Public and Commercial Services Union

With the far-right again on the rise, a film installation on the treatment of disabled people in Nazi Germany has a powerful message for everyone today. Mary Carr reports.

It is 1939 and the German economy is fragile. Hitler has to cut public spending so he decides to cut the German public. He targets disabled people as unproductive: ‘useless eaters’. Compulsory sterilisation and abortion are already being used in an attempt to purge the Nazi gene pool of physical and mental impairments. But housing, feeding and caring for these people is expensive. The first Nazi programme of mass murder was not based on ethnicity but on simple economics.

The Nazis had already been ‘mercy killing’ children. The medical authorities monitored children from birth to identify “life unworthy of life”. The new Aktion T4 programme targeted adults, with inability to work being a crucial factor in selection.

Disabled people identified for extermination were collected together in holding institutions. From there, groups were taken to killing centres in sinister grey buses with blacked out windows. At the centre, each person was examined by doctors to establish a plausible lie for their death certificate. Those with interesting medical conditions were earmarked for later dissection. Then they were murdered. The doctors experimented with a number of methods before settling on gas chambers disguised as showers.

A must-see film installation, by Roaring Girl Productions, which highlights this little-known aspect of the holocaust, starts its tour in Liverpool on 17th November.

Writer/Director Liz Crow explains why she wanted to tell the story: “It’s an episode of history that is virtually hidden, yet the values that underpinned it still echo through disabled people’s lives today. What stays with me is the part that disabled people played in bringing Aktion-T4 to a close. How do you resist when you’re incarcerated in an institution? Yet some people did. It’s a reminder of how crucial disabled people’s voices are to directing change, then and now.”

The installation features two short films. The first, ‘Resistance’, tells the story of Elise, a patient who sweeps the floors of the institution. Silently watching everything that goes on, she knows what will happen to her if she boards the bus. But how can she resist? In the second film ‘Conversations’ , three of the actors talk about researching and filming the story and its relevance to them as disabled people.

Despite the official secrecy, the truth leaked out and protests began, led by the Catholic church. A key moment was when a group of disabled people from a holding centre learned they were going to be taken to a killing centre. They went around saying good bye to the townspeople. They could not save themselves but they triggered a campaign which led to the official suspension of Aktion T4.

The final obscenity was that, after the war, little action was taken against the murderers of more than quarter of a million disabled people. Many of the doctors and nurses involved continued as respected members of their profession.

The Nazi government learned methods during Aktion-T4 which they used in the concentration camps. Even the ovens from the killing centres were recycled. With the rise of the Far Right in Europe and a chilling increase in hate crimes against disabled people what lessons will we learn?

The tour starts at Liverpool's Cultural Urban Centre from 17 November to 5 December. For other venues and dates check the Roaring Girl Productions.