Programme

“Disposable Humanity: Film as Memorial, Memorialization as Film” by David T. Mitchell, George Washington University, Sharon L. Snyder, Independent Scholar, and Cameron S. Mitchell, CSM Productions

This keynote talk/film screening explores a longstanding debate about “direct links” between the mass murder of 300,000+ disabled people in Nazi psychiatric institutions (code name: Aktion T4) and the slaughter of 5.6 million Jewish people in the Holocaust. In exploring these genocidal parallels, Disposable Humanity argues that the Holocaust could not have happened, when it happened, or in the way it happened, without the T4 murders as prelude. There is no way to disentangle the two mass murders; in fact, understanding the medical gas chamber murders of disabled people transforms our understanding of the Holocaust. The avoidance of the intertwined fates of these two groups led directly to the conscious delay of memorialization of T4 victims and deferral of reparations. Thus, the documentary film serves as a memorial to absented lives in history, and captures memorialization as an ongoing, active process that exposes contemporary attitudes toward disability.

More Programme Details to come…