Q&A | ‘The shadow of eugenic thinking still hangs over disabled people today’

An exhibition opening this week at the Holocaust Centre North in Huddersfield explores the untold life stories of the British-born victims of Aktion T4, the Nazi extermination programme that led to the murder around 70,000 adults with mental and physical disabilities.

Finding Ivy: A Life Worth Living is based on an international research project set up by nursing lecturer Helen Atherton after a chance discovery 14 years ago. Working in her own time, Atherton brought together a team of volunteer researchers who have since unearthed the individual biographies of 13 victims who were born in the UK.

Museums Journal spoke to the exhibition’s co-curators, Helen Atherton and Simon Jarrett, about their efforts to bring this devastating, lesser-known chapter of the Holocaust to light.

How did the exhibition come about?

Helen Atherton: In 2010 I was on a study trip visiting the Hartheim Memorial Centre in Austria, the site of one of the killing centres used by the Nazi state to kill tens of thousands of disabled and mentally ill people as part of the T4 Killing programme.

I noted that one of the victims listed in the memorial panels had been born in the UK. Intrigued by this, and having written my PhD thesis on the impact of eugenic "science" on people with learning disabilities, I set about researching and piecing together the story of the named person, Ivy Angerer, a young woman with a mild learning disability, who had been born in Broughty Ferry in Scotland to her immigrant parents, a German mother and Austrian father. 

Ivy was murdered by the Nazi state at the age of 29 at Hartheim because of her disability. The exhibition is named after her.

I then researched the six killing centres that were used in Germany and Austria by the T4 programme and discovered 12 more British-born victims. Some of these them were from mixed British-German or British-Austrian marriages.

Others were, like Ivy, from the families of German and Austrian immigrants who moved to Britain to work in the early twentieth century before fatefully returning to Germany before the second world war.

I brought together an international team of researchers in Germany, Austria and the UK, including the exhibition co-curator Simon Jarrett. Together the team have meticulously pieced together the life story of each person, using documents from archives across the world.

We have also tracked down relatives of many of the victims who have supported the project supplying memories, documents and photos. This work has resulted in the exhibition which you can now see.

Can you tell us a little more about this aspect of the Holocaust?

HA: Between 1940 and 1941 around 70,000 adults with mental and physical disabilities were systematically murdered in Germany and Austria under a Nazi state-led programme called Aktion T4 (T4 referred to the headquarters of the killing programme, which were at Tiergarten Strasse 4 in Berlin).

They were deemed to have “lives unworthy of life”. This was all part of the Nazi quest for racial purity, heavily influenced by eugenic theory, which argued that forms of “mental disturbance” and disability “polluted” the race.

The programme was led by doctors and carried out by them and other medical staff, including nurses, and other civilians. All the perpetrators participated voluntarily. 

This mass killing was a precursor to the wider Holocaust. It gave the Nazi state a chance to experiment with forms of mass killing, and it was in the T4 programme that gas chambers were first used to carry out mass murders.

Many of the techniques later used in the Holocaust were honed in the T4 programme, such as deception to create a calm atmosphere, mass cremation, the removal of valuables such as gold teeth and false accounts of death or whereabouts to relatives.

Many of the staff involved in T4 graduated to the death camps in Poland and applied what they had learned to the killings of millions of Jews, as well as other minorities. Equipment from T4 centres was dismantled and shipped to be reassembled in Poland. 

In recent years some museums, such as the Imperial War Museum and the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, have drawn attention to this lesser known aspect of the Holocaust. However it is rare to have such detailed life stories related to the victims, rather than the perpetrators, of these killings.

This is partly because of the circumstances of many of those who died, but also because of strong privacy laws in Germany around the archival sources. The result is that many victims have remained anonymous, a sort of second, historical death, after the initial murder.

This exhibition therefore is groundbreaking in telling detailed life stories of T4 victims in partnership with their families, which we hope restores some dignity and respect to the memory of people who were killed in such a callous way. 

The fact that the exhibition is about British-born victims highlights the previously unacknowledged international dimension of T4. 

How did you approach the exhibition from a curatorial point of view?

Simon Jarrett: We felt that the life stories of the individuals were the most important part of what we were trying to convey, but we also needed to describe and explain the T4 programme, which many people know very little or nothing about, and its aftermath, including its relevance for today.

The exhibition consists of 16 panels. There are 13 which each tell the life story of one of the victims. Remarkably we have been able to find photographs of eight of the 13 victims, which are displayed on the panels.

For all 13 of the people we have photos of their families, where they lived, and other aspects of their lives. We hope this helps to create a sense of them as individuals, alongside the factual information we have about them, rather than as simply faceless victims of an incomprehensible hatred. 

We have two introductory panels which explain what the T4 programme was, how it came about, and how it operated. A final panel is called Aftermath, and there we discuss what, if anything, happened to the perpetrators after the defeat of Nazism in World War II.

