Dehumanization, Disability, and Eugenics

Abstract

Eugenics and dehumanization are often thought to be closely related because the best-known state-sponsored eugenic program—that of the Nazis, from 1933 until 1945—involved the extreme dehumanization of certain sorts of people, such as Jewish people and people with disabilities (Black 2003: Chs.15–17; Smith 2001). Under the Nazi regime, there was the systematic segregation, internment, sterilization, and murder of such people.This formed part of an explicit program of genocide and extermination of Jewish people and people with disabilities (amongst others), who were subject to such treatment because they were deemed to be less than fully human and, in some cases, had “lives without value” or “lives not worth living” (Binding and Hoche 1920; Proctor 1988;Taylor 2015).They were not merely viewed as different from those that the Nazis envisaged as populating the Third Reich, but they were depicted as inferior sorts of people: Untermenschen (subhumans) or a Gegenrasse (counter-race) who lacked the desired characteristics and abilities to stock future generations (Stone 2010; see Steizinger, this volume).Thus, we find the standard tropes of dehumanization—assimilating Jews to vermin and social diseases, comparing disabled people to burdensome animals—in Nazi propaganda and in public forms of state communication. These dehumanizing depictions were sufficiently extreme in nature that the Nazi state apparatus, with the support of the German volk, could see itself justified not simply in protecting the German nation from the concocted threats posed by such sorts of people, but as dutifully eliminating those threats from present and future generations altogether. In the name of eugenics, between 70 000 to 100 000 German citizens with disabilities (Weindling 2014) were systematically murdered by the Nazis through the Aktion T4 euthanasia program early in the Second World War; approximately 6 000 000 Jews were murdered during the more temporally and geographically expansive geno­ cidal Holocaust that was the culmination of the Nazi enthusiasm for “racial hygiene,” or eugenics. Recognition of the dehumanizing nature of these genocidal and murderous laws and policies is often thought to have been important in the ending of what I have called the “short history” of eugenics (Wilson 2018a: Ch.2), that being a history that runs for the 80 years between Galton’s early thoughts about eugenics in 1865 and the end of the Second World War in 1945.What about eugenics itself? Is there something about the very idea of eugenics itself that is dehumanizing or, instead, should we properly reserve that judgment about eugenics for extreme implementations of the practice of it, such as one finds in Nazi laws and policies?