3.1 Possible Reasons for Emilie Rau's Crisis

It is at once interesting and atrocious that Emilie, because of individual, social, and institutional circumstances, veered into a crisis that was interpreted according to National Socialist ideology as biological in nature and that ultimately led to her killing. The reasons why she came into this crisis cannot be fully and definitively explained, but there are a few key points.

As mentioned above, the first instance of confusion and depression coincided with her husband's medical leave, and Emilie, a housewife with no professional education, believed that her husband could no longer support her and their four children. Added to that were two miscarriages and the circumstance that her oldest child—and at the same time, her only daughter, Marie Rau/Hechler (my grandmother)—was 19 years old in 1931 and had just completed her culminating high school exams, so it was unclear how long she would continue to live at home and help with the household.

Figure 2. Photo: Emilie Rau with the two older children, Marie and Walter, approximately 1921

The relationship between Emilie and Christian Rau was presumably complicated. My father explains: "My mother accused him of being part of the reason why Emilie had the psychological problems she did," and further adds, regarding Christian Rau, that he "was harsh. I believe that she [my grandmother] also said that he [Christian Rau] had beaten her [his wife, Emilie], that he was too strict, that he ranted and raged." My aunt tells almost word for word the same story about her grandfather, and that he also had fits of unfounded jealous rage. Added to the purported domestic violence that Emilie, the children, and grandchildren had to suffer was purported sexual violence, which was confirmed in the medical records. In this matter Emilie complains to a physician that "her husband even today had sexual intercourse with her" and: "The man had sex with me constantly." It is speculative whether that has a causal relationship to Emilie's crisis. It is not improbable that it at least had an impact on her. The medical records further make clear that whenever her husband "approaches her, she recoils and becomes resistant and agitated." Christian Rau is asked by the clinic in 1937 not to visit so often, because that makes his wife "very agitated and anxious." Still before her time in the various clinics, Emilie, according to my aunt, "behaved conspicuously, called the police department and shouted curses aloud." It is probably also true that Emilie once filed for divorce. The 'mania' that was directed against her husband, read in this mindset, is comprehensible and plays into the general tendency to cast female realities of life in terms of psychiatric illness and to pathologize 'normal' reactions to sexism and violence (cf. Kalkstein/Dittel 2015).

My aunt also reported that the oldest son, Walter, had severed his ties to his father, Christian Rau, holding him responsible for Emilie's crisis. My inquiry with Walter's son, Martin, Emilie Rau's grandson, partially confirms that: "Beaten? That's the first time that I'm hearing that. My father [Walter] made an allegation […] that his own father, Christian, had not advocated strongly enough for his wife. No one ever suggested that she might have been beaten."

Since my aunt, born in 1939, cannot have been aware of meeting my great-grandmother, who was murdered in 1941, she must have heard this story from her mother. My grandmother however put forth a very different hypothesis about the crisis of her mother. She expressed herself multiple times very clearly in this matter, taking it as given that this was depression linked to menopause. This question about the cause of Emilie's crisis and the enormous sense of injustice consumed my grandmother intensely.14 According to my father, my grandmother wanted "to keep the peace in the family" and therefore expressed no open criticism toward her father. Accepting the idea of menopausal depression allowed her to maintain contact with her father and to have a plausible reason for her mother's crisis.

There is another possible reason for Emilie's increasing destabilization. As noted in her medical records: "I didn't actually want to come here. I wanted to go home. The institution is too hard on me," and "I'm getting sick here and it is making me weak." Physicians note repeatedly that she asserts she is "not sick" and "insists" on "being released." Additionally, repeated notes in her records allege that she is aggressive, that she curses, and that she does not want to work. One may also infer that she was perceived to be rebellious and an 'unpleasant' patient who upset the smooth running of the psychiatric ward. One may also presume that physicians and caretakers15 had the upper hand and let her know that. This is admittedly speculative, but the overarching nature of psychiatry as a disciplining and normalizing institution is by now well known. Moreover psychiatric clinics in their history have again and again been sites that, instead of alleviating crises, instead intensify them or even cause them in the first place (cf. Foucault 1969).

3.2 Visits by Family Members

The image of Christian Rau as a battering and quick-tempered husband is somewhat mitigated or at least enlarged for me by the correspondence that I have read. Even my grandmother writes in 1982: "He loved her very much," despite the "oppressive day-to-day married life for Emilie Rau." He visited her regularly and took care of her. This is made clear, for example, in a letter to the directors of the St. Valentinus House from December 4, 1938, in which he gives detailed thought to his wife's clothing and then writes, "Furthermore I have one more request that means a lot to me. You know that my wife is pressing strongly to come home. Until now I have always upheld the story that this would happen at Christmas. Perhaps it is possible for you to move her to another room at Christmas that is sparsely occupied, so that the change alone might drive away her desperate thoughts and she would be given new hope." In addition he conveys his impression that she has been improving recently, and offers to pay more beginning next year, in the event that she can have improved living conditions.

In the years before Emilie's murder, there were real battles between Christian Rau and the various directors of the institution. His deep desire, described above, was emphatically denied, just as the desire for a walk outside of the clinic on the day of their silver anniversary, also described above, had been denied. In 1937, the medical director implored: "I would like, in the interest of your wife, to urge you to limit to the fullest extent possible your visits and those of all other relatives. It is better for your wife if she receives at most a visit every 2-3 months." Christian Rau acquiesced to this reduced schedule in the interest of his wife's recuperation, and he informed all of the relatives.

Figure 3. Photo: Christian Rau, Marie Rau, Walter Rau, Emilie Rau, approximately at the end of 1915

In her last card to her husband on January 26, 1941, barely one month before her murder, Emilie writes from the Eichberg sanatorium near Wiesbaden: "health wise I am still doing well, I hope that is the case for you as well." Her card allowed her family members to hope that she could soon come home again. Her husband promptly tried to receive permission for a visit. This was rejected as a matter of course. Thereupon he turned once again to the directorate of the Eichberg sanatorium. On February 24, 1941, three days after the murder of his wife—that he still did not know about at this time—he writes with a mixture of fury and astute analysis: "it is inconceivable that you will not make an exception for my wife to visit. […] After an 8-week waiting period a visit is beyond any doubt appropriate. It could be limited to a short time, in my view. But to withhold approval completely can only lead me to imagine the worst. Please consider the other family members, especially my daughter and my 3 sons, who are doing their duty for our Fatherland. […] What shall I say to my second son, who has been a soldier since the fall of 1937, who fought along in all of the battles and now has leave from the East? My wife is not without a sense of awareness […]. She is getting better again, at least to a degree that she can be at home again. I ask you, do not act more harshly than you must. Please give me an exception and approve a short visit of my wife for the first half of the month of March of this year. Heil Hitler! Chr. R."

The only response that he receives from Eichberg is the bill for the cost of medical care and the report that Emilie Rau "was transferred on February 21, 1941 upon the orders of the Defense Commissioner of the Reich." The new address is not given to the relatives; they are told that they will receive this information from the new institution. The report does indeed reach the relatives a short time later; it is news of the death of Emilie Rau.

That Emilie's husband was taking care of Emilie, just as her children were, that they visited her and wanted to have her come home are all significant factors in Emilie's murder in that she was murdered despite the care of her family. The behavior of family members was very important and was specifically factored into the T4 program by those carrying out the plans. The more isolated and lonely the patients were, the greater the danger they faced of being murdered. Many family members were not firm and clear advocates for their family members. Götz Aly estimates that 80 percent of all family members did not press the institutions for more information about where their family members were going, and also that protest was almost always successful (cf. Aly 2013). Many equivocated and were ambivalent in their posture with regard to the treatment of disabled people. This was exacerbated because of the war situation and the corresponding shortage of resources. Additionally a considerable number of parents and relatives in fact conceived of it as 'deliverance' when their disabled family members were killed. Under these conditions Emilie's husband and children unknowingly protected her, even though they were ultimately not successful.

3.3 The (In)ability to Work

What led to Emilie's assessment as 'unfit for living'? This cannot be explained with complete certainty, but there are clear indications of what would have led to it.

In October of 1939 Hitler authorized his attending physician, Karl Brandt, and the director of the Führer's counsel, Philipp Bouhler, to carry out the planning for the killing of 'life unworthy of living,' termed 'euthanasia.' Hitler pre-dated the communication to September 1, 1939, the day of the beginning of the War. Parallel to the outward declaration of war was the one directed inward (cf. Wildt 2012: fn 33). Those who wished to be the 'master race' had to optimize that race in order to be able to demonstrate and justify the desired supremacy both to the home population and abroad, the social psychologist Birgit Rommelspacher concludes (cf. Rommelspacher 1993: 7). 'Cripples' and 'idiots' have no place in the 'master race.' Mutually reinforcing practices follow from this National Socialist ideology: on the one hand is the 'building up' of the 'German Volk,' that is, putting [the Volk] in a 'higher position' and on the other hand is the 'culling' or 'expunging' [of undesirable elements] in the form of destroying 'life unworthy of living.' The program of healing and destruction consisted of simultaneously healing the 'curable' and destroying the 'terminally ill.'

Plans for a 'recovery' of the 'national community' presumed that it was inherently sick. Among the 'pathogens' were those people deemed 'racially inferior' (Jews, Slavs, Sinti and Roma, …) as well as those people classified as 'genetically inferior' (the so-called 'congenitally ill,' 'asocial,' 'criminal,' …). The Nazis pathologized and criminalized those people who were already marginalized and cast them as 'elements foreign to the community' cleared for eradication, for 'expunging.' 'Progress through annihilation' was the paradigm for the higher development of the 'German People.' This type of eugenic16 thinking was by no means new or limited to the Nazis. The difference from earlier times and from other countries is that the Nazis were more ruthless and created opportunities for scientists to apply to human beings what had been worked out decades earlier (cf. Lösch 1998; 88 n., Kater 2001: 20).

Alongside of eugenic ideology, material factors also play a significant role. Even when one was evoking 'merciful death' and 'deliverance,' the 'burden' for society was being calculated and presented in unvarnished propaganda campaigns. In the Social Darwinist 'struggle for existence' and in the hallucinated notions of 'degradation of the races' and 'degeneracy' of the 'German people,' the 'value' of the human being was computed, expressed through the sum of the revenues which a person generates minus that person's cost to society (cf. Rommelspacher 1993: 8). With the reduction of the human being to one's economic value the central criteria for the murder of disabled people was determined: no or meager productivity and the consumption of money, resources and labor.

If the inability to work was one central criterion that led a person to the gas chamber, the other was incurability (cf. Winter 1997: 472, Hamm n.d.).17 The certification by a specialist at the St. Valentinus House in Kiedrich from August 6, 1938 provided this diagnosis for Emilie Rau: "The clinical diagnosis is the paranoid form of schizophrenia, stemming from a corresponding pathological predisposition. Significant improvement for this type and duration of illness is highly unlikely." My grandmother commented in 1982 that this "cold diagnosis and prognosis of my mother's illness" served as the "basis for the subsequent euthanasia program." In addition to that were repeated entries in Emilie's medical records—"refuses again and again to engage in work"—and her statement: "Work is out of the question for me." On this point it is important to know that women's work productivity, just as women's behavior, was assessed more negatively than it was for men (c.f. Endlich et al. 2014: 96).

Unable and unwilling to work, incurable, rebellious—a clear case for the gas chamber.

3.4 Falsified Cause, Place, and Date of Death

In order to draw as little public attention and protest as possible, the 'T4 Action' was planned as a 'secret matter of the Reich' and operated by means of cover organizations and an opaque bureaucracy as an obfuscation of the murders. "Nothing was accurate: neither the place of death, nor the date of death, nor the manner of death," said my aunt, outraged, to which one must note: not even the ashes in the urn were hers; she was not cremated because of any dangers of contagion, and the doctor who signed the death certificate used an alias.

The family was informed that Emilie Rau "died unexpectedly from complications of a boil on her lip, with resulting meningeal infection." In fact the cause of death was asphyxiation from carbon monoxide gas. To erase the traces, she was immediately cremated. Since two or more corpses were always cremated together in one incinerator, Emilie Rau's ashes could not have been the only ones in 'her' urn. The falsification of the date served to keep the secret, but also prolonged the [family's] payment of medical treatment costs. This falsification secured significant profits for the Central Clearinghouse for Sanatoria and Nursing Homes, a department of the T4 program. Those paying the bills continued to pay care-giving expenses; in Emilie Rau's case, for an additional eight days: she was murdered on February 21,1941, but her death certificate shows March 1, 1941 as the date of death. In many cases the falsified dates of death amounted in contrast mostly to several weeks, as the medical historian Georg Lilienthal explains (cf. Lilienthal 2008). The dispatching of Emilie's patient records to Pirna-Sonnenstein similarly had to do with erasing tracks. Emilie came from the nearby vicinity of the killing facility, and in order to thwart investigation attempts by family members, she was officially reported to have died in a very distant facility. In this manner the system of intermediary facilities served to obscure the path of transferals of those people who were murdered—in Emilie's case, the institution at Eichberg, which was assigned to the killing facility of Hadamar.

This process was eminently effective. We may presume that many families in the Federal Republic do not know to this day that their ancestors were murdered in the National Socialist 'euthanasia.' That they possibly do not want to know is a point to which I will return. But even my grandmother, to whom it was very quickly clear that her mother had been murdered—she was already writing about "euthanasia" in 1946—only figured out the falsifications much later: "In August of 1986 during the Frankfurt Euthanasia Trials the Senior Prosecutor Eckert [said]: he recognized by the abbreviations that my mother had not been murdered in Pirna, but in Hadamar." This in turn strongly intensified her investigations and activities; she wanted to know the truth.

4.1 The First Generation19

On May 10, 1987, my grandmother writes on the occasion of her mother's murder: "We were paralyzed with horror and for years were fearful of further invasions of brutality into our family." Similar formulations of "shock," "horror," and "fear" pop up repeatedly in her descriptions. I am reluctant to judge the extent to which she is speaking more about herself than about her father, but it is safe to assume that at least a portion of these descriptions apply to Christian Rau. His way of dealing with the murder of his wife was, in contrast, completely different from that of his daughter: "Christian Rau said that his daughter shouldn't speak so loudly about it. He didn't want to speak about it; that could be dangerous," said my aunt. My grandmother uses words to this effect in a letter from 1982: "This sort of thing created fear and horror and paralysis deep within the families and caused psychological repression. My father, for example hid his own insecurity and fearfulness behind a rigid monument of a father, was not prepared to reconcile with his son or acknowledge his own mistakes, and considered it proper to assert his complete innocence regarding the death of his wife by writing his son out of his will." I had noted earlier that the estrangement between the first son, Walter, and his father had to do with accusations that the former made to the latter, that he had not sufficiently engaged himself in supporting his wife. Thereupon Christian Rau tried to disinherit his son.

4.2 The Second Generation

I have already written quite a lot about my grandmother Marie, the eldest child of Christian and Emilie Rau. The other three children were, as noted above, soldiers in the Wehrmacht. The youngest, Karl-Heinz, "died of severe tuberculosis after the war in 1949," according to my aunt, and the second youngest, Erich, "died in the war," according to his son Ludwig.20 The eldest son, Walter, made the murder of his mother taboo with the exception of the argument with his father.

My grandmother bore the brunt of the effects of her mother's crisis quite tangibly even during National Socialism. In 1987 she remembers, "Because of my mother's illness I wasn't able to study at the university or receive a dowry." The gravest concern of all proved to be the planned wedding with her future husband, Ernst Hechler: "We got engaged in 1937 and had to present a certificate of clearance in order to marry. For that reason, at the beginning of the year 1938 I sought out the director of the health department in Homberg, district of Kassel," Dr. H.J. Vollbrandt, whom my grandmother knew personally. "After consulting with Kiedrich, where my mother was being cared for […] he advised unconditionally that we marry although the laws of heredity health were already in effect."

Since 1935, a certificate of fitness to marry was an obligatory requirement for a marriage. The Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring forbade, as the biologist and scientific journalist Ludger Weß, writes "the marriage of the 'genetically contaminated' and the 'genetically biological inventory in the hospitals and nursing homes,' which would later form the basis for the mass extermination of psychiatric patients, was also extended for the inconspicuous relatives of the mentally ill" (Weß 1998: 32ff.). Future spouses were also examined for incurable hereditary diseases. Those wishing to marry were only given certificates of fitness to marry by the medical authorities after a successful eugenic examination and marriage counseling by the Center for Genetic and Racial Hygiene. Accordingly, the Berlin-Wilmersdorf Center for Genetic and Racial Hygiene wrote to the St. Valentinus House at Kiedrich on November 10,1938, where my great-grandmother was a patient at the time: "To clarify a genetic biological matter we ask for the release of the local medical record […] of Mrs. Elise Emilie Rau." My grandmother Marie Rau and grandfather Ernst Hechler were granted a certificate of fitness to marry after a successful examination, but were denied a 'marriage loan,' a loan from the state to newlyweds.

"We never got over the shock that our family suffered," my grandmother writes elsewhere about the murder of her mother. And it seemed to be continually reactivated as a trauma. "What made her especially bitter is the impression that for many of the perpetrators involved, there was no remorse, no understanding of the criminal aspect; they felt themselves to have been in the right," my cousin Sebastian conveys his impression. My aunt concurs with her son: "Marie was upset because those guys didn't go to jail." The murder of her mother consumed her. When the trial began in Frankfurt in 1986, "my mother traveled there on the very first day to see for herself," my aunt remembers. "She followed the trial, all she could do was cry; she heard everything." Even as the trial was going on my grandmother wrote an affidavit in 1986 in which she filed a complaint of unconstitutionality, demanding a revision of the German Restitution Laws (abbreviated in German as BEG): "The details that have since been made clear to me by witnesses and joint plaintiffs devastate me and strengthen my own evidence: The 70,000 patients and defenseless victims were placed at the mercy of a gruesome, secret technology of murder that was tested out on them and consequently used in the Holocaust against those persecuted for racial-religious or political reasons."

4.3 The Third Generation

The third generation, under consideration here, consists of my father, my aunt, Martin (Walter's son) and Ludwig (Erich's son).

Not only my grandmother, but also my aunt bore the brunt of the after-effects of psychiatry's authority over my great-grandmother at her own wedding in 1963, eighteen years after National Socialism. "The night before my wedding with Malte […], Malte was warned that there was someone in my family who was mentally ill and that that could be an inherited trait." There were many physicians in Malte's family, and his parents upbraided him strenuously on account of the "bad heritage," he remembers. His son, Vinz, adds that on his father's side of the family, "word was that […] the insanity is on the Hechler side."

There is moreover a particular alertness to psychological abnormalities within the family. In 1982 my grandmother writes an anxious letter to another family member: "Much to my horror, I ascertained in my conversations in Lauterbach that the events surrounding Emilie Rau, née Listmann, were repressed for decades, that it was not discussed thoroughly with the children, and the smallest deviation from the presumed norm would now be measured against this trauma." The person with the "deviations," referenced here, is, according to my aunt, "also mentally ill, has a persecution complex." And she follows that with: "She is the only one in the family who is unstable." It is this postscript that takes on gravity in light of the killing of Emilie Rau. The fear that something else could still be inherited, that the "insanity" is in the family, lives on and puts the family on alert. "Perhaps it will break out again in a few generations," surmised one family member whom I interviewed, mulling over whether Emilie was "congenitally ill" or not. "I do have my thoughts about it now, [but] before this I was unsuspecting" is the reaction to this article, and "because of the earlier history [the murder of Emilie Rau] this [the crisis of the "unstable" family member] takes on a whole new meaning for me." Accordingly I was asked during my research into the family not to contact the person in question nor to "address it [the murder of Emilie Rau]," since my article would "not do" her "good." At the same time this was followed up by noting that the father (a son of Emilie Rau) "took care of his own family exceptionally diligently and with greatest love, especially his sick child. I think […] that the fate of his mother was an especially formative experience for him."

My father explains, "The topic of 'euthanasia' […] in the Rau household in Lauterbach was taboo. My cousins did not know anything about it. Ten years ago [circa 2003] there was a funeral, and my cousin Martin found out about it for the very first time there. It had been hushed up. Many families are ashamed, even now." Martin agrees with him: "It does not play a role in our family." He would like to "spare" his "family and their descendants […] having to ponder that this may arise." This portion of the family has a very different way of dealing with the murder of Emilie Rau than my grandmother and her children and grandchildren have. Martin not only carries on Emilie's family name, he points out as well the difference between my father and my aunt: "They live in Berlin and are anonymous in the big city. I am not anonymous here, I stand out in Lauterbach like a multi-colored dog." He fears "sensation mongering" and "being approached about this by people with whom I have no relationship," which he does not want. In spite of the taboo with the family and outside of the family, Martin and his wife "were in Hadamar a year ago for the commemorative event. My cousin, Ludwig, was also there." Ludwig was also present with my grandmother in 1991 "in Hadamar when the memorial site was opened." He is the only one of the family members I interviewed who still has "documents about that." Marie "wrote a letter now and then and sent articles. I have kept a portion of them. I also have a portion of Emilie Rau's medical records."

4.4 The Fourth Generation

The fourth generation includes my three older cousins (my aunt's sons), my sister Barbara, who is one year younger than me, and me, Andreas. My half brother, who is twenty years younger than I am, does not know about Emilie Rau, so he will not be discussed here.

Everyone in the third and fourth generation says that they learned about Emilie in their earliest childhoods and grew up hearing about her murder. No one delved into the case much more deeply than that, though, and not everyone knows what 'T4' is. Moreover no one, with the exception of Ludwig, knows anymore where their copies of the exhibition catalog, Transferred to Hadamar are. My grandmother had distributed multiple copies among the family after its publication.

In response to my asking when she learned about Emilie Rau's murder, my aunt said "I already knew as a child, only five or six years old." My father also said "I learned in my early youth that my grandmother was murdered." It is similar in the fourth generation. My eldest cousin Vinz says "I knew for a long time that she was murdered." My second eldest cousin, Udo, answered, "I was still a kid, but I couldn't tell you how old I was." My third eldest cousin Sebastian said, "Grandma Marie told us the story of great-grandmother […] when we were kids. That's why I was already occupied with T4 at that time, because I think that many people know absolutely nothing about what 'T4' was. Grandma had many books on the subject. Back then she had always wanted us, as kids, to develop an interest in politics […] that someone from the youngest generation take notice of that."

It was somewhat different for my sister and for me. My three cousins were able to understand the connections better because they were older. Udo says: "we had more contact to Grandma and you two were too young. The trials were in the '80s." My sister, born in 1978 and one year younger than I, and I learned the story of Emilie Rau through our father and not through our grandmother. "I only grasped from the periphery that that had been a major topic," my sister explained about my grandmother. I, Andreas, also did not pick up on a lot about the activities of my grandmother, surely for the main reason that she lived in Bensheim, in southern Hesse, and only lived in Berlin, where I grew up, during the last years of her life. So for my sister, the question of where she learned about this is significantly harder to pinpoint than for my cousins: "I don't know exactly. Those are fragments of memories that are pieced together from all sorts of things. Family reunions were occasions to talk about it, but never in depth." It is much the same for me, even though there was a decisive juncture that deepened my knowledge: when the German state wanted to force me to perform compulsory military service and I wanted to refuse completely, my attorney asked me whether anyone in my family had been persecuted by the Nazi regime. I remembered vaguely what my father had told me. Only in that context did I take the text about Emilie Rau from Transferred to Hadamar in my hands. It benefited me that, thanks to my grandmother, this case was well documented and that at that point those people who suffered because of National Socialist 'euthanasia' had been at last recognized as a category21 of victims of National Socialism. With that, I was released from compulsory military service.22 The entire dimension, though, has only become clear to me through the interviews and the writing of this text.

4.5 Connection to Emilie und Passing on of Tradition

My question of whether they felt any connection to Emilie was denied by almost everyone. At the same time almost everyone had been considering how to deal with exclusion and deviance and considered those questions to be exceedingly important. Still, my aunt had "never thought about [the connection to Emilie]" and does "not care that I never got to know my grandmother. I was only sorry for my mother, because she always cried so much." My father also has "no relation to Emilie Rau." When I asked whether Emilie played a role in his life, he said "No, absolutely not. But the treatment of the sick and disabled was always an important subject at home." Interestingly, he is the only one who refers to Emilie as "Emili" and calls her his "grandma." He never got to know Emilie, but he did meet Christian Rau's second wife.

For the fourth generation, it is similar, even though somewhat more ambivalent. For my sister Barbara, "it is not an issue that I am actively dealing with." For my cousin, Udo, Emilie is also not an issue. "But […] when other people are mistreated, I am also the one who makes himself unpopular among the crowd and says that something is not in order here. […] I attribute that to how I was brought up, very much shaped by Granny, who had a strong sense of justice; she had a powerful impact on us." My cousin Vinz, who had "no relationship" to Emilie, also responds to my question in this vein, recognizing that "she is one of the most interesting people in our family, whose roots I would most like to trace." He is also the one who communicates most openly how much he is affected by the fact that National Socialist ideology lives on: "I notice that I begin to sob when I think about the fact that things happened in Germany that should never have happened. Presumably [I sob] more than others. The terrible thing is that none of this is limited to the past, but is still taking place yet today." He, too, is of the opinion that one must take a position at the cost of a personal risk and brings this directly into the context of the struggle against Nazi-ideology and injustice. At the same time, Vinz "fought with our grandmother, because I said that […] people were interested in her […] because she was such a pretty woman and looked so 'normal' but not because she was murdered. Then Granny became really upset because for her it was all about 'euthanasia' itself; she hadn't really connected it so much with Emilie. She made that documentary with Professor Dörner, where that [National Socialist 'euthanasia'] was increasingly the focus. That was the argument. I was in my early twenties."

Family members of the third and fourth generations are less interested in Emilie's life than my grandmother. So conflicts arose not only because of differing views of what might be especially interesting about Emilie or what might not be. "People were increasingly annoyed because she was constantly talking about it" said my aunt describing her own and other's reactions [to my grandmother]. Other family members found my grandmother "exhausting" at times. My mother states this in a sharp way: My aunt and my father "were not sympathetic to their mother regarding the subject of T4." Accordingly, my aunt told my grandmother many times that "she should leave 'these old things' alone, it would upset her too much, or something similar. You can't change the past." On the other hand, my mother, who married into the family, says that "nothing was kept under wraps" and that she was confronted with the facts from the beginning. "Your grandmother often spoke at family gatherings for coffee about her mother, full of outrage and near tears that she was murdered in Hadamar."

My grandmother not only involved her own children, but also her grandchildren in the history of Emilie Rau, in the struggle for a dignified commemoration and political demands. My cousin Udo "was in Berlin, when Granny was also here in Berlin. There was a meeting of the Federation of People Aggrieved by 'Euthanasia. She stayed in the Federal guest quarters. She had also been invited […] I accompanied her to a session." Together with my cousin, Sebastian, she was in Hadamar in 1983 for the opening of the exhibition in the former gas and oven chambers.

This attitude towards remembering in order to advocate for a better society is also very strong among the third and fourth generation, with the exception of Martin, who "doesn't want to burden anyone in the family," asking "whether it does anyone any good." My father said to me in a conversation: "It was important to me that you knew about it. It's important to talk about these things so that more people know what can happen if you don't talk about them." Similarly, Ludwig said: "My children know about it, yes, certainly, we've often talked about it. There's also a book, Transferred to Hadamar, which we also have. Nothing is taboo with us." My cousin Vinz handles the subject in a comparable way with his two relatively young children: "Yes, we've already talked with them about how their great-grandmother was killed, but not in the context of 'euthanasia' or 'unworthy life', but who in their family were victims and who were perpetrators." Likewise, my cousin Sebastian has addressed these issues with his children: "Yes, I've told them about it. […] The subject of Nazis is an issue. I put a lot of value on their knowing what is good and what is evil."

Among the consequences that I, in the fourth generation, face, is that I have to think about my great-grandmother whenever I read something about Hadamar or T4, that it has often happened that I cry when I speak about my great-grandmother or the 2011 legalization of pre-implantation diagnosis in the Federal Republic, which for me has a direct connection to the discussions around 'life (un)worthy of living.' The vocabulary of the T4 masterminds, such as 'defective human being,' 'empty shell of a human,' 'spiritually dead,' 'inferior,' 'ballast existences,' 'useless eater' and the like similarly evoke in me immediate images of my great-grandmother. I had to think of her as well during a continuing education course that I took part in in 2012, when in one module, a psychoanalyst spoke condescendingly of her clients and ran up and down the list of every possible personality disorder in the ICD-10 and DSM-IV. I was increasingly bothered, sat in that course with tremendous rage and turned over this phrase again and again in my mind: 'this kind of pathologizing thinking cost my great-grandmother her life.' Even during my school years, I contradicted my math teacher when he proposed an economic scenario for analysis and explained that certain costs for caring for people were unaffordable. I wrote him a long letter and enclosed a text about capitalism and neoliberal reconfiguration of society.

4.6 Victims and Perpetrators

I see my great-grandmother as a victim of the Nazis. But the deeper I delve into the case, the more confused the roles of victim and perpetrator become. They are partially fluid, which became clear during my grandmother's life during the war and also shortly thereafter, not least because her marriage, as discussed above, was to a Nazi. "My father was a Nazi. He joined the party in 1929," said my father about my grandfather, Ernst Hechler, who was also an SA Member, and who died in combat in 1943 shortly after the defeat of the Wehrmacht at Stalingrad.

Just as ambivalent is that my grandmother intervened for Dr. Vollbrandt, the physician from Homberg who helped her to procure her certificate of fitness for marriage. He pops up again in 1946, when his wife writes to my grandmother that he was imprisoned and had to face charges in front of a hearing panel.23 She wrote the letter to request that my grandmother issue a letter exonerating him, which she did in writing and also later spoke in his favor in front of a judge. In 1982 my grandmother writes in a letter that "the evil spirit of euthanasia ceased in July of '41; in the Homberg-Efze district it was halted by Dr. Vollbrandt; that was confirmed in a denazification hearing by the pastor of Homberg-Efze." Whether that is true, I cannot verify, but I am skeptical in the face of the generally quite lax manner in which the Western Allies dealt with the Nazis. That they kept an 'innocent man' in prison for such a long time is hardly probable, not least of all because Dr. Vollbrandt had an elevated position in National Socialism. Why my grandmother defended him this way probably has more to do with the fact that she knew him, he helped her, and from that time on she saw herself as indebted to him.

The role of my grandmother's sister-in-law is also ambivalent. "Aunt Ursel was a social welfare worker," said my aunt, "she made lists of mentally disabled people. The lists were used to nab people and lock them up. She first heard that people had been taken after the fact." Within our family, 'Aunt Ursel,' like my grandmother, was considered to be an upright critic of National Socialism, at least after 1945.

Christian Rau always signed his letters with "Heil Hitler!," was a Police Chief Inspector, responsible for supplies for the armed forces, and affirmed his allegiance via his three sons, who all "do their duty for our Fatherland." That might not necessarily have been out of ideological conviction, but it could also have been tactically motivated, in the interest of his wife. But I consider this theoretical intellectual game also to be highly unlikely.

And not least, Emilie Rau herself. In her medical records there are several indications that she expressed anti-Semitic ideas in conversations with doctors. She was quoted, among other things, as saying "Dr. Wahlmann in Hadamar was in my opinion, a Jew, and said that he had been reformed." She also wrote "How can my husband have encountered the Jew Lehmann, the doctor at the Frankfurt psychiatric clinic?" It is not unambiguous, but one can already tell from the special emphasis on "Jew" that the content was anti-Semitic.

And one further dimension of the subject is important. It is distinctly easier for me to identify with my great-grandmother than with her husband or with my grandfather. The identification with perpetrators is for me an impossibility, although I recognize that perpetrators, too, belong to my family history. It is often a more comfortable way out, both in terms of memory politics and within the family, to resort to identification with the victims and to airbrush the perpetrators out of sight. But my (questionable) need for clearly defined victim and perpetrator roles in my family is not satisfied by the sometimes contradictory actions of individual family members.

6.1 Who Commemorates Whom? Remembrance and Identification

Survivors and their narratives are important aspects of teaching and learning about National Socialism and the processes of memorial politics. There were virtually no survivors of the Nazi 'euthanasia.' Even if there had been, many had no access to cultural techniques such as writing or publishing of memoirs or otherwise going public as survivors because of poverty or other social deprivation. Not to mention the lack of public awareness or interest. The dearth of reports from survivors impedes learning about, identifying, and remembering those who were hunted and murdered for being 'unworthy of life.'

Disabled individuals, particularly those in psychiatric care, were seized and murdered, but not their complete families. That is a difference from those who were persecuted for racist and anti-Semitic reasons, those who were always targeted to be captured and destroyed as complete families. Jews or Sinti and Roma for example lived as families; they knew each other and were related to each other. Before National Socialism, they existed as groups30 and—to the extent that they survived—to a large part afterwards as well, if they were not completely torn apart from one another or did not migrate to different countries. 'Disabled people' in contrast do not constitute a group, apart from the common discrimination that has befallen them.31 That is a factor in how memories are processed, and it pertains worldwide: for the daughter of a Jewish woman in Argentina, the Shoah is very likely to figure prominently in her life—she would also have been targeted—, but for the daughter of an Argentinian woman living with depression, the 'T4 Action' would very likely not figure in her life. Traditions within a family and the processes of memory develop for those persecuted by racism and anti-Semitism as familial matters and with regard to their belonging to a collective identity group.

Those exterminated for being 'unworthy of life' usually did not know each other and were not related. Individualization complicates the creation of communal spaces for remembering, the emergence of a collective consciousness, and the development of political activities for the descendants of these families. These particular families have nothing in common except for the fact that their ancestors were murdered because of ableism.

If we reject the assumption that disability is inheritable and see disability and 'the disabled' in terms of social construction, that is, as arising from social process—the individual impairment isn't the problem, but a disabling society that imposes disabling barriers and thus creates 'the disabled,'—then there is no such thing as a disabled genealogy. Non-disabled descendants of disabled people are not disabled. But is there not still a connection? The German state recognized me as a direct descendant of a woman persecuted by the Nazi regime; a connection is established here. Indeed correctly, in my view. There is a genealogy, but not in a biological sense and also not in the sense that I as an individual experience disabilities daily. But indeed in the sense that I discussed above, in the section, "Consequences for My Family." That genealogy is a cultural, psychological, social creation of transgenerational transmissions within a family in an ableist society.32

The notion in the preceding paragraphs that there are non-disabled Jews on one side and disabled non-Jews on the other, is a false notion. There were disabled Jews and it is precisely through them that we can trace the transition of the T4 Action to the Shoah. The central Shoah Memorial Yad Vashem in Israel, however, appears not to want to address the murdered disabled Jews. In the main exhibition, the killing facility of Hadamar is presented in the context of the National Socialist 'euthanasia' crimes, a context in which most of the victims were not Jewish. The killing facility where the first Jews were systematically killed under the auspices of the T4 Action in July and August of 1940 was, in contrast, Brandenburg, which remains unnamed. The common grouping of disabled people and Jews appears to be objectionable.

T4 memorials in the Federal Republic were almost exclusively founded by non-disabled people, from almost the same professional groups who had taken part in the murders at the time (cf. Winter 1997: 484). What for other memorials was completely unthinkable and where the victims' groups were participants in the conception from the outset, disabled people were not only excluded from the conception of the memorials, but also for a long time excluded even as visitors. With the assertion that visiting would be emotionally and intellectually 'too demanding,' likely 'euthanasia' victims were not among the visitors to the NS 'euthanasia' memorials. The memorial at Hadamar was a pioneer in this regard and developed pedagogy for memorial visitors with learning disabilities (cf. George 2013).

6.2 Remembrance and Change

Within a family, descendants of those exterminated as 'unworthy of life' can connect three anchor points of memorial politics: the murder of their ancestors, the familial impacts, and the ableism present today. As described above, the 'danger' of one's own potential stigmatization as 'disabled' leads to processes of avoidance (denial of relatives, special caution regarding possible disabilities in later generations, transgenerational trauma, etc.). A conscious recognition and acceptance of history in general and family history in particular remains incomplete as a result.

This promotes ableism, even inadvertently. The same repression that characterized how people dealt with disabled people in the past will repress the discussion surrounding disability in the here and now. It follows logically that for my grandmother it wasn't just about a dignified remembrance of her mother, but always also had to do with political struggles: rehabilitation of [the memory] of those murdered, compensation for their deaths, support for family members and descendants, dismantling of old Nazi laws, research into the crimes and a principled examination of society's manner of dealing with disability, deviance, and normalcy. Remembering is never an end in itself. To look into the past is at the same time to look at the present and the future: to remember the destruction of 'lives unworthy of living' in order to remove the rationale for the basis of ableism.

Whoever does not want this confrontation with ableism will also have problems with the memory of disabled ancestors who may have been murdered. Considering that a majority of Germans are positively obsessed with feeling like 'victims' of the Nazis, it is actually attractive to have a victim of Nazi 'euthanasia' in the family, and the ranks of those who go out to search for any murdered disabled people in their family history could be well stocked. However, a victim narrative à la "First we had to go to war and were forced to shoot people, then we were bombed out and displaced, and my 'mentally ill' mother was also killed" does not function with that final bullet point. The reversal of perpetrator and victim reaches its limits where the consequences for the actual victims enable renewed discrimination.

In this regard, a major factor in the process of remembering is also whether the person who was murdered was killed because of a physical or a cognitive disability. The identification with the physically disabled seems to be comparatively easier to accept than the identification with people who 'aren't right in the head.' If the former are 'poor victims' for whom one can feel sorry, but who nonetheless have a free will, people with cognitive limitations are without this condition of autonomy and control. This enlightened vision of horror of the irrational, uncontrollable, and dependent appears to be so threatening that—were those murdered ever be to remembered and commemorated within families or in society—the 'cripple' would be sooner remembered than the 'lunatic.'33

7.1 An Abbreviated History of Ableism in German Society

There are Holocaust deniers who 'prove' in detail that the gas chambers never existed. There are no T4 deniers. The gas chambers in German psychiatric institutions never rose to the level of general awareness that the killing centers in the East achieved. It almost seems as though denial were not even necessary, since knowledge is so scant and recognition of it does not pose a challenge to German identity. The murder of 'useless eaters' was not only advocated during National Socialism, but also not regarded as a crime in post-National Socialist Germany for a long time. The Allied Control Council nullified all laws that it believed to be infused with National Socialist ideology. The Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring was not among them. It was only rendered null and void in Bavaria in 1945 and in 1946 in the Soviet Zone of Occupation (cf. Scheulen 2008: 212 fn). Forced sterilization of disabled people was only forbidden in the Federal Republic beginning in 1992. A male nurse who was convicted of being an accessory to murder of patients in Hadamar was, after his release from prison, employed again in a psychiatric facility by the successor of the former representative at Hadamar (cf. Winter 1997: 475). This individual case is symptomatic: German psychiatry, writes the Frankfurt psychologist and biographical researcher, C. Dorothee Roer:

survived largely intact in the new era with regard to personnel, structure, and scientific-ideological underpinnings. Perpetrators and bystanders among doctors and nurses continued to practice in their former areas of specialization. In the entire Federal Republic not one doctor's license to practice medicine was revoked, not even those who were convicted or held criminally liable. Scientists published as experts and reviewers, often maintaining the positions they held before May 8, 1945 without interruption. Most of them appear not to harbor any sense of injustice or guilt. (Roer 2008: 192)

And many perpetrators were provided cover by medical colleagues who knew of and tolerated their actions. The discussion of medical crimes was thwarted by those who paved the way for them and those who carried them out (cf. Winter 1997: 473).

In the post-National Socialist society it was said openly that the killings were at least partially legal. At a hearing of the West German Federal Parliament in 1961 the invited experts presented the opinion "that the Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring was not an injustice of National Socialism, but a measure undertaken by German physicians with enormous awareness of their responsibility for the well-being of the entire German population" (Gerst 2007). This position was reflected in the ruling, often flanked by media campaigns for the perpetrators. Of 438 National Socialist 'euthanasia' criminal proceedings that were carried out through 1999, only 6.8 percent ended with legal sentences. Among them were numerous acquittals that were greeted by the public not infrequently with applause. Well into the 1970s and reaching the German Supreme Court the rulings were characterized by the fact that the murders were partially justified as morally defensible, as the Berlin historian Ingo Loose describes the climate at the time (cf. Loose, n.d.). Even today physicians have a high social standing and are highly regarded, which makes it difficult to perceive them as the perpetrators that many of them were. Only in 2010 did the President of the German Society for Psychiatry, Psychotherapy and Neurology apologize that it took the professional society 70 years to acknowledge that its earlier members and colleagues were guilty (cf. Grüber, n.d.).

The scandalous rehabilitation of the perpetrators and the multifarious continuities stand in contrast to the continued humiliation, emotional injury and social ostracism of the survivors and their families. In East Germany the victims of National Socialist 'euthanasia' were not recognized as a victim group at all, although they were commemorated (cf. Winter 1997: 484)—and in West Germany only very late: 1988. As the official successor to the Third Reich the Federal Republic strove from the outset to split up the various victims' groups into different categories, to put them in hierarchies and play them off of one another, and to keep their restitutions, paid despite resistance, as low as possible. In their Running Battle Against the Victims (cf. Pross 1988) West Germany always bet on the 'biological solution,' i.e. waiting for those affected to die; there was no interest in a timely settlement for the benefit of those affected. Thus, in the processes of evaluating damages of persecution, the NS 'euthanasia' victims and those who underwent forced sterilization (or their families) were not only confronted with the former perpetrators, which many who filed grievances experienced as a repeat of the persecution (cf. Pross 1988, Roer 2008: 193), but they also had to endure ableist aggressions of whether or not this concerned 'typical National Socialist injustice' or 'non-typical National Socialist injustice' or whether they were 'persecuted by' or 'victims of' National Socialism (cf. Hamm 2013). In 1987 the Federation of People Aggrieved by 'Euthanasia' and Forced Sterilization commented: "Our efforts to be recognized as people aggrieved by National Socialism and to seek reasonable restitution have not been respected, and moreover denied with injurious and insulting arguments that at times resembled the notions and justifications of the National Socialists themselves" (Bund der Euthanasie-Geschädigten und Zwangssterilisierten 1987: 1f.). They still have to fight this battle even today, since a victim of National Socialist 'euthanasia' does not possess the same rights of restitution that those persecuted by National Socialism have (cf. Hamm 2013, Winter 1997: 479). The large majority of those who underwent forced sterilization spent their lives after the defeat of National Socialism without rehabilitation and without any financial compensation for the injustice done to them (cf. Hamm, n.d., 2013).

Part of the wrestling for social recognition of the injustice suffered includes the effort to declare the Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring null and void. In 1974 the law was suspended, in 2007 it was outlawed, but it has not to date been declared null and void.34 Margret Hamm, currently chair of the Working Group of the Federation of People Aggrieved by 'Euthanasia' and Forced Sterilization, comments bitterly on the question of whether she still has hope that the Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring will ever be declared null and void: "Yes, when everyone is dead. That's how simple it is. And then there will be a great commemoration day" (Hamm 2013).

The consequences for those affected, forced into silence by the German government and society, and—based on compensation—forced into a narrow legal straightjacket, are often denied recognition and have no words to express what they feel or to describe what happened.

7.2 Self Protection Against Discrimination Instead of 'Shame'

The fight for recognition in a society that simply killed disabled people and then only long afterwards began to talk about this history, and then as now drew quite insufficient conclusions from it, is arduous. For those who suffered from it or are in any way affected by it, this struggle can lead to further injury, the feeling of being 'wrong,' to withdrawal, to being ashamed, or to the establishment of taboos. My great-grandfather made the murder of his wife a taboo, parts of my family do that up until the present day, and for my grandmother, it was a long struggle against fear, shame, and hurt.

It is often held, with regard to those people annihilated as 'unworthy of life,' that families feel shame and in turn make the subject taboo because of that shame. Disabled people are viewed as 'embarrassing,' people are ashamed; hardly anyone would like to have a 'lunatic' in their family or a disabled child. Many people today feel similar 'shame' when they need therapy or were ever under psychiatric care.35 As part of writing this article, I spoke to friends who had suddenly remembered that they had somebody who was forcibly sterilized in their family, or who was in a psychiatric clinic, or that 'something happened.' However it was not and is not present. They are not representative victims with whom one identifies, only victims who are not integrated into one's family history.

I think that the terminology of 'shame' veils more than it names. It is not an apt concept for allowing us to understand taboo and repression. Victims and family members are presumed to feel shame for something that is actually not shameful, namely having a family member who was 'disabled' by society and murdered. Shame is used to render people silent and to provide cover for ableist acts. People thus affected often learn to see themselves with the eyes of the perpetrators and to internalize this view. Their deviance from the norm of the healthy and 'efficient' or 'productive' results in their negative view of themselves, they frequently feel themselves to be deficient and worthless (cf. Kuch 2004). Whoever is ashamed is afraid that the well-protected secret of not being 'normal' will be discovered, is suddenly visible to all, which goes along with the loss of social acceptance and recognition.

'Shame' individualizes and denies its cause: ableism. To fear ableism and consequences like stigma, social ostracism, and discrimination is understandable. That, however, is something different from 'shame.' The former is a sensible and unfortunately often self-protective measure against discrimination. To evoke 'shame' to 'justify' that family members do not want their murdered family members to be named decouples the conversation from the conditions that give rise to the shame. Shame can be a consequence, but not the cause.

This shifting nexus of justifications is ableist and contributes to the continuation of ableism, precisely because ableism is not thematized nor is it even considered. Instead of asking what family members might need in order to commemorate their murdered relatives, they are rendered speechless in the fullest sense of the word. The hegemonic discourse makes it impossible for those harmed and for their families to express the injustice they have suffered and to file suit or bring a legal action, since this falls outside of the parameters of typical social situations and the prevailing language has no words for it. To understand at all what a person was subjected to and to find words and a language for what was experienced, was and is hard enough for many who were affected (cf. Lyotard, quoted in Brunner, Frei, and Goschler 2010: 28; 196). Tragically, this speechlessness in turn contributes to ableism, precisely because it remains unaddressed.

Martin (a grandson of Emilie): "Once in our town in Lauterbach there was also an exhibition in the local heritage museum that was almost identical to the one in Hadamar. But we didn't out ourselves there."

I: "Why didn't you out yourselves?"

Martin: "That was so long ago, why should we still kick up dust in such a small place?"

It kicks up the dust, at least in Martin's conjecture. He is probably right. Not only does one denounce the wrongdoing done to a family member, but one also outs oneself as a family member of someone with a hereditary disease. This makes speaking about it almost impossible. Perhaps it would be good to kick up the dust in Lauterbach. Martin, however, would have had to bear the consequences. Very few were fighters like my grandmother, and even she was greatly hurt by the reaction to her activism. She suffered from continuous marginalization and stigmatization and always expressed "vexation" with the treatment of 'forgotten victim groups' by the federal government and other authorities, the Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring, and so on. In 1987, she wrote about the Frankfurt 'Euthanasia' Trial that she felt 'mocked' when "on March 27, 1987, the solicitor, in favor of his clients, the accused, downplayed the cruel and insidious methods by which the family members were deceived when they wanted to help." Previously, the defense had portrayed the victims as "spiritually dead", "burnt out defects of nature," "animal-like dreamers" and "lowly existences." (cf. Lebenshilfe-Zeitung 1987)

My grandmother spoke out and ended her tacit consent for the ableist status quo at a time when almost everyone else remained silent. For that she was directly threatened multiple times: "I received a terrible anonymous letter," she registers the reaction she received in 1987 to her letters in both regional newspapers of her area. The [anonymous] letter begins: "Mrs. Marie Hechler! Leave this story with the 'Saujuden'36 well enough alone. You are polluting your own nest" and it goes on in a strongly anti-Semitic and racist manner. At that point she went to Berlin to see her children for a good week and reports: "I have to create distance from the exceedingly hostile voices against minorities in the Bergstraße district." In the early 1990s she explains that she is "so demoralized" that "I cannot speak any more in public about my poor mother."

7.3 The Politics of Memory and the Handling of Names

The non-publication of names cements the covering up, the hiding, and the taboos surrounding people murdered as 'unworthy of life.' Those people who were willfully stripped of their personalities, made into numbers, gassed, and burned often have no grave and are even today officially airbrushed out of existence. This is not only in contrast to the many other National Socialist victims' groups, where the names of those murdered are searchable in the internet as a matter of course, but it also counteracts the efforts to restore dignity to those murdered, to give back their individuality and their humanity, and to create a visible space in history and in collective memory.

It is however not accurate to claim that the names of victims of National Socialist 'euthanasia' are never named. Sometimes they are named. At the end of 2002 the first public reading of the names of 30,161 T4 victims took place in Berlin. The list is based on National Socialist documents that took a circuitous path and landed in the hands of the Stasi,37 moldered away in the ministry and were then rediscovered in the early 1990s. The documents pertain to the T4 Action during the years 1940-41. They are the only remaining files; the Nazis had already destroyed a majority of files themselves. The names of the other victims of the National Socialist 'euthanasia' are mostly unknown. In the mid-1990s the Federal Archive took over the docket of files, and they can be viewed there today (cf. von Buttlar 2003). The reading was titled In Remembrance of Our Sisters and Brothers, the Forgotten Victims of Systematic Medical Mass Murder, 1939-1948 and was a joint commemorative event of the National Association of Survivors of Psychiatry, Berlin-Brandenburg and the Israeli Association Against Psychiatric Assault (IAAPA) in Tel Aviv (cf. Landesverband Psychiatrie-Erfahrener Berlin-Brandenburg 2002).

Laudably, Hagai Aviel, Chair of the IAAPA in Israel, copied the list and posted all of the names and birthdates on it online. On his homepage he explains: "The action of publishing the names is part of a process to restore the victims' dignity after they disappeared into to black hole of psychiatric files." Since that time family members can search for their murdered relatives. The page www.iaapa.de/il/46024/claimslist/Ra-Rh.htm is so far the only place where my great-grandmother Emilie Rau is commemorated with her full name. For this sensible and proper act, Hagai Aviel was criminalized in the Federal Republic. A ruling of the Administrative Court in Koblenz obliges Aviel to remove this data. The only reason that it cannot be enforced is that there is no agreement providing for mutual law enforcement between the Federal Republic and Israel. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USA) shamefully acquiesced to the pressure of the Federal Government. In 2002 it had copied the IAAPA list and posted it in its online database. In the middle of the year 2012 however, it took the names out of the network again with the justification that the list had been published illegally according to German law (cf. International Claims List, n.d.: Aly 2013: 17).

The Munich working group, Psychiatry and Welfare in National Socialism, has long advocated the disclosure of names of those murdered and in early 2013 read publicly the names of Munich victims of NS 'euthanasia' and other corresponding documents. The working group wants to create a commemorative book of all 3,000 people from Munich who were murdered as 'unworthy of living.' In the 'Commemoration and Necrology' of the city of Leipzig the names of NS 'euthanasia' victims are already online. The Polish National Archive Gorzow Wielkopolski makes available the personal records of thousands of mostly German patients who were murdered in the institution Meseritz-Obrawalde (at the time, German, today, Polish) (cf. Parzer 2013, 2014), and the Austrian memorial site Steinhof, that commemorates the NS 'euthanasia' victims of the Vienna Clinic 'Am Spiegelgrund' published its necrology online with complete names, birthdates, and dates of death (cf. Gedenkstätte Steinhof n.d.).

In this manner, the Stumbling Block Project38 of the Cologne artist Gunter Demnig brings to light names and brief biographical details of those persecuted. Even if there are to date relatively few Stumbling Blocks for the victims of National Socialist 'euthanasia,' there will surely be more in the coming years. There are, for example around psychiatric institutions in Berlin-Wittenau and in the entire vicinity of Berlin-Reinickendorf quite a number of cobblestone memorials that sketch out the life journeys of those people who were killed for being 'unworthy of living.' According to a decision of the data protection office in Wittenau the names of those who were murdered may be named in the interest of the public (cf. Weindling 2011: 129). And in Bremen the director of the Stumbling Block Project, underway since 2004, of the Bremen Agency for Civic Education was quoted in the newspaper Weserkurier in December 2013 with the following words: "This is the first stone for a victim of 'euthanasia,' which we place here at the request of the family members." Almost twenty relatives of Christine Sauerbrey, murdered in June of 1941, in Hadamar, made their way to the ceremony placing the Stumbling Block (cf. Raudusz 2013).

According to Federal archive law, subject files are accessible to the public after 30 years, unless this access does not adversely affect a third party or that party's personal rights. Files on human beings may be used as early as ten years after that person's death or 110 years after that person's birth. This applies to all victims of NS 'euthanasia.' There are additional legal rulings that are comparatively complicated, such as those concerning victims of medical practice or their families. So, as I understand it, all of the names could actually be made public. The archives in contrast defend themselves against doing this by referring to 'interested third parties who qualify for protection.'39 Paradoxically, and shamefully, relatives and family members who are allegedly 'protected' by this practice are prevented from learning the truth about their murdered family members.40 There are many people who are affected by this. Götz Aly estimates that at least every eighth German or Austrian who is older than 25 and whose family roots reach back in the Empire to 1900 are directly related to one person who became a victim of NS 'euthanasia' (cf. Aly 2013: 15). The taboo is in this manner flanked by the prevention of knowledge.

At the same time good intentions are impeded. So for example, the British medical historian, Paul Weindling, may not carry out his plan to have a directory of all victims of National Socialist 'euthanasia' and medical experimentation on the basis of legal regulations pertaining to archives in Germany (cf. Parzer 2014).

Should legal hurdles indeed stand in the way of the publication of names, then I would like to say, as one who is constantly evoked, as a 'relative living today': That may not happen in my name! And also not in the name of a portion of my family. My father considers the forced anonymity to be "Nonsense" and my cousin, Sebastian answers the question whether the victim of NS 'euthanasia' should be identified with their full name: "Yes. They have just as much right as all the other people who were murdered." My grandmother wrote as early as 1989: "Out of this has emerged for me the demand that my poor mother does not remain anonymous, hidden under a monument!!"

There are two additional groups of stakeholders who contribute to the maintenance of anonymity: researchers and the families. I find it necessary and sensible when researchers consult with families and proceed with reverence, yet at the same time more courage is needed in the interest of those who were murdered. If families are opposed to the naming because through it they are genuinely likely to encounter ableism, such as for example stigmatization in a small town or within a particular social community, then I consider that to be a legitimate and understandable reason. In that case anonymity should continue to be maintained. This might especially pertain to those family members who are living today who still carry the same family names as their murdered descendants, which might be relatively rare, who still live in the same region, and for whom in general little anonymity is afforded. Otherwise it would be rare for people to draw this conclusion simply on the basis of surnames.

This should not obscure the fact that in most cases the desire of family members not to have their murdered ancestors named is itself ableist. This continues all of the above-described problems—the fear of stigmatizing perpetuates the stigmatizing—and is for that reason to be weighted lower than the effort to commemorate by name those who were murdered and identify their life dates in a widely accessible databank. Those murdered would in this way finally be afforded proper respect after all these decades and at least symbolically their individuality and human dignity would be restored. In addition the family members would have more ways to research the facts about their relatives.

All things considered, it is not always simple to agree with research. Even a key text by Paul Weindling on this topic includes no explanation of what the topic and a possible publication of names can mean for family members, how they could feel, and what sort of consequences the discussion of naming can yield. It is simply stated that the families would "frequently be glad" [about the naming] (Weindling 2011: 129). On one hand, this is not consistent with the frequent emphasis on 'shame,' and on the other hand this lack of attention to consequences for families seems to me to be symptomatic of a particular circle of researchers on the topic of murder of 'the ill' and National Socialist 'euthanasia.' Paradoxically, the argument now as then was for freedom of research. Even though I assume that researchers on these topics have good intentions and though I welcome their scholarship, it is always necessary to ask and to reflect upon what the goal of research is, how it is embedded in social conditions, and what effects it has.