Public Disability History

By Robert Parzer Translation: Ylva Söderfeldt Workers at the T4 memorial in Berlin. Photo © Robert Parzer. Public discourse and collective memory have tended to neglect the National Socialist killings of mentally ill and disabled people. Still in the 1990s the position towards victims of the so-called “euthanasia”-programs was defensive, until in the early 2000s the debate surrounding the Berlin Holocaust memorial led to other victimized groups being recognized at the highest political level. This started a process that finally in 2014 led to the inauguration of the memorial for the victims of the National Socialist “euthanasia” killings. The memorial was supported by an exhibition project funded by the German Research Foundation. Since the practice of “writing onto the internet” has become popular and commonly accepted, different online media have also become platforms for remembering Nazi crimes. However, the murdering of mentally ill and disabled people is an exception tha

By Rachael Stamper In my role as heritage project manager at Queen Elizabeth’s Foundation for Disabled People, a disability charity based in Surrey, UK, I have been exploring how to make disability history more accessible to the general public and for disabled people themselves. Firstly I would like to talk about a conference I attended at the London Metropolitan Archives in November 2015 titled ‘Disability and Impairment – A Technological Fix?’ The aim of the conference was to share what disability organisations and researchers were doing or with disability history. The conference married together two groups of people, academics and non-academics, and both groups were represented in twelve twenty minute presentations, followed by Q&A sessions. Academics were present from Lancaster University, The Open University, Langdon Down Museum of Learning Disability, the Wellcome Trust, The National Archives, Yale University, and The University of Exeter. They presented a wide range of