T4 and public disability history in Sweden

By Matilda Svensson Chowdhury

The boy in the black and white photograph is smiling widely at the camera. He is well-groomed and well-dressed in a white shirt and a dark jacket. His eyes are glistening. This photograph is the first picture in a Swedish exhibition on Aktion T4. Across the boy's chest there’s a turquoise text: “Aktion T4 – on the view of human beings in Nazi Germany”. The boy in the picture is named Robert and a little further in the exhibition, we learn how his mother cunningly was able to could save him from becoming a victim of T4.

Picture of Robert, exhibition on Aktion T4

The Living History Forum (The LHF) is a Swedish public authority [myndighet] which, on behalf of the Swedish government, shall “promote work to enhance democracy, tolerance and human rights with special focus on the Holocaust.” It might seem a bit strange to have a public authority working with these issues, but this is the way it has been in Sweden for the last almost 20 years. A large part of the work the LHF is doing is directed at school children and thus there is almost always an educational framing to the produced material, for example in the form of teachers’ guides. One of the first information materials, which was developed already in 1998, was the book “Tell Ye Your Children...”. This book was however intended primarily for an adult audience and came about as a part of the first information campaign, Living History. To date, more than 1.5 million free copies have been distributed in Sweden.

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Accessible disability history - sharing the past

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 topics such as the impact of 20th century computers on people with disabilities, the blind and dead in Victorian Britain 1851 – 1901, and mobility and impairment in the eighteenth century.

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