As part of the Humanities Center’s Fall 2025 speaker series on New Histories of Fascism, Nazi Germany, and the Holocaust, Dagmar Herzog (CUNY Graduate Center), a renowned historian of fascism, sexuality, disability, and modern Germany, will present her new book, The Question of Unworthy Life: Eugenics and Germany’s Twentieth Century (Princeton University Press, 2024).

Between 1939 and 1945, Nazi Germany murdered nearly three hundred thousand people diagnosed with psychiatric illness or cognitive deficiencies. Not until the 1980s would these murders, as well as the coercive sterilizations of some four hundred thousand others classified as “feeble-minded,” be officially acknowledged as crimes at all. The Question of Unworthy Life charts this history from its origins in prewar debates about the value of disabled lives to our continuing efforts to unlearn eugenic thinking today.

Drawing on a wealth of archival evidence, Dagmar Herzog sheds light on how Germany became the only modern state to implement a plan to eradicate cognitive impairment from the entire body politic. She traces how eugenics emerged from the flawed premise that intellectual deficiency was biologically hereditary, and how this crude explanatory framework diverted attention from the actual economic and clinical causes of disability. Herzog describes how the vilification of the disabled was dressed up as the latest science and reveals how Christian leaders and prominent educators were complicit in amplifying and legitimizing Nazi policies.

The Question of Unworthy Life also recovers the stories of the unsung advocates for disability rights who challenged the aggressive victimization of the disabled and developed alternative approaches to cognitive impairment based on ideals of equality, mutuality, and human possibility.

This lecture is free and open to the public.