History

The darkest and best-documented atrocity in the history of disabled people occurred during the Nazi regime in Germany in the 1930’s and 1940’s. Hitler’s Aktion T4 program killed disabled people and incinerated their bodies, almost as a way of practicing its methods for the numerically greater atrocities committed against the Jewish people in the “final solution” remembered as “The Holocaust” to this day.

Margaret MacMillan’s book helps us understand what history is and how it can be used or misused when applied to current situations. Facts can be “cherry-picked” or left out altogether, twisted for current political purposes, or misinterpreted accidentally or deliberately. But facts are facts. People had their bodies harmed in painful “medical” experiments. People died at the hands of other people, many of whom were medical professionals. Some families volunteered their disabled family members to be slaughtered. Other families would have been horrified, but never found out the truth about how their disabled family member died.

Kenny Fries is a disabled writer, researcher and scholar who has lived in America, Canada, Japan, and Germany. While living in Germany, he has contributed important work on the history of Aktion T4, the Nazi program of experimentation and extermination of people with disabilities. In these six videos, Fries details the facts gleaned about the people who died, and those who killed them.

Disposable Humanity (World Premiere, Slamdance 2025)
A film by disabled historians David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder about the original victims of the Nazi Aktion T4 Euthanasia program — the ‘practice’ ground for methods of killing and disposing of bodies that paved the way for the Shoah, the mass murder of millions of Jews. The Holocaust became possible through the designation of an entire class of people, disabled Germans, as ‘lives unworthy of life’ who were (secretively) declared redundant and marked for ‘disposal’ by the German medical establishment and the Nazi government. Most of these medical practitioners escaped accountability and/or punishment after the war ended. These victims were not memorialized in Germany until 2014.

One of the most infamous Nazi doctors was Josef Mengele, a Nazi scientist who did heinous experiments on many disabled people, both before and after he had them killed in the gas chambers of Auschwitz. But one family was not killed, so their story survives. Perla was a member of the Ovitz family, a family of Jewish dwarves — “little people” who performed in circuses and shows for a living. Dr. Mengele decided not to kill this large family of performers for reasons we will never know, but he did conduct painful and humiliating experiments on them. One film, Liebe Perla, interviews one of the survivors, who is so grateful to him for not murdering her family that she refuses to say anything bad about him, and refuses to acknowledge the number of disabled people he tortured and killed.

There is much to say about the manner in which disabled people have been treated in Canada as well, from institutionalization to sterilization, from segregated education to victimization. Eugenic thinking was common here before and during the Nazi war, across the political spectrum, left to right, and the notions behind it did not disappear with the eventual change in the law. Large, congregate institutions for people with intellectual, mental and psychiatric differences and disabilities were notorious for physical, sexual and emotional abuse of residents. Most of these places have been closed in most provinces and territories, but they still exist, often under different names. Unmarked graves of thousands of residents have been desecrated and treated with disrespect. Woodlands in BC is one of those institutions, but there were many others from coast to coast.

For a tally of the effects of the Coronavirus Pandemic on disabled and institutionalized people, see Amy Hasbrouck’s June 2020 Blogpost, The impact of the Coronavirus pandemic, and the policies meant to contain it, on disabled people. While you’re there, spend some time checking out the 245-episode archive of webinars, from 2012 up to June, 2020.

While disabled people in Canada achieved a measure of equality by having their rights recognized in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms in 1981, this has not resulted in social and material conditions of equality for most. While there have been many important challenges resulting in strengthened legal status for people with disabilities, there is still a very long way to go before the country achieves real recognition of substantive equality.

There is much more material to be included on this page in the future. For example, The Eugenics Archive provides a rich and comprehensive historical resource that deserves much more attention, and will be highlighted in upcoming blog posts. Meanwhile, please give sober consideration to the real historical backdrop of the disabled community’s opposition to a Bill that offers them “death by choice”, but fails to provide material support for life.

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Important speeches on the floor of the Senate during Third Reading of Bill C-7

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CJDS – The Canadian Journal of Disability Studies, August, 2024

The Forward to Volume 13, #2 is a comprehensive history of the disability rights movement’s perspectives and actions on euthanasia and assisted suicide, including the demolition of “reasonably foreseeable natural death” as a requirement in 2021. The remainder of the volume contains many of the “5-minute entreaties” presented to a parliamentary committee in 2022, as lawmakers rushed to consider the inclusion of mental illness as a ground for euthanasia, in the absence of terminal illness.

https://cjds.uwaterloo.ca/index.php/cjds/issue/view/47

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CJDS 14.1 – APRIL 2025. Canada’s Medical Assistance inDying:Eugenics under another name? Valentina Capurri, PhDInstructor of GeographyToronto Metropolitan Universityvcapurri@torontomu.caAbstract

This paper is a study of the Canadian Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD)program initiated in 2016 and undergoing expansion ever since. It tries to understand how it is that the Canadian government frames assisted dying as a viable and beneficial practice to both individuals and the public purse, while also exploring the rationale for its decision-making. The study begins by examining MAiD and its projected expansion (expected for March 2027) to cover a larger group of applicants than those initially qualifying when it was started. I argue that the program is first and foremost rooted in eugenics and economics as priorities in Canada at the government/administrative and society levels. Together with eugenics, I question economic forms of logic that shape how governments enact and support policies, specifically during periods of financial recession. In my overall analysis, I caution about the serious implications that legalized assistance in dying could have not only on the individuals directly affected and their immediate families and friends, but also on the larger society. (ALSO available in French).

https://cjds.uwaterloo.ca/index.php/cjds/article/view/1210/1354

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