The frailty of justice, an academic and personal reflection on Markus Kreitmair’s “In Fear of the Frail": The treatment of the disabled at the Eichberg Asylum for the mentally ill in Nazi Germany

As a historian with a disability specializing in the Holocaust and WWII, I