Disposable Humanity which has its world premiere at the Slamdance Film Festival this week recounts one of the darkest, most disturbing and yet underreported genocides witnessed in human history.
From 1939 onwards under the auspices of the Aktion T4 program, the Nazis systematically murdered 250,000 disabled people with psychiatric and physical disorders residing in institutions. The so-called “euthanasia program” also targeted many young children who would today be referred to as having learning disabilities or special educational needs. The program was named Aktion T4 after the address of its Berlin headquarters located at 4 Tiergartenstrasse.
At the time, these were dubbed “mercy killings” but the reality was anything but merciful with lethal injections eventually being supplanted by gas chambers and some left to starve to death. The war waged by the Third Reich on disability had its ideological roots in the 1920s writings of German professors Karl Binding and Alfred Hoche who attributed the terms “life unworthy of life” and “human ballast” to people with disabilities.
Disposable Humanity is a directorial debut for Cameron Mitchell whose credits since the documentary’s filming in 2017 include PBS American Masters, The Co-Op and Kryptonite. The film follows Mitchell and his family, with his parents both being disability studies scholars, traveling through Germany and Poland in search of the all too often hidden and untold story behind the Aktion T4 genocide as narrated by memorial directors, disabled people and relatives of T4 victims.
One of the most captivating aspects of the production is its thematic approach. Rather than a straightforward chronological narrative, Disposable Humanity is anchored through several key ideas, which, when combined, help us view these horrific events through a unique historical lens.
A catalyst for the holocaust
Certainly, one takeaway that resonates is the extent to which the Euthanasia Program, which at its height in 1940 was carried out at six separate extermination centers deploying gas chambers, became a forerunner for the Final Solution proper which killed six million Jews. Victims from psychiatric hospitals and other care settings were selected through paper-based assessments by panels of physicians who had never previously met the patient. Once transported to the extermination centers disabled people were asphyxiated in prototype gas chambers using carbon monoxide. As Professor David T. Mitchell, director Cameron Mitchell’s father, a producer and writer for the film and an internationally-recognized scholar in Disability Studies at George Washington University explains, it was the Euthanasia Program that provided the Nazis with a proof of concept for mass murder:
“Hitler’s first project with the Jews was that they would all be deported to Poland, Siberia or Madagascar. The idea was for mass deportation and getting them out of the space,” Professor Mitchell explains.
“But as they came more and more in contact with the T4 people, and the T4 people were like, ‘Hey, we have a better idea. We’ve been slaughtering our psychiatric patients and it doesn’t present the logistical challenges of a mass deportation’ – that’s when the Nazis flipped to the Final Solution. They hadn’t planned on killing Jews from the beginning. They planned on killing them when they established a reliable way to do it.”
Disposable Humanity delves deep into this evolution of death factories even to the extent of demonstrating how the very same ovens used to cremate the remains of the handicapped were transported to far flung concentration camps to later be used in the final solution.
As the film’s end credits remind us – “Aktion T4 catalyzed the holocaust. The Holocaust is a part of disability history. Do not look away, share what you’ve learned.”
Silenced and invisible
Another lens through which to view the Aktion T4 era as well as it’s prelude and aftermath is a socio-legal one. Those new to the topic may be shocked to learn that eugenics and the forced sterilization of the mentally handicapped were not limited to Nazi Germany in the 1930s. It was happening in the United States as well as director Cameron Mitchell explains:
“Americans inspired the Nazi law of sterilization. California had 20,000 sterilizations when all is said and done, and that was referenced in the passing of the law for the sterilization of the hereditary ill, which is the second law that the Nazis passed in July of 1933 after the law against interracial marriage. it was right up front and they cited California. Sterilization was rampant in the United States and the Nazis looked at that and wanted it. So, we enable the Nazis on their path to the Holocaust so to speak.”
Viewers also learn how handicapped victims of the Nazis failed to gain true justice after the war with many of the physicians who had sent them to their deaths being allowed to continue their careers. As the vast majority of the victims were German nationals, their murders fell out of the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court. Where successful prosecutions happened this was often only made possible by presenting evidence that non-disabled people were also being killed as those lives appeared to have a higher tariff attached to them.
Ultimately though, Disposable Humanity is a film about memorialization. How should victims of genocide be remembered and who should be the torchbearers for keeping their stories alive?
Here, people with disabilities appear to lose out too. Despite being the first victims of Nazi industrial scale killing they were the last group to receive a dedicated memorial which was opened in Berlin in 2014. The monument to the T4 victims was built on Tiergartenstrasse but came many years after dedicated commemorations for the other groups which included Jews, LGBT and Romani people. One element that played into this was perhaps the collective silence amongst many German families after the war when it came to discussing the Aktion T4 killings. Undoubtedly, some of this stemmed from a residual shame of acknowledging the existence of family members with cognitive deficiencies and hereditary illnesses. However, early in the documentary we learn from Susanne Knittel, a Public Memory Scholar at the University of Utrecht that other psychological factors may also be at play.
“Memories come to the surface in a surprising and unexpected manner. They make us uncomfortable or make the familiar narrative that we have told ourselves about the past strange,” she says.
“We all have an idea about what the Holocaust was and how we commemorate it and how memorialization and commemoration should take place but all of these assumptions are challenged in a way when Nazi euthanasia comes into Holocaust memory. What is characteristic of traumatic memory is that it is not actually experienced to the fullest or consciously and so it also cannot be narrated or related. In fact, it may be relived unconsciously in the form of nightmares.”
So, in the final analysis, is Disposable Humanity just a horrifying episode of history that can thankfully never be repeated? Steve Way is the film’s Executive Producer. Way lives with muscular dystrophy and is a stand-up comedian in the NJ/NY area, a disability advocate and has starred in the Hulu show Ramy. He certainly believes that Disposable Humanity represents far more than just a grotesque history lesson:
“People question how the Third Reich could ever happened but people fail to understand that this is what is happening to disabled people right now. You have President Trump scapegoating disabled people for a plane crash and Elon Musk wanting to cut Medicaid. People will die,” Way says.
He continues, “People say what happened in Nazi Germany can never happen here but you don’t have to have gas chambers and death camps for it to happen. This movie can be a part of the resistance and how we fight back but it’s also a blueprint for how fascism and mass killings happen. Just because it’s not done inside a gas chamber or by firing squad that doesn’t mean that it can’t happen with computers, AI and insurance denials.”
For this reason, perhaps, now is precisely the moment to pause and listen to the untold stories of those cruelly silenced Aktion T4 victims who went on to be abandoned on the sidelines of history for so long.