Life unworthy of life

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The phrase "life unworthy of life" (in German: "Lebensunwertes Leben") was a Nazi designation for the segments of populace which had no right to live and thus were to be "euthanized". The term included people with serious medical problems and those considered grossly inferior according to racial policy of the Third Reich. This concept formed an important component of the ideology of Nazism and eventually helped lead to the Holocaust. How the killing was carried out is described in the article, Action T4.

History

The expression first occurs in the title of a 1920 book, Die Freigabe der Vernichtung Lebensunwerten Lebens (Allowing the Destruction of Life Unworthy of Life) by jurist Karl Binding, retired from the University of Leipzig, and psychiatrist Alfred Hoche from the University of Freiburg, both professors. According to Hoch, some living people who were brain damaged, mentally retarded, psychiatrically ill were "mentally dead", "human ballast" and "empty shells of human beings". Hoch felt killing such people was useful. Some people were simply considered disposable. Later the killing was extended to people considered 'racially impure' or 'racially inferior' according to Nazi thinking.

Nazi categorization

Further information: Nazi concentration camp badges and Holocaust victims

This poster (from around 1938) reads: "60,000 Reichsmarks is what this person suffering from a hereditary disease costs the People's community during his lifetime. Comrade, that is your money too. Read '[A] New People', the monthly magazine of the Bureau for Race Politics of the NSDAP."

Those considered to be "deviant" or a "source of social turmoil" in Nazi Germany and the occupied Europe fell under this designation. The "deviant" category included the mentally ill, people with disabilities, political dissidents, homosexuals, interracial couples, and criminals. The "social turmoil" category included some clergy, Communists, Jews, Romani people, Jehovah's Witnesses, "non-white" or non-Caucasian peoples, ethnic Poles and a variety of other groups in society. More than any other of these groups, the Jews soon became the primary focus of this genocidal policy.

The concept culminated in Nazi extermination camps, instituted to systematically kill those who were unworthy to live according to Nazi ideologists. It also justified various human experimentation and eugenics programs, as well as Nazi racial policies. The policies included ethnic Poles, with Adolf Hitler writing to his generals in the Eastern Front to kill "without pity or mercy, all men, women, and children of Polish descent or language", and Heinrich Himmler writing, "All Poles will disappear from the world. [...] It is essential that the great German people should consider it as its major task to destroy all Poles."

Development of the concept

According to the author of Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton, the policy went through a number of iterations and modifications:

Of the five identifiable steps by which the Nazis carried out the principle of "life unworthy of life," coercive sterilization was the first. There followed the killing of "impaired" children in hospitals; and then the killing of "impaired" adults, mostly collected from mental hospitals, in centers especially equipped with carbon monoxide gas. This project was extended (in the same killing centers) to "impaired" inmates of concentration and extermination camps and, finally, to mass killings in the extermination camps themselves.

See also

• Glossary of Nazi Germany
• Nazi eugenics
• Action T4
• Department of Film (Nazi Germany)
• Nazism and race
• Eugenics

External links

• "Life Unworthy of Life" and other Medical Killing Programmes by Dr. Stuart D. Stein, University of the West of England