About the exhibition
In the Nazi era mentally ill and disabled persons were considered to be a “burden” on the German “people’s community” and were persecuted for this reason alone. Over 200.000 persons fell victim to the so-called “euthanasia” programme, which was nothing other than the organised murder of the mentally ill and disabled.
With the exhibition registered, persecuted, annihilated the Munich Documentation Center for the History of National Socialism took the alleged “value” of life as a guiding thread and documented the history of exclusion, forced sterilisation and mass murder. As in the exhibition Munich and National Socialism, the individual fates and biographies of both victims and perpetrators were shown, complemented by how this aspect of Nazi history was dealt with after 1945.
The exhibition was conceptualized and first realized by the German Association for Psychiatry, Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics in cooperation with the Foundation Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe and the Topography of Terror Foundation. For its presentation in Munich, a special working group – Psychiatry and Care in Munich under National Socialism – has developed a complementary section focusing on “euthanasia” in Munich and Bavaria.
