LEGAL AND HISTORICAL ASPECTS OF THE DISABILITY IN NAZI GERMANY
Keywords:
disabled people, Nazi Germany, constitution, legal analysisAbstract
The legal and historian perspective on the Nazi Germany deeds regarding the disabled people are of vital
importance. Understanding how and in what circumstances did the Nazis industrialized death through various legal
and quasi-legal proceedings can lead to more in-depth and thorough knowledge about one of the darkest hours of
humanity. The disabled community served as a training wheel for the Nazi machinery which systematically and
from day one of its rule aimed at deconstructing the “defect” part of the society. Through this smooth political and
legal escalation of the de-humanization of a major societal group such as the disabled, the Nazis achieved the needed
understanding and know-how on how to proceed with a large-scale genocidal practice which ultimately lead to the
horrific scenes of the Holocaust. From legal standpoint the Nazi regime made all the needed judicial steps to ensure
that their anti-humane policies are firmly within the boundaries of the law. Nevertheless, this so-called “law” was no
more than mere quasi-legal texts that had no real foundation in the grand understanding of what lawful and just
systems of rule mean. This, however, did not stop the Nazis of exploiting their vulgarization of the law to justify the
smooth and steady escalation of destroying various parts of humanity that were deemed unfavorably by the regime.
This was founded in the trust of science argument and what “science” meant in that context was the fully-scaled
governmental weaponization of the pseudoscience “eugenics”. Stepping on the “good practices” from the US and
Great Britain, the Nazis implemented a government-backed policies in line with the callings of the eugenics. These
two aspects – the eugenics as a (pseudo)scientific foundation together with the needed practice and developing of
know-how on mass scale genocide – lead to the involuntary sterilization of hundreds of thousands of disabled
people, as well as the so-called “euthanasia” of thousands upon thousands of people from the same group. The
eugenics and the newly founded capacity of genocidal practices led, in part, to the horrors of the Holocaust. This
leads to the conclusion that understanding how the Nazis legally abused their power to de-humanize and eventually
destroy the most vulnerable part of the society – the disabled people – is needed in order to organize the overall
understanding of how the Nazi regime operated. The practices of the Nazi Germany are formally legal – being
organized through seemingly legal texts – but are in no way, form, or shape in alignment with the understanding of a
constitutional state. The government should ensure that the personal rights are unalienable and the state is not allpowerful
and without check. Without these guarantees the pseudo-legality of the system is just that – pseudo.
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