Feature: The First Holocaust

Disabled people were the first to be targeted in Adolf Hitler’s dream of creating a Master Race. Able magazine looks back at what happened in the 1930s, why it’s still relevant today, and how disabled people are now at the forefront of bringing this hidden history to light.

MEMORIAL DAY

At moments, the contrast seemed almost unbearable: hearing about the inhumanity of the officially-sanctioned sterilisation and murder of disabled children and adults, while outside the sun shone brightly in a near cloudless blue sky, birds sung and a cooling breeze rustled through the surrounding trees.

Early May; Able magazine was among several hundred people invited by the National Holocaust Centre, in the heart of rural Nottinghamshire, to witness the official dedication of a small memorial commemorating the million-plus deaf and disabled people persecuted, sterilised or killed during the German Third Reich. While the Holocaust is rightly remembered for the murder of millions of Jews, the fact that the whole process began with Aktion T4 – the systematic sterilisation, abuse and murder of people with learning and physical impairments – has been largely forgotten. Until now.

At the heart of “Disability and the Holocaust: We Shall Not Forget” was the dedication of a rose and plaque in the Centre’s memorial gardens, paid for by members of the Nottinghamshire Disabled People’s Movement (NDPM). Supporting this was a schedule of talks and discussions on the subject of the disabled holocaust.

Writer and film director Liz Crow discussed her recent research trip to some of the actual sites where Aktion T4’s murderous activities had taken place. Some of the facilities are still operating as mental health institutions today, although Liz seemed more shocked that the plaque marking the site of the program’s long-demolished headquarters is next to a modern bus station – given the program’s increasingly iconic use of dark-windowed buses to transport disabled people to their death.

Personal testimony was provided by 85 year old Hans Cohn, who explained how he escaped the coming disaster by being sent to a college for blind students in England in the late 30s. Meantime members of the NDPM explained why it was important to uncover and promote this “hidden history”, and their younger colleagues – members of the Pioneers Youth Disability Forum – outlined their proposals for the UK’s first permanent memorial sculpture acknowledging this particular period of disability history.

After the official dedication of the plaque, the general view of the attendees Able spoke to was that it had been a “remarkable” day. The artist Alison Lapper – model for the infamous nude statue erected last year in Trafalgar Square – said: “It opened even my eyes and I thought I knew a lot about the Holocaust,” she said. “Disabled people were the first victims, yet we hardly feature in the history books and are still so often swept aside and forgotten about. I hope that this will open people’s eyes and hearts, and really mark the start of a learning process for the future.”

Representatives from the Holocaust Centre also explained how they intended to become more inclusive, not just making their educational exhibitions more accessible to disabled visitors but also incorporating disabled people into the story they tell. Part of this will be through a new interactive, hands-on exhibition. Aimed specifically at primary school children, the Journey has been designed with access “built in”, so that visitors of all abilities can experience the multi-sensory recreation of a 30s Jewish home, a classroom, a street scene after the infamous Kristallnacht (during which thousands of synagogues, Jewish homes and businesses were attacked) and a “hidden room” within a house. The aim is to ensure that even young visitors can appreciate prejudices and differences and how they relate to events happening today.

For that is at the heart of what the Holocaust Centre does; highlighting the lessons the past can give about tomorrow. The Centre’s Dr James Smith explained: “Apart from marking the importance of the place of disabled groups within the memory of the Holocaust, this day is also a reminder of how groups that were persecuted under the Nazi regime are still in many respects excluded from our own communities today. Not of course in the same extreme manner, but there are many lessons we have to learn about not being bystanders and promoting societies that include rather than exclude people, either deliberately or inadvertently. The world has moved on very positively in the past 60 years since the Holocaust, but in many ways the lessons are still there to be learned. There is still a huge amount of work to do.”

MORE: The Holocaust Centre,

Laxton, Nottinghamshire, NG22 0PA

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Hans Cohn was born in Berlin in 1923. Because his lawyer father was a former soldier – awarded the Iron Cross – he was exempt from a Nazi decree forbidding Jewish children attending Aryan schools, and – age 11 – was sent to a private school which was popular with the children of foreign ambassadors, His parents hoped Hans would escape the worst of the growing persecution and would also gain useful fluency in other languages.

