What the Nazis called "Aktion T4" was a Euthanasia program, officially started on August 18th, 1939. The registration¿ operations for individuals with physical or mental handicaps were followed by the forced sterilization and the transfer to the clinics organized to kill.
What do the Germans of today know about the Aktion T4? Why it¿s difficult for them to relate to this event, compared to the other crimes committed by Nazi Germany?
With this research, I will try to explain the mechanisms by the memory of actions that led to a merciful death of approximately 70,000 lives "unworthy of life", which has been preserved in the private and family dimensions, and how and what characteristics it has been transmitted from one generation to another.
Through interviews with families, who had a relative interned in one of the program's clinics spread across the Reich territory between 1939 and 1945, I will investigate the evolution and passage of memories stored within the family sphere, paying attention to the generational steps and processes of the trauma.
Those stories are made out of difficult reconstruction attempts, silence, and negations, the same ones that led the victims to live in a condition they could not understand, and separated them from the world before testing a solitary death. Far from any contact with their families, the trauma I analyze concerns actions, carried out by previous generations of my interviewees.
The problematic relationship everybody has with the end-of-life issue and the sense of guilt which generated by the awareness of crimes that committed, in this case, peculiarity with Aktion T4, which was not a crime committed beyond national borders or outside the private sphere and to the others, but in the most central and intimate place of Nazi culture: the family.
I strongly believe in the potential of my research project. Families of Aktion T4's victims have never been interviewed and their memory has never been collected and analyzed before.
As I already said, Aktion T4 memories' not only concern the victim position but also the perpetrators' side, so I will define a completely new status: if the families define themselves as part of the victim's story, they also perceive themselves as Germans, so inserted in the big perpetrator's group. In a lot of victims' families, there were also people directly connected with the crime, as doctors, SS soldiers, etc. I think there is not a similar example in the history of trauma studies, for such a particular intermediate position. The work of the German painter Gerard Richter, about his aunt Marianne Schönfelder (who has been a victim of the Nazi euthanasia program), well summarizes the memory's dynamics I am analyzing: at a first sign the painting seems like photography, an image perfectly readable, but when we look at it with more attention we note that there is something that disturbs the visual communication. An image that we recognize as a familiar one -it is an image of a baby and a woman, with no doubt -, is actually avoiding us. This particular visual proposal is totally linked, in my opinion, with the specific elaboration of memory I am working on. The German society knew about the killing Euthanasia program, the crime has been there, in front of people's eyes, but nobody could really see it. Society still has a problem (something still disturbs the communication) watching AktionT4 crime and elaborate it.
I believe that the wound inflicted by the killing of members of German families by the German State itself, the killing of relatives of fervent supporters of the regime, of mothers and fathers of German citizens, lie at the heart of the problem of German society's difficulty in coming to terms with the past. My contribution can be a starting point for a new reflection on the issue.