Henry Friedlander explores in chilling detail how the Nazi program of secretly exterminating the handicapped and disabled evolved into the systematic destruction of Jews and Gypsies. Tracing the rise of racist and eugenic ideologies in Germany, he describes how the so-called euthanasia of the handicapped provided a practical model for mass murder, thereby initiating the Holocaust. Based on extensive research in American, German, and Austrian archives...

The scholarship devoted to the complicity of German physicians in the Holocaust is rich and detailed, but there remains, as Michael Bryant demonstrates, still more to learn. It is well established that the techniques employed by the Nazis to exterminate Jews and others in concentration camps were first applied to people in state hospitals who were deemed mentally disabled or terminally ill. What has been less thoroughly investigated is the postwar...

"The Am Spiegelgrund clinic, in glittering Vienna, masqueraded as a well-intentioned reform school for wayward boys and girls and a home for chronically ill children. The reality, however, was very different: in the wake of Germany's annexation of Austria on the eve of World War II, its doctors, nurses, and teachers created a monstrous parody of the institution's benign-sounding brief. The Nazi regime's euthanasia program would come to determine the...

At the Nazi concentration camp Dachau, three barracks out of 30 were occupied by clergy from 1938-1945. The overwhelming majority of the 2,720 men imprisoned in these barracks were Catholics including monks and seminarians from all over Europe. More than a third of the prisoners in the "priest block" died there. The story of these men which has been submerged by the overall history of the concentration camps, is told in this riveting historical account....

For decades, history ignored the Nazi persecution of gay people. Only with the rise of the gay movement in the 1970s did historians finally recognize that gay people, like Jews and others deemed "undesirable," suffered enormously at the hands of the Nazi regime. Of the few who survived the concentration camps, even fewer ever came forward to tell their stories. This heart wrenchingly vivid account of one man's arrest and imprisonment by the Nazis...