We also talk about the contribution made by the family members who have been part of this project, and how they are keen to ensure that the memory of their relatives, and what happened to them, is kept alive – these were not unwanted, unloved, neglected people. They were for the most part members of loving families who have passed on their memory through generations.

Importantly we also discuss the implications for today. While the horrors of Nazi extermination programmes are now thankfully a thing of the past, the shadow of T4 and eugenic thinking still hangs over disabled people today.

Disabled people are often treated appallingly by health services, they are discriminated against in abortion law and they remain often second class citizens, with low employment and high poverty rates. The idea that some lives are less worthy of life than others remains, if better disguised than it was in the past.

It's important to note that this project is not funded by any research grant, and everyone who has participated in it has done so voluntarily in their own time, on top of their day jobs and without payment. We have been very limited in time and money, and therefore opportunities for consultation with disability groups have been limited.

However, we are now working on high levels of engagement with the exhibition now that it is touring. We held a public event in London where learning disabled performers from an orchestra and a dance company created a very moving performance based on their reflections on the exhibition.

The performers were supported by a facilitator who discussed the exhibition and the stories with them, and all chose to participate when offered the chance to withdraw if they found the content of the exhibition too overwhelming or upsetting.

Their performance paid tribute to the victims but also celebrated their own lives as talented creative people – their own powerful riposte to the awful ‘unworthy of life’ idea. As the exhibition continues to tour we plan to do much more work like this around the country.

We should also note that there have been high levels of family engagement in the project, which has been very gratifying. One relative actually did some of the research and wrote the panel for her great uncle.

What legacy do you hope the exhibition will have?

HA: We are pleased to see that large numbers of people from all walks of life have been viewing the exhibition, attending our events and responding positively to the messages of the exhibition.

We hope that the exhibition will raise awareness of this little-known aspect of the Holocaust and help people to reflect on the lessons and implications it holds for us today. We also hope that it will be seen as a good example of how life stories can convey in such powerful ways historical episodes which might otherwise seem somewhat distant and difficult to conceptualise.

We hope that discussion and reflection on the exhibition with disabled people, people with mental health needs, the medical professions, social workers, students and the public at large will help to foster the importance of genuinely inclusive communities and societies which value and respect all lives.

How do you support people’s wellbeing when dealing with this subject matter?

SJ: The T4 programme, the deliberate and systematic killing of disabled and mentally ill people in their tens of thousands, is a horrendous and deeply disturbing episode which happened within living memory.

However much we try to restore dignity and respect to the victims, to show how they lived their lives loved by their families and pursuing their dreams, we cannot sugar coat what happened. Visitors will see on each panel that each victim died either in 1940 or 1941, and each of them was transported to a killing centre and gassed on arrival.

It is important therefore that we make it very clear to anyone who comes into contact with the exhibition that it contains deeply upsetting and difficult content, they should think carefully before viewing it.

We have a warning panel at the beginning which makes this clear. It also contains contact details of the curators should people wish to discuss further with us, and a suggestion that people should talk to staff at the venue if they feel unsure.

However we make no apologies for the content of Finding Ivy. It is a story that has to be told, and there is no ‘nice’ way of doing that.

We hope that people find the individual stories uplifting, despite the tragic end of each person’s life, and there is some comfort that they were loved in their families, a love which has been passed down the generations and is still alive today.

We also hope that our discussion in our final panel, and the events we hold, will encourage people to work to prevent such darkness and horror ever re-emerging.

The Holocaust is due to become a core part of the curriculum in England. How can museums respond?

HA: We are delighted by this and sincerely hope that the story of T4 receives the prominence it should have in this teaching. It is an excellent opportunity for museums to explore this aspect of the Holocaust and tell its stories, and explore its place in the wider context of the Holocaust as well as its implications for today. It offers very big opportunities to engage with and involve disabled people, and inform the wider public.

How has the exhibition been supported?

SJ: This has been very much an international initiative and we are hugely grateful for all the help and support we have received from colleagues in Germany and Austria, particularly the Hartheim Memorial Centre near Linz in Austria and its director Florian Schwanninger. The exhibition is bilingual and is designed to be displayed in either English or German. 

We have three sets of panels, two of them kindly donated by Hartheim and one from a generous anonymous donor who visited our exhibition and asked if there was a way they could help. This means that it is currently touring Austria and Germany and can also be shown in two locations simultaneously in the UK.

Where else can it be seen?

SJ: We have exhibited so far this year at the London Metropolitan Archives, the German Historical Institute London and the City Literary Institute. In the north we have exhibited in Leeds, Beverley and now Huddersfield. We have bookings going into 2025 in locations such as Swansea, Birmingham, Coventry, Leeds University, Surrey, Kingston (London), as well as a programme of exhibitions in German and Austria. For a full list of venues you can visit the Hartheim website.

Finding Ivy: A Life Worth Living opens at Holocaust Centre North on 2 October