Aggregated News
REVIEWED:
The Question of Unworthy Life: Eugenics and Germany’s Twentieth Century
Dagmar Herzog
Princeton University Press, 2024
The Life Worth Living: Disability, Pain, and Morality
Joel Michael Reynolds
University of Minnesota Press, 2022
The Art of Flourishing: Conversations on Disability
Edited by Liz Bowen, Joel Michael Reynolds, Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, and Erik Parens
Oxford University Press, 2025
At the Nuremberg Medical Trials, Karl Brandt, Hitler’s personal physician, testified about his involvement in what he referred to as “the Leipzig case.” The parents of a child born with several disabilities wanted to have it killed. Since the director of their local hospital had rebuffed them, they had petitioned the Führer’s chancellery directly. As it happened, the Führer wanted a solution to the so-called euthanasia question, and so Brandt was directed to review the case and make it an exemplar. He found, as he put it, no reason to let the child live.
The child, eventually identified as a boy named Gerhard Kretschmar, became the first known victim of the T4 program, which killed nearly 300,000 disabled people between 1939 and 1945. While...