The Origins of Nazi Genocide: From Euthanasia to the Final Solution

TLDR

Friedlander traces how Nazi racist and eugenic ideologies led the regime to pursue the extermination of Jews, Gypsies, and the handicapped, viewing these groups as biologically inferior. The study documents the link between the Nazi assault on the handicapped and the Final Solution, showing that 1930s legal restrictions and exclusionary policies, including mass sterilization, paved the way for mass murder during the war. Through extensive archival research, Friedlander analyzes the roles of German bureaucracy, judiciary, physicians, scientists, and popular opposition in the transition from euthanasia to the Holocaust. He demonstrates that the euthanasia program provided a practical model for later mass murder, with the killing centers where the handicapped were gassed and crem.

Abstract

Tracing the rise of racist and eugenic ideologies, Henry Friedlander explores how the Nazi programme of secretly exterminating the handicapped and disabled evolved into the systematic destruction of Jews and Gypsies. He describes how the so-called euthanasia of the handicapped provided a practical model for the later mass murder, thereby initiating the Holocaust. The Nazi regime pursued the extermination of Jews, Gypsies and the handicapped based on a belief in the biological, and thus absolute, inferiority of those groups. To document the connection between the assault on the handicapped and the Final Solution, Friedlander shows how the legal restrictions and exclusionary policies of the 1930s, including mass sterilization, led to mass murder during the war. He also makes clear that the killing centres where the handicapped were gassed and cremated served as the models for the extermination camps. Based on extensive archival research, the book also analyzes the involvement of the German bureaucracy and judiciary, the participation of physicians and scientists, and the nature of popular opposition.