How did Germany become the only modern state to implement a plan to eradicate cognitive impairment from the entire body politic – sterilizing and murdering hundreds of thousands of fellow citizens diagnosed with mental and emotional disabilities? Dagmar Herzog traces how eugenics emerged from the flawed premise that intellectual deficiency was biologically hereditary, how this crude explanatory framework diverted attention from the actual causes of disability, and how church leaders became complicit in amplifying Nazi policies. Above all, she shows how recovering this history – and its complex aftermath – helps us understand the intricate interconnections between antisemitism and antidisability hostility in wholly new ways.
Dagmar Herzog is Distinguished Professor of History at the Graduate Center, City University of New York, where she writes and teaches on the histories of sexuality and gender, Nazism and the Holocaust, disability activism and care work, psychiatry and psychoanalysis. She is author of seven books, including Sex after Fascism (Princeton, 2005), Sexuality in Europe (Cambridge, 2011), Cold War Freud (Cambridge, 2017), and The Question of Unworthy Life (Princeton, 2024).
