Persecution of social outsiders, Sinti and Roma, and murder of the disabled
Seminar questions:
What is the rationale behind the sterilization and later the murder of the disabled?
How did the families of the disabled react?
Why did the doctors and nurses participate? what leeway did they have?
What does the murder of the disabled and Sinti and Roma bring to our understanding of the Holocaust?
Core readings:
Michael Burleigh, “Psychiatry, German Society and the Nazi “Euthanasia” Programme,” Social History of Medicine, Volume 7, Issue 2, August 1994, pp. 213–228.
Celia Donert, The Rights of the Roma: The Struggle for Citizenship in Postwar Czechoslovakia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), ch. 1.
Ari Joskowicz, "Separate Suffering, Shared Archives: Jewish and Romani Histories of Nazi Persecution," History and Memory, Vol. 28, No. 1 (Spring/Summer 2016), pp. 110-140.
Extended readings:
Götz Aly, Peter Chroust, and Christian Pross, Cleansing the fatherland : Nazi medicine and racial hygiene (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994).
Susan Benedict and Linda Shields, eds. Nurses and midwives in Nazi Germany: The "euthanasia programs" (London: Routledge, 2014).
Henry Friedlander, The origins of Nazi genocide : from euthanasia to the final solution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995).
Elena Lacková, A False Dawn: My Life as a Gypsy Woman in Slovakia (Hatfield: University of Hertforshire Press, 2000).
Sybil Milton, “Holocaust: The Gypsies,” in Samuel Totten, William S. Parsons, and Israel W. Charny, eds., Century of Genocide: Criti- cal Essays and Eyewitness Accounts (New York, 2004), 161–205.
Edith Sheffer, Asperger's Children:The Origins of Autism in Nazi Vienna (New York: Norton, 2018).
Nathan Stoltzfus, Robert Gellately, eds., Social Outsiders in Nazi Germany (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001).
Piotr Wawrzeniuk, “Lwów Saved Us”: Roma Survival in Lemberg 1941–44, Journal of Genocide Research 20, 3 (2018), 327-350.
Paul Weindling, Health, race and German politics between national unification and Nazism, 1870-1945 (Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 1989).
Anton Weiss-Wendt, ed., The Nazi Genocide of the Roma: Reassessment and Commemoration (New York: Berghahn, 2013).
Andrew Wisely, 'War against “Internal Enemies”: Dr. Franz Lucas’s Sterilization of Sinti and Roma in Ravensbrück Men’s Camp in January 1945,' Central European History 52 (2019), 650–671.