Social Attitude Towards Disabled People: Historical and Cultural Aspects

Abstract

Discrimination and repulsion of disabled people can be observed throughout human history. The tendency to exclude them from "normal" society is a common attitude. Even to kill them may be an option to be realised under certain circumstances. In particular, that has become apparent in Nazi Germany during World War II with its (even then illegal) "euthanasia" programme. It displayed a sophisticated system of murdering ten thousands of patients of mental hospitals in special killing centres on the eve of the holocaust. The motivation for such a criminal atrocity shows characteristic traits of such an extermination strategy. There are three relevant dimensions: (1) The economic argument stresses the financial burdens caused by the disabled seen as unproductive eaters weakening the normal society (this idea became first an ideological argument in the face of the misery of World War I); (2) the biological reluctance assumes that disability caused by hereditary diseases would produce a general degeneration of the "vital race" according to the doctrine of eugenics which was widely accepted in the academic world at the end of the nineteenth century; and (3) for social psychological reasons, the disabled were supposed to be "inferior" and a threat for fellow men because of their typical mind of evil resentment (see below: Krüppelseele, crippled mind).