Centre for Culture & Disability Studies (CCDS) Research Forum
Date: 23 Feb 2011
Time: 2.15pm – 3.45pm
Room: Liverpool Hope University, Eden 109
“Beings From Another Galaxy”: Historians, the Nazi “Euthanasia” Programme, and the Question of Opposition
By Emmeline Burdett
University College London
Suzanne E. Evans’s book Hitler’s Forgotten Victims: The Holocaust and the Disabled (2004) was written with a number of clear purposes in mind. Among other things, Evans stated that she hoped that the book would “shatter the silence that has surrounded the fate of people with disabilities during the Holocaust” (7). It seems from Evans’s book that the “silence” to which she was referring was one pervading society as a whole, rather than one that affected groups of academics, for example historians of the Nazi era. Nevertheless, it is instructive to consider the ways in which these historians have discussed the Nazi “euthanasia” programme. In this seminar, Emmeline Burdett will argue that the most tenacious attitude taken toward the programme has been that of emphasising the public and Church-led protests against it which supposedly brought it to an end. There is nothing wrong with studying these protests – after all they are important. However, as Burdett will demonstrate, many historians have, over a long period of time, emphasised the importance of the protests in such a way, and to such an extent, that every aspect of the “euthanasia” programme itself is effectively obscured. She will argue that this state of affairs was caused by a failure among the historians concerned to regard the “euthanasia” programme as primarily a question of the mass-murder of innocent human beings; instead they viewed it as a sterile ethical issue. Burdett will be arguing that the situation has improved a lot in recent years, thanks in part to the ground-breaking investigations carried out into the programme in the early 1990s, by such historians as Michael Burleigh, Henry Friedlander and Hugh Gregory Gallagher. The study of the Nazi “euthanasia” programme is also beginning to form an important part of courses in disability history.
Emmeline Burdett is a Doctoral Candidate at University College London, where she is looking at Anglo-US debates about “euthanasia” and how ideas about disability impinge on these debates.
For further details contact:
Dr. David Bolt
Lecturer and Recognised Researcher, Disability Studies
http://www.hope.ac.uk/boltd
Director, Centre for Culture & Disability Studies
ccds.hope.ac.uk
Editor, Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies
http://liverpool.metapress.com/content/121628
Email: [log in to unmask]
Telephone: 0151 291 3346
Office: WAR 101
Postal address: Faculty of Education, Liverpool Hope University, Liverpool, L16 9JD
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