Episode 26: A Bureaucracy of Death: Nazi Germany's T4 Programme

In this episode, Katja and Chris examine the origins and implementation of Aktion T4, the Nazi regime’s systematic programme of mass murder targeting disabled people. They trace the intellectual and political foundations of the programme, from nineteenth-century eugenic thought and Weimar-era anxieties about demographic decline to the 1933 Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring and, ultimately, the establishment of a coordinated system of mass killing by gas, which anticipated methods later employed during the Holocaust.

The episode considers the roles played by doctors, nurses, administrators, and other state officials in implementing the programme, exploring how professional expertise and bureaucratic structures facilitated mass murder. It also examines the question of public knowledge, considering what ordinary Germans knew about the killings, how information circulated, and the extent to which popular opposition contributed to the programme’s pausing in 1941. During a second, more discreet phase of T4 from 1942 onwards, however, a further 120,000 victims were murdered. Katja and Chris discuss the slow engagement in post-war West Germany with the crimes of T4 and its belated recognition in memory culture.

Links
- Henry Friedlander - The Origins of Nazi Genocide
uncpress.org/9780807846759/the-origins-of-nazi…
- T4 Registration Form (1939/1940) germanhistorydocs.org/en/nazi-germany-1933-194…
- One More Thing project
findingivy.org

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Host: Katja Hoyer & Dr Christopher Dillon
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