Documentary film-maker Saskia Baron looks back at the production of the Channel 4 series about the Nazi eugenics era, in which she brought to public attention the campaign of mass-killing against people with disabilities.
There used to be a saying in British TV circles that if your documentary proposal had Egypt, sex or Nazis in it, you could get it commissioned. I had already made two documentaries about the Holocaust for the BBC when Channel 4 commissioned a series about science during the Third Reich. Two programmes would look at aviation and physics, the other two would focus on the Nazi plan to improve the human race through biology and medicine, and those were the films I worked on.
The Nazi sterilisation campaign – and the more covert murder of 100,000 disabled German children and adults in the name of eugenics – is perhaps not as widely known as the slaughter of millions in the concentration camps. I was keen to explore this history and get the story out to a wider audience, while being wary of British TV’s seemingly insatiable appetite for dwelling on Nazi horrors. There were so many respected scientists and doctors involved; they had become key players and ensured that eugenics was at the heart of the Nazi agenda. I wanted to understand how such thinking evolved and to make sure that their victims’ voices were heard.
It is sometimes forgotten because of the dark shadow cast by the Holocaust that eugenics originated in Britain with Francis Galton and was not originally dominated by right-wing thinking. The Eugenics Society’s supporters included Winston Churchill and John Maynard Keynes and it was George Bernard Shaw who suggested that the disabled be dealt with by a “lethal chamber”. Beveridge himself favoured the prevention of reproduction by people with disabilities. Even The Guardian in 1934 endorsed a parliamentary report advocating voluntary sterilization of the unfit. Eugenics was a global phenomenon; Hitler was a keen reader of American eugenicist literature while writing Mein Kampf. He was envious of US legislation that had seen tens of thousands of Americans forcibly sterilized in the 1930s.
‘Useless eaters’
When Hitler came to power in Germany, he embraced the notion that the people’s health would improve through increased exercise, better diet and state encouragement of increased birth rates for ‘ideal couples’, while sterilising those of ‘poor stock’. Many German doctors embraced this wholeheartedly, reporting patients with congenital illnesses, constructing family trees and advocating sterilization for anyone believed to be the bearer of a hereditary condition.
It was a short step from there once the war was under way to propose that in straitened times, disabled people who could not work were ‘useless eaters’ and ‘lives unworthy of life’. The Action T4 programme set about killing over 100,000 disabled adults and children through a mixture of starvation, lethal injections and gas in sealed trucks or chambers constructed in hospital grounds. When protests arose from the church, amid fear that the programme would spread to include elderly people and war-wounded, the Action T4 programme was shut down and its technology and experts moved on to the concentration camps.
With the help of an excellent associate producer, Shaun Whiteside, and advice from historians Michael Burleigh and Henry Friedlander (himself a concentration camp survivor) we set about finding survivors of the sterilization programme in Germany, witnesses to the extermination programme and survivors of medical experiments from the death camps. It was heart-breaking to meet Ralph Thurm, who had been sterilized at the age of fourteen solely because he had deformed hands (which functioned perfectly well as his beautiful drawings proved). We filmed with the sister of a little boy who had been murdered in a hospital for disabled children, where they had both been sent simply because they had no parents. She believed that her brother was given a lethal injection because he had been hungry and had stolen food from the kitchen for himself and other children on the ward.
Our survivors wanted to bear witness and make sure that future generations knew what had happened to them. I worried that in order to get the whole story out or clarify events for the viewer, my questions might cause them further trauma. In some instances, we knew more about what had happened to them than they did. One Polish woman had survived Auschwitz where she had been imprisoned for helping the resistance. She had married after the war but had not been able to have children – which led her mother-in-law to take her to a doctor for examination. We knew that she had been a victim of Dr Carl Clauberg, who had used Auschwitz prisoners as guinea pigs to perfect his technique of cheap mass sterilization through injecting chemical irritants into the womb.
As well as filming interviews in people’s homes, we also filmed extensively in former concentration camps. They had become museums and while the preservation of the past is admirable, the presence of tourists and the curating of history through labels and display cabinets, gave them a distancing effect. It was when we filmed in the asylums and hospitals where the original gas chambers were created to kill disabled people that the past came most vividly to life. Some gas chambers were still in working hospitals where disabled people live or seek treatment today. The staff knew the history of their institutions and were passionate about letting people know what had happened in the past. Where possible, they had kept the fittings in the gas chambers as memorials. We were shown box cupboards filled with files from the 30s and 40s detailing patients and their purported causes of death. They showed us film and photos of the patients who died during the Nazi era.
These modern-day German doctors who had become historians of the killings in their institutions expressed anger and endless remorse about what had been done in the name of medicine in the past. They described how Germany today has some of the strictest protocols on patient information, strong disability rights and some of the most rigid rules about genetic testing in Europe – all reactions to the Nazi era.
Disturbing interviews
These doctors’ and historians’ remorse was in stark contrast to the proud son and daughter of two key eugenicists, Alfred Plötz and Ernst Rüdin, who were willing to talk to us on camera. The former was still proud of his physician father, and thought that Plötz’s idea of ‘racial hygiene’ was a very good philosophy that had only gone wrong because it was overextended. Rüdin, a psychiatrist who had been the key advocate of sterilization and later of ‘euthanasia’ had escaped lightly at Nuremberg. His daughter had become a genetic psychiatrist herself and when we interviewed her, still believed that people with schizophrenia should not be allowed to have children as they would not be able to look after them.
One of our final interviewees was even more disturbing. A retired pediatrician and lecturer, Erich Hässler, had worked at the hospital in Leipzig where the first disabled baby had been killed in 1939 on official orders from Hitler’s own physician, Karl Brandt. In our interview, Hässler insisted that the parents had rejected the child, requested his killing and that he had not been directly involved in the murder. But Hässler gave us a chilling insight into the mindset of the times when he said: “Fundamentally euthanasia is murder, but in grave times of need, exceptional cases can occur and this I cannot condemn. And besides total idiot children can’t be educated, they don’t develop, they don’t know any words, they only scream, they have to be force-fed, are doubly incontinent and throw urine and faeces if they are not tied down. These children are idiots, that’s the kind of children we are talking about.”
Since the interview we did in 2000, evidence has emerged that Hässler was more actively involved, contrary to his claims to us. He died in 2005 at the age of 104. Remembering how we had politely eaten cake and drunk tea before filming him in his peaceful, flower-filled garden, still fills me with horror.
Saskia Baron’s Hitler’s Biological Soldiers and The Deadly Experiment for C4 Science and the Swastika, can be viewed at https://vimeo.com/channels/saskiabaron/45195203
Further recommended reading:
Henry Friedlander The Origins of Nazi Genocide: From Euthanasia To The Final Solution. University of North Carolina. 1995
Michael Burleigh Death and Deliverance: ‘Euthanasia’ in Germany Cambridge University Press 1995.
