Held as part of the Finding Ivy: a life worthy of life exhibition events series.
The ‘T4’ euthanasia programme was a carefully planned programme of medical killing. It should be understood as both a precursor to the Holocaust and as a eugenic “genocide” of people with disability.
In this talk Marius Turda will discuss the eugenically-driven and state-sponsored determination to eugenically ‘purify’ the race and society of its ‘undesired’ members. With its objectifying and stigmatising gaze, eugenics distinctly shaped the ableist and racist representation of physical fitness and intellectual ability and with it of a society in which the individuals who were seen as different and less ‘human’ were relegated to medical institutions, special educational programmes, and marginal social spaces. These individuals were not considered valuable members of the national community. They were targeted, mistreated, dehumanised and eventually exterminated while they were entrusted to the care of physicians and nurses.
But eugenics shaped not only the development of Nazi Germany’s policies of racial and social engineering: its reach was truly global. Worryingly still, its legacies continue to fuel deep-seated racism, hostility towards immigrants and foreigners, and the use of a political language offensive to people with learning and developmental disabilities. To this day, some in our society continue to be seen as biologically, intellectually, and socially valuable, while others are not.
About the Speaker
Professor Marius Turda has been teaching at Oxford Brookes since 2005. He is the founder director of the Cantemir Institute at the University of Oxford (2012-2013) and founder of the Working Group on the History of Eugenics and Race (HRE), established in 2006. In 2022 he was awarded the Order of the Centenary by Her Majesty Margaret, Custodian of the Royal House of Romania.
