The Third Reich's first genocide

Welcome to the History Extra podcast, fascinating historical conversations from the makers of BBC History magazine. Between 1939 and 1945, the Nazis killed nearly 300,000 people with psychiatric illnesses or cognitive disabilities. Some 400,000 more. were forcibly sterilized. Historian Dagmar Herzog's book, The Question of Unworthy Life, examines how decades of eugenic theorizing and anti-disability propaganda led so many people and institutions to become complicit in this program of sterilization and mass murder, and explores why it took Germany so long to fully recognize it as a crime.

I spoke to Dagmar to find out more. Before we get into anything else, I wonder if we can start with the central event of your book. What exactly was the Nazis' so-called euthanasia program and who did it target? So the Nazis killed approximately 300,000 people on grounds that this was a mercy death, in quotes, euthanasia, that is a euphemism. Because in fact they were grotesque and cruel deaths.

And the people they targeted were primarily those who were either having diagnoses of psychiatric illness, predominantly schizophrenia, although that was a huge umbrella term, or they were people with cognitive deficiencies. And above all, they were the long-term institutionalized and they were people who could not work. They required the care of others. And that is why they were targeted for death. So it's predominantly people who have cognitive impairments or psychiatric illness or behavioral disturbances.

We already have this episode, so unlocking it is cheap and permanent: the full transcript (35 minutes, 5,757 words), segment and word-level timestamps, and .txt, .srt, .vtt and word-level JSON downloads, as many times as you like, forever.

No account needed, we create one from your checkout email. With credits it is 1 credit; packs start at 5 episodes for $3.49, and monthly plans are cheaper still.