[nabs-l] Honors research

[Emma Mitchell]

Hey, everyone My project was selected to receive funding from my university however since it takes a lot of money to travel I could use some help by any donations possible. The project is below—

The Fates of Blind People in Nazi Germany

Statement of Purpose:

I have an opportunity to spend the summer in Germany at the University of Köln to study the impact of Nazi T4 on blind German adults and children.  My parents, who are GW faculty members, have received a grant to live, lecture, and make a documentary film on the T4 program and contemporary memorialization efforts. The research will involve travel to all six T4 Euthanasia Memorial Centers (Brandenburg, Grafeneck, Bernburg, Sonnenstein-Pirna, Hadamar, and Hartheim Castle) as well as to two T4 memorial sites outside of Germany (Vienna, Austria and Posnen, Poland).  All of the memorial centres include an archive with research materials related to that particular site as well as medical records of the 300,000+ disabled killed.  In these records is where I will look up the individual stories of blind people caught up in the T4 killing program.  Using optical character recognition software that allows my phone to scan paper documents, graphs, and charts (can't do photos) I will gain access to this unique collection of research materials in order to pursue my topic.  
One important thing about T4 is that the staff and killing technology was later transferred to Holocaust death camps.  Thus, T4 was the precursor to the mass murder of 6 million Jewish people (mostly Eastern European not German).  The memorial sites that, in some cases, still house the original death apparatus (gas chamber, observation window, autopsy room, and crematoria) are also on the campuses of operating psychiatric hospitals and prisons.  Whereas the killing of "psychiatric patients" would seem to include only those with mental impairments, people with physical and sensory impairments were also killed because eugenics attempted to rid the nation of disabled people as excessively burdensome.  
As a young woman who is blind and also has a physical disability, I would have been included in those groups identified as "unworthy of life."  Therefore the opportunity to study T4 has significant meaning to my research in that we must resist the urge to artificially separate the past from the present.  Today across Europe and the United States we see many potential harms to disabled peoples' well being on the horizon including: repeal of the Affordable Care Act which provides healthcare for a large percentage of disabled people (including myself), the passage of Assisted Suicide Laws, the lowering of the age limit for assisted suicide requests, the alarming escalation of the number of disabled women in prison, public education's increasing participation in the pipeline to prison program for students with autism and other behavioral disabilities, and the raiding of healthcare coffers in the name of austerity cut backs to balance beleaguered state budgets.  I have written on the T4 program for my Introduction to Critical Theory class and on Marxist analyses of disabled people excluded form the workforce for my Literature in the Financial Imagination class this semester.  Thus, the opportunity to live in Germany will significantly enhance my developing research interests in this area.  While in Germany I will participate in the making of a feature length documentary film on T4 and contemporary memorialization being made by my family that records our many visits to Euthanasia Memorial Centers over the past two decades.

Research Questions and Methodology
My primary goal while researching in Germany this summer will be to create a history of blind peoples’ fates during World War II under National Socialism (Nazi authoritarianism).  We know that many blind people were killed in the medical mass murder campaign known as the T4 program because all T4 researchers identify blindness as a category of selection (Robert Lifton, Henry Friedlander, Götz Aly, for example).  We also know that blind Jewish people were killed in the Holocaust because blindness was one of the conditions selected out at the train spurs by Nazi physicians and SS officers for immediate gassing.  Sometimes people with visual impairments slipped through this initial selection process and worked under conditions of forced labor in the camps.  For instance, in Martin Sherman’s play, Bent, the character of Rudy is killed because he has poor vision after living and laboring for a time in a Jewish concentration camp outside of Berlin (likely a camp similar to Sachsenhausen).  Significant to my interests is the fact that I have visited one German memorial, Otto Weidt’s Blind Workshop, where blind people made brooms and brushes during World War II on Rosenthaler Strasse in Berlin.  Since the factory owner, Otto Weidt (who had a visual impairment himself), was able to keep blind and deaf people from T4 and concentration camp deportations until 1943, I want to research how other blind people might have been employed during this period and whether employment served as a buffer against extermination?
There are also specific questions about blind peoples’ fate that are not fully answered in the existing literature.  For instance, T4 began by killing disabled infants and young children and current research identifies blindness as a condition that was used to select disabled adults in the adult killing program.  Thus, were blind children targeted as well as adults in the T4 program?  In other words, was blindness considered a severe enough disability to get children caught up in the T4 net or was blindness only operative in the adult killing phase?  
One of the research rationale offered up for the relationship between T4 and “the final solution” is that T4 physicians went to Jewish concentration camps and selected ill and disabled Jewish people for death at the T4 killing centers before the program was stopped in late 1942.  This transitional program of mass murder is referred to as the 14f13 program.  Was blindness a criteria for selecting disabled Jewish people for killing during this period between T4 and the larger Holocaust?  To answer this question I will read the personal diaries of the 14f13 physicians contained in the memorial archives.
There are also questions relating to contemporary memorialization efforts about the victims of the T4 program.  If blindness was a key criteria used for selection, why is there only one memorial site devote to blind people who killed by the Nazis and what does that tell us about contemporary modes of memorialization?  Should T4-related memorials be based on single disability categories – such as blindness – and what can we learn about T4 by focusing on such particular disability experiences?  Also, is there a danger in focusing the memorialization effort so tightly?
Future presentation and/or publication of the result sof this hands-on research experience might develop into my honors thesis at GW.  The deaf history researcher, Horst Biesold, wrote a book on the fate of deaf people in Nazi Germany titled, Crying Hands: Eugenics and Deaf People in Nazi Germany.  Perhaps this depth of research experience might well allow a more extended study of blind people in a similar vein.  I am certain that the NFB would be greatly interested in any research outcomes from this project and that I could present them at their annual convention.  

Please share and spread the word.
The website is below:
https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/disposable-humanity#/ <https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/disposable-humanity#/>
Thank you for your time,
Emma Jane Mitchell