In September 1934, Hans was assaulted by a Hitler Youth member; a blow to his left eye started the deterioration of his eyesight. As a Jew, no ophthalmic specialist in Germany would treat him, so by the time he underwent two, unsuccessful operations in the Netherlands, it was too late. When, a year later, he developed sympathetic ophthalmia in his right eye, he was left totally blind. Unusually, senior staff at the school allowed Hans to continue attending, becoming one of the first blind children in Germany to receive a mainstream education.

In 1938, as anti-Jewish feelings grew in Germany, Hans was sent to complete his studies at Worcester College in the UK. Plunged into a strange, unknown environment he was initially bullied because of his poor English, but his mother migrated to England the following year. His father remained in Germany in order to continue funding his son’s education for as long as possible – he was deported to Theresienstadt concentration camp in 1941 and died a year later “from the consequences of a medical experiment”.

Thanks to the financial support of the Jewish Blind Society in England, Hans completed his education, and qualified as a physiotherapist in 1945. He worked for 20 years in a general hospital before settling into a thriving private practice. He’s also been a member of the Royal National Institute for the Blind and its standing committees since 1973, International Officer of the National Federation of the Blind of the UK, and editor of the NFBUK’s magazine, Viewpoint, since 1982.

When Able speaks with Bristol-based writer-director Liz Crow in July, she’s about to start editing a short drama on Elise Blick, a German woman caught up in Aktion T4. This film, alongside a series of video portraits of the cast speaking about how working on the project has affected them, will form the core of Resistance – an educational film-based installation which will be launched on Holocaust Memorial Day, 27 January 2009, before touring the  UK.

Certainly Liz found making the film an enlightening experience. “Putting together the script and watching actors bringing it to life, I feel like I’ve learnt so much about the kind of process and experience people must have gone through back then,” she says. A short research trip to some of the Aktion T4 sites also helped. “It didn’t change the story that I was telling,” she insists, “but brought a depth to it. I feel we’ve got closer to the truth.”

Liz first heard of the disabled holocaust when author Alan Sutherland dedicated his book on disability politics to the victims of the Third Reich. Later she read the work of American disabled author Hugh Gregory Gallagher. “That was the first in depth research I’d come across about Aktion T4,” she explains. “I was very struck by a relatively short chapter about disabled people who had resisted. I knew that I wanted to do something about that historical episode, that the only way I could actually deal with the horror was to look at the fact that disabled people did resist – I think that showed enormous courage and it needs acknowledging.”

Nor does Liz believe that the disabled holocaust is something safely in the past. “I’m not saying that Aktion T4 exists now, but the values which permitted it to happen then are absolutely contemporary,” she insists. “Some of the statements that came out in the recent debates about the Embryology Bill could have come straight from papers and speeches made in the 30s. From the casual abuse of Blue Badge spaces through to the apparent rise in disabled hate crimes, the values are still there.”

Despite disability rights now being enshrined in law, Liz is wary of complacency. “When I started out doing direct action protests, I imagined that once you’d won something, it was sorted and you went on to the next thing,” she says. “Over time I’ve realised that actually you have to become a caretaker as well.”

This is why Liz doesn’t see Resistance as just being about what happened during the Third Reich. “The project is going to include linked events,” she adds. “As it tours, other people and groups will be able to connect their own events, art activities or activist work. It’s going to become a platform celebrating disabled people now.”

MORE: www.roaring-girl.com

1925: Adolf Hitler’s book Mein Kampf published. In it he wrote: “He who is bodily and mentally not sound and deserving may not perpetuate this misfortune in the bodies of his children. The racial state has to perform the most gigantic rearing-task here. One day, however, it will appear as a deed greater than the most victorious wars of our present bourgeois era.”

1933: Hitler becomes Chancellor of Germany. The Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring prescribes compulsory sterilisation for a range of hereditary conditions – including schizophrenia, epilepsy, Huntington’s chorea and “imbecility” – as well as chronic alcoholism and social “deviance”.

1935: Having previously agreed to withdraw from all political activity in Germany, the Catholic Church protests in a private memorandum against proposals to pass a law legalising euthanasia.

