Disposable Humanity: A Film About the Mass Murder of Disabled People During World War 2

​TW: Violence and murder of disabled people.

“Disposable Humanity” is a feature documentary by film director Cameron Mitchell tracing the history of “Aktion T4,” a Nazi program that murdered over 200,000 people between 1939 and 1945.

Ableism Rooted in German History

Most Germans remember learning about the war crimes and cruelties committed by the Nazis against Jewish people. At school, students read “The Diaries of Anne Frank“ and discuss the discrimination against Jewish people in all aspects of life, but they are not taught that it all started with disabled people. Disabled people were the test balloon for the Holocaust. They were targeted first and used to “test” the logistics of a state-led killing machine.

First, 350,000 disabled people were forcefully sterilized, and thousands died as a consequence. Then disabled toddlers and young children were killed out of “mercy” in 1939. Later on, the same law also authorized “mercy killings“ of adults, primarily targeting disabled and chronically ill people as well as people with mental health conditions.

The term “Aktion T4” was first used in post-war trials against doctors involved in the killings. It referred to the address of the chancellery department at Tiergartenstrasse 4 in West Berlin, set up in early 1940 to recruit and pay personnel associated with “Aktion T4”. Doctors were authorized to select patients they considered incurably sick and kill them. The murders were committed primarily in institutions through gassing, lethal injection, or starvation. From 1939 to 1945, between 275,000 and 300,000 people with disabilities, chronic illnesses, and mental health conditions were killed by the Nazis. The logistics behind it paved the way for the murders in the concentration camps.

A film giving a platform to unheard voices

“Disposable Humanity” is made from an American perspective and from within a family where disability is the norm. Director Cameron Mitchell’s parents are disability studies professors and invented “narrative prosthesis,” the idea that disability can be used as a bad plot device in storytelling. Mitchell’s father and sister are disabled.

Yet, no member of his family had known much about “Aktion T4” or the history of crimes committed against disabled people by Nazis in Germany. The idea for the film developed after the Mitchell family presented on eugenics in the US at a conference in Germany in the 90s. “Someone in the audience stood up during the Q&A section and asked a question in German which the translator refused to translate,“ Mitchell remembers. “And after some outcry and pushing from the rest of the audience, he translated it, and the question was: Did you know that they did this not far from here?“

The Mitchells wanted to know more, so they grabbed a camera and went to film at what are now the T4 memorials at Hademar and Bernberg. “The director in Bernberg came out and told us the exhibit wasn’t accessible to disabled people because it was down in the basement,“ Mitchell says. “But it didn’t really stop us. We carried each other down the stairs.” Mitchell was nine when this happened, but it stayed with him, and since then he wanted to make the voices of disabled people heard.

“I just realized that when we talk about the Holocaust, or other crimes committed by the Nazis, we hardly ever talk about disabled people. It’s hardly ever mentioned in literature, and so I felt that it was time to make a feature film for various reasons,” Mitchell says. “What we Americans often forget is that we blame the Germans for everything the Nazis did, but we forget, for example, that it was the Americans who inspired the whole idea of Nazi Eugenics. I wanted to change the conversation and the representation because we’ve frankly been lied to,” he continues, “about how the Holocaust occurred, about how it started on the backs of disabled people who were murdered first. They were the first to be killed and the last to be remembered, with the T4 memorial being opened to the public in Berlin in 2014.“ Mitchell says the crimes were planned with striking efficiency. As the Nazis pursued what they believed to be a perfect human race, they put people with hereditary blindness, hereditary deafness, or Huntington’s chorea on the top list for immediate sterilization and later made sure they ended up in institutions to be killed.

Journey into dark memories

After Cameron Mitchell read through the archives, he took his family on a journey to Germany to film “Disposable Humanity”.

What makes this film so impactful are the memories and stories of descendants of T4 victims. They often begin with disguise and shame.

A lot of them, for a long time, didn’t know what really happened to their family members. Some had been told their family members died during an illness as a child, while in reality they were killed as adults in psychiatric institutions by the Nazis. In the film, they give us an insight into how they began looking for clues and piecing together what really happened.

As Germans, we still find it hard to cope with this part of our history; we deny it, or at least try to hide it as well as we can. And that is not even hard because, unlike the well-documented history of the Holocaust, the stories of disabled people aren’t as easy to track.

To Cameron Mitchell, this denial is one of the reasons we keep making the same mistakes globally. “While we were in Germany filming, we realized how deep denial can go. How can you have a T4 memorial, and run a still functioning psychiatric institution right in the same building? We need to question institutionalization in general! In Pirna-Sonnenstein, for example, they had a sheltered workshop where they are exploiting disabled labor, paying them 2 Euros an hour right next door to this monument. It just shows the lack of questioning our actions!“ Mitchell says. These facts are underlined in the film by German Disability Studies Professor Rebecca Maskos.

“Disposable Humanity” isn’t easy to watch for a disabled person. One may have moments where they aren’t sure whether to cry, throw something at their screen, or completely lose any hope in humanity. In one scene, the viewer sees stairs leading down to what used to be a gas chamber in a basement. After waiting their turn to die in a concentration camp, disabled people were transported to this basement. In the film, they describe a mounted panopticon mirror in the corner, so nurses could confirm everyone’s last breath before they ordered staff to go in and remove the bodies.

“Nobody ever asked where the gas chambers came from. We all assume that the idea just occurred to the Nazis. But this was a carefully planned logistic system, and it was tested out and evolved through the T4 program.“

According to Mitchell, without T4, the Holocaust wouldn’t have been possible. “When we were visiting these memorials, some of the memorial directors told us that this would have happened anyway, that they would have figured out ways of committing these crimes on millions of Jews. I am convinced it isn’t true! Nothing was coincidental. They prepared well. And that is one of the main messages of this film.“

Efficient registration

One of the scariest moments of the film includes hearing some of the information in medical forms that were sent to families with newborn children, especially if they were known to have a disability. Parents were asked if the child died in an institution, would the parents hold the institutions responsible for their death? They were looking for legal permission to kill. These forms were later given to adults as well. By then, they had a broad database of disabled people. Parents with a disabled child immediately got a letter from the health authorities that their child had to be transferred to an institution for special care. And many parents would never see their child again after that.

Stigma then and now

Many of our ableist stereotypes today are rooted in T4. For instance, the film shows the propaganda movies the Nazis used to show in cinemas to implant this idea of eugenics into the minds of German society. “Lives unworthy of living, useless eaters – these were the terms fed into these videos,“ Mitchell says, “paired with monstrous uplighting and low angles of disabled people in institutions to get the public to go along with it. It was so deeply rooted in society that almost all the doctors who were asked to participate in T4 said yes, even though they were offered the option to decline. Regular people never questioned disabled people being sterilized either.”

A film that raises questions

“Disposable Humanity” is probably the scariest and most psychologically challenging film of the decade. Mostly because it hits close to home for most disabled people. Worldwide, we experience a climate that once again asks whether we are worth being alive, whether we deserve to live independently rather than be institutionalized, and, if we aren’t careful, we may end up where we were 80 years ago. To prevent that, we, as a society, need to understand that a human’s worth has nothing to do with their productivity or support cost. We need to understand that accessibility is a human right and that, after all, in the end, we all may end up disabled one way or another. And moreover, we need to stop being ashamed and in denial of this part of our history. Only if we confront this uncomfortable reality will we ensure that disabled people are never silenced, segregated, or deemed “disposable” ever again.