The Hadamar Clinic and humanity

In the summer of 1941, the staff of the Hadamar Psychiatric Clinic in Germany held a party with beer and wine to celebrate the 10,000th patient they had murdered. Initially, the doctors and nurses of the Clinic killed their patients by lethal injections. However, this proved far too slow a process, and so they devised the more cost-effective system of using carbon monoxide in fake shower rooms to kill large numbers at once. The people they murdered were a diverse group of disabled and mentally-ill people, but most had an intellectual disability (called ‘learning disability’ in the UK) and were thus deemed a threat to the efficient survival of the German ‘race’.

The policy of mass murder of people with an intellectual disability by the Nazi regime was an extension of a widely-approved public policy of eugenics. In the first part of the 20th Century, eugenics attracted support from left and right, and from leading intellectuals. Indeed, it was the more socially-progressive societies like Sweden and Canada which at that time most ardently promoted the eugenic policies of the compulsory sterilisation of people with an intellectual disability, and their incarceration in mental handicap hospitals. Eugenics became discredited by its association with the Nazis, and public policy in almost all countries today favours the integration of people with an intellectual disability into the day-to-day life of society. The old hospitals have closed, the rights of disabled people are increasingly protected, and strenuous efforts are made to improve their employment opportunities.

It is tempting to see these changes as marks of ‘progress’, in the sense of an incremental improvement of civilised values from barbarism to humanitarianism. But this would be historically inaccurate. The harsh policies associated with the eugenics movement replaced those influenced by more humane ideas in the 19th Century, which had emphasised the potential of all people with an intellectual disability for learning and social improvement. Rather than a march of progress, our recent history has been a struggle between two views of humans and their worth. Eugenics represented the idea, popularised in the Enlightenment, that human beings are distinguished from other species by their rationality. Rationality then becomes the measure by which people can be ranked, but also a means of determining the general arrangements of society. This legitimises ‘social engineering’, or the application by those in power of measures to shape the lives of those deemed less rational than themselves. A fear in the early 20th Century that the less rational sections of the population were increasing in numbers compared to the more rational created support for eugenic ideas, and led to the ultimate Nazi social engineering project at both the Hadamar Clinic and the mass industrial-scale killings that followed.

There is another and older view of humankind: that each of us possesses an essential essence or soul, that gives us our human character and by which we can be judged. The quality of our souls is unrelated to our physical strength, our intelligence, or our rank in society: a person with an intellectual disability can have a soul more worthy than that of a scientist that sneers at him. This is of course a fundamentally religious outlook, which should make us very troubled by attempts to drive out religion in the name of science. What, therefore, should be the duty of the scientist and the intellectual according to this older view of mankind? It should be to find out the truth and tell it to others, to maintain knowledge in society from one generation to another, to help people reflect deeply on their values and choices, and to do all this with humility.