1939: The parents of a severely deformed child born near Leipzig write to Hitler seeking his permission for their child to be put to death. Hitler approves, creating a precedent for the mercy death by lethal injection of children under the age of three with severe impairments, assuming agreement of three doctors. After the outbreak of the Second World War, procedures – including gaining parental consent – becomes less rigorous. The program is quickly extended to older children, adolescents and adults, with all hospitals, nursing homes, old-age homes and sanatoria required to identify patients who had been institutionalised for five years or more. At Posen (now Poznań) in Poland, hundreds of patients are killed using carbon monoxide gas in an improvised gas chamber, viewed as being a quicker and more efficient method than lethal injections.

1940: “Special Treatment” centres at Brandenburg, Grafeneck and Hartheim kill nearly 10,000 disabled people each, with a further 6,000 killed at Sonnenstein.

1941: The Catholic Church breaks its official silence on euthanasia. As public protests spread, Hitler orders the cancellation of Aktion T4, though the clinical murder of disabled people continues.

1946: An American military tribunal tries 23 doctors and administrators for their roles in Aktion T4 – 16 are found guilty, with seven executed on 2 June 1948.

2008: Simon Wiesenthal Center representatives in Chile announce campaign to ensnare Aribert Heim, aka “Dr Death”, on the run since 1962 for his work at the Sachsenhausen, Buchenwald, and Mauthausen concentration camps – at Mauthausen, he murdered hundreds of disabled people by lethal injections during the autumn of 1941.

IN NUMBERS:

360,000 – estimated number of disabled people sterilised in Nazi Germany between 1933 and 1939.

250,000 – estimated number of people with physical and learning impairments murdered by the Third Reich.

20,000 – estimated number of concentration camp inmates killed in T4 centres after the program was officially cancelled.

5,000 – estimated number of disabled children killed in Germany between 1939 and 1941

It’s a story which theatre director Peter Clerke believes “really does deserve to be told”. Yet it took writer and actor Nabil Shaban more than a decade to bring his play about the disabled holocaust to the stage – in fact, it’s more than 25 years since he first heard about Aktion T4 from disability campaigner Vic Finkelstein and decided that the most effective way for him to publicise this ignored history would through a new drama.

Nabil is possibly the most famous disabled actor in the UK, having played the repulsive Sil in 80s Doctor Who and co-founded acclaimed theatre company Graeae. Back then, though, he didn’t believe he could write a play about the disabled holocaust, so he spent many years trying to interest writers to take on the subject. In the early 90s he linked up with dissident South African writer Jack Klaff – who came up with the title, The First To Go – but work didn’t progress anywhere near fast enough for Nabil. “So a friend said to me – why don’t you write it?” Nabil laughs. “At the same time Graeae had been taken over by a really great guy called Ewan Marshall, who asked me if there was anything we should work on together. I wrote up a proposal for the play, Graeae submitted it to the Arts Council for England and they gave us the money – so, in 1995, Ewan commissioned me to write the first draft.”

By the time Nabil had done so, however, Ewan had moved on and his successor wasn’t interested in the play. A further decade followed during which Nabil repeatedly failed to get people interested in The First To Go as either a play or a film. Famously, after he did get some funding from the government’s Year for Disabled People fund to develop a film version, Nabil felt obliged to return the money as a protest against the UK invasion of Iraq. So, it wasn’t until after he’d moved to Scotland and built up a reputation with local theatre companies that he was able to get funding from the Scottish Arts Council to prime a full production of the play.

Having championed the play for so long, Nabil clearly believes the story of the disabled holocaust needs to be told, but he also insists that it’s a story told by disabled people. “If non-disabled people were to do a piece about the disabled holocaust, you would get a story about some do-good nurse or doctor trying to help disabled victims escape from the killing centre,” explains Nabil. “Yes, there were a lot of stories like that, but I didn’t want to write a story where disabled people are just at the receiving end of someone else’s benevolence, altruism or heroism.”

