanting the sterilization campaign. There is some evidence to suggest that some of the Nazi doctors had begun starving or refusing lifesaving procedures to those they deemed unworthy of life even before being given the green light by the government. The killing program was called T-4; the designation coming from the address of the central headquarters and like the earlier sterilization campaigns was organized with panels making decisions over who was deemed worthy to live.
People in institutions were gassed, injected with lethal drugs and/or starved to death. These killings took place mainly in six designated asylums. People were sent there from hospitals, asylums, concentration camps and other institutions.
In the greater Reich, a period referred to as "wild euthanasia" began with the official curtailment of the centralized T-4 program. Doctors and other personnel decided on their own whom among their patients needed to be killed. Injections and starvation were the prevalent methods used.
Additionally, troops moving into Poland and Russia from the onset of the War executed inmates of asylums and other institutions for the disabled/diseased regularly. Inmates of workhouses and prisons were also included at various sites. At first the troops shot people in the head. Later, T-4 program personnel were transferred east and used the gas killing methods they had perfected in the T-4 phase.
During and after the official T-4 program, concentration camp prisoners were 'selected' for death under a program designated as 14f13. 14f referred to the inspectorate of concentration camps and 13 to the 'special' treatment of sick and frail prisoners. This phase of the killing continued after T-4 stopped.
In a parallel program, doctors, midwives and other medical personnel were mandated to report all children born with any type of "birth defect." Those deemed unworthy of life were marked for death. The program at first included children from newborn to three-year-olds but continually expanded the age limit, including teenagers in the program by the end of the War. The killing of German disabled children both with and without their parents' or guardians' knowledge and support continued throughout the period.
Works Cited:
Burleigh, Michael, 1994, Death and Deliverance, 'Euthanasia' in Germany, 1900-1945 Cambridge U Press.
Friedlander, Saul, 1997, Nazi Germany and the Jews, Volume 1, The Years of Persecution, 1933-1939, Harper Collins, NY
Gallagher, Hugh Gregory, 1990, By Trust Betrayed: Patients, Physicians and the License to Kill in the Third Reich, Vandamere Press.
Noakes, J. and Pridham, G., Eds., Nazism 1919-1956, A Documentary Reader, 4 Volumes: Exeter Press, Exeter, Devon
O'Neill, Sandy, 2000, First They Killed the 'Crazies' and 'Cripples': The Ableist Persecution and Murders of People with Disabilities by Nazi Germany 1933-45, An Anthropological Perspective, UMI Dissertation Services
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