Mass Murder of People with Disabilities and the Holocaust
International Conference Bern November 26th, 2017, organised by the Swiss Chairmanship of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA), Federal Department of Foreign Affairs of Switzerland, and the Pädagogische Hochschule Bern
Brigitte Bailer
The IHRA founded in Stockholm 1998 unites governments and experts from 31 member countries to strengthen, advance and promote Holocaust education, remembrance and research worldwide and to uphold the commitments of the 2000 Stockholm Declaration The chairmanship changes each year, with Switzerland holding the chairmanship in 2017. Early on IHRA chose to include in its work the topic of the genocide of the Roma.
With the Bern conference the IHRA has now turned to another topic of great importance for the understanding of the history of the Holocaust: the mass murder of people with disabilities and the continuities and parallels to the mass murder of Jews.
In the conference we examined the ideological and historical context of the Holocaust, that included crimes against and mass murder of other groups of people the National Socialists deemed unfit to live. The conference aimed to draw lines of continuity and parallels in eastern and western European territories occupied by National Socialist Germany.
Before entering into the history of the crimes perpetrated in occupied Europe, two presentations covered the starting point for the so called “Euthanasia” and mass murder of psychiatric patients: Regula Argast, Switzerland, shed light on the Swiss roots of Eugenic thinking and examined what role Swiss eugenicists played in the propagation of eugenics, as well as the links between Swiss eugenics and Nazi racial hygiene.
Starting with an explanation of crimes committed against peoples with disabilities, most of them psychiatric patients, in the German Reich and Austria, Paul Weindling, Great Britain, called for strengthening the remembrance of the victims of those crimes. Due to data protection problems their names are rarely made public and therefore these specific victims of National Socialist rule tend to be more forgotten than others.