The First To Go – recently produced by Edinburgh-based company Benchtours in venues across central Scotland (and Hull!) – focuses on three disabled people: Seigfried (played in this first production by Nabil), Heidi (Scottish actor Robyn Hunt) and Helmut (Alan Clay, who has often worked with learning disability theatre company Mind The Gap). Long time inmates at various institutions, they are escorted on their journey towards a final “mercy death” by Brunhilde (Cernie Burnell), a nurse who lost her arm below the elbow in an explosion. To comfort her charges she joins their storytelling circle where she joins in their story of the Bad Man (Adolf Hitler) and his Liar (Joseph Goebbels), whose congenital club foot should have placed him on his own lists of undesirables.

“I didn’t want to tell a story where we were just victims,” Nabil insists. “I also didn’t want to make disabled people holier than thou. When I discovered that Joseph Goebbels was disabled it gave me an opportunity to put him in as a disabled villain. At the same time, I wanted a disabled hero, so Colonel von Stauffenberg (a disabled war veteran who headed an attempt to assassinate Hitler) was the perfect choice. It allowed me to write a play about these three elements of disability; the hero, the victim and the villain.”

Critical and audience reaction to the play was largely positive, but its strengths were already recognised by the cast. Robyn Hunt, who played Heidi, explains: “I’m one of those disabled actors who believes that there are a whole load of untold stories about disabled people and that we have a responsibility to help tell them.” According to fellow actor Nick Field, Nabil has created a “good piece of theatre that has something to tell people.”

Certainly Benchtours creative director Peter Clerke was pleased by the mix of audiences that came to see the show. “There were people and groups that were concerned with disability issues,” he explains, “but there was quite a lot of the general public as well who just came along – that was particularly gratifying.”

However, the tour was just seven performances long. “That’s the problem with theatre; it’s very transitory,” Nabil admits. “But one of the sad things was that we had problems getting theatres to take the show on. They thought it was too depressing, that it wasn’t commercial, that it was too wordy and too long.”

Nevertheless, Nabil hopes that The First To Go will have a future. “It certainly has a life now, in book form – anybody can get it from WHSmith, Waterstone’s or order it from the internet,” he says, “but I’d still like to get the show back on the road, to get it into London. And I still want it to be made into a movie. Scottish Screen have expressed an interest in it, but I’ve got to find a producer first, so if any Able reader wants to become a film producer…”

Nabil Shaban – The Relevance of the Disabled Holocaust

“The Arts Councils’ brief is to get rid of companies like Benchtours and Theatre Workshop because the government doesn’t want to be funding disability arts anymore; it doesn’t want to be funding disability theatre or any kind of minorities. The whole emphasis is on bourgeois theatre that doesn’t question, doesn’t oppose a regime which is stealing more and more money from the tax payers to pay for its illegal wars. Money’s being taken out of the Arts – not for the bloody Olympics, that’s just camouflage, that’s just a smoke screen – to pay for a war in Iraq, a war in Afghanistan and the future war in Iran. One of the reasons why Hitler was killing people in hospitals and so on was that he needed to free up all the money that was being spent keeping “useless eaters” to be spent on the war effort.

“That, I believe, is the fate of disabled people in Britain today. We can already see how there is this kind of creeping agenda of euthanasia eugenics agenda in Britain. It began with the Fertilisation and Embryology Bill, whereby it’s legal to abort disabled fetuses that have reached full term. And we see the prioritisation going on in the NHS whereby certain people are bottom or don’t even get on waiting lists – like that Down’s Syndrome girl who needed a heart operation but was denied even a place on the waiting list. That’s what we’ve got today, and I believe it’s going to get worse. So obviously, the government don’t want to encourage the screening or production of plays like mine because the last thing they want is for people to start opposing the euthanasia policy.”

First They Came… is a poem attributed to Pastor Martin Niemöller, who opposed the Nazi regime, survived the Sachsenhausen and Dachau Concentration camps and ultimately became a leading voice of penance and reconciliation after the Second World War. The poem exists in several forms, but all clearly underline the danger of political apathy against a regime purging its chosen targets, one after another. A new version was read after the symbolic lighting of candles at the Holocaust Centre in May.

FIRST THEY CAME…

First they came for the sick and disabled, and I did not speak out – because I was not disabled.

Then they came for the Communists, and I did not speak out – because I was not a Communist.

Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out – because I was not a Trade Unionist.

Then they came for the Homosexuals, and I did not speak out – because I was not homosexual.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out – because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me – and there was no one left to speak for me.