The Third Reich’s first genocide

Between 1939 and 1945, the Nazis killed nearly 300,000 people with learning disabilities or psychiatric illnesses. Some 400,000 more were forcibly sterilised. Historian Dagmar Herzog speaks to Ellie Cawthorne about how decades of eugenic theorising and propaganda led so many institutions to become complicit in this programme of sterilisation and mass murder – and why Germany took so long to fully recognise it as a crime.

(Ad) Dagmar Herzog is the author of The Question of Unworthy Life: Eugenics and Germany’s Twentieth Century (Princeton University Press, 2024). Buy it now from Amazon: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Question-Unworthy-Life-Eugenics-Twentieth/dp/0691261709/?tag=bbchistory045-21&ascsubtag=historyextra-social-histboty.

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