From October 1939 until the end of World War II in Europe, the National Socialist “euthanasia” program claimed the lives of an estimated 200,000 patients living in institutional settings throughout Germany and certain parts of German-occupied areas.  Planners of this clandestine program justified the “euthanasia” action on the grounds that their victims – the institutionalized mentally and physically disabled – represented both a genetic and financial burden upon their society and the state. Clearly, economic and utilitarian concerns figured with concepts of racial hygiene as an impetus for the program; and from the start, the ability, or inability, of the individual to work represented an important factor in including or excluding that patient from the killing measure.  Since the 1920s, many European institutions employed a quotient of patient workers for the facility’s menial tasks, a concept thought both therapeutic for the individual and economical advantageous to the institution itself.  But undeniably in both phases of adult “euthanasia” operations (1940-1941 and 1942-1945), the criterion of labor might establish a reprieve for patients as “useful workers” or doom them to the destruction process. This paper will examine labor as a crucial element in determining patients for the “euthanasia” process and highlight its peculiar role in the inclusion of geriatric patients and foreign forced laborers in a killing program whose guidelines had originally excluded them.

Patricia Heberer, Ph.D., has served as an historian with the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington since 1994. There she functions as the Museum’s in-house specialist on medical crimes, the medical community, and eugenics policies in Nazi Germany. Dr. Heberer earned her BA and MA from Southern Illinois University; she pursued doctoral studies at the Free University of Berlin and the University of Maryland, receiving her Ph.D. from the latter institution. A contributor and consultant historian for two United States Holocaust Memorial Museum publications, 1945: The Year of Liberation and In Pursuit of Justice: Examining Evidence of the Holocaust, she is currently in the final stages of producing a history of the Hadamar “euthanasia” (T4) facility for publication. Her most recent article, The Nazis and Medical Ethics: The Context, appeared in the Journal of the Israeli Medical Association in March 2007.

Publications (Selection)

- Ciaglośćeksterminacji: Sprawcy “T4” I ‘akcja Reinhardt. In: Dariusza Libioniki, Akcja Reinhard: Zagłada Żydów w Generalnym Gubernatorstwie. Warsaw, 2004
- Gender Relations in German History. London,1996 (co-editor Lynn Abrams)
- The Nazis and Medical Ethics: The Context. In: Journal of the Israeli Medical Association, 7/2007
- Atrocities on Trial:  The Politics of Prosecuting War Crimes in Historical Perspective, Lincoln, forthcoming July 2007 (co-editor Juergen Matthaeus)
- Justice in Austrian Courts: The Case of Josef W. and Austria’s Difficult Relationship with Its Past. In: Patricia Heberer and Juergen Matthaeus (eds.), Atrocities on Trial:  The Politics of Prosecuting War Crimes in Historical Perspective. Lincoln, forthcoming July 2007
- Early Post-War Justice in the American Zone: The ‘Hadamar Murder Factory’ Trial. In: Patricia Heberer and Juergen Matthaeus (eds.), Atrocities on Trial: The Politics of Prosecuting War Crimes in Historical Perspective. Lincoln, forthcoming July 2007
- Early Military Commission Trials in the US Zone of Occupation. In: Henry Friedlander and Nathan Stolzfus (eds.), Nazi Crimes and the Law. Washington, DC, forthcoming 2007
- The Hadamar Facility and Euthanasia Policy. In: National Socialist Germany (forthcoming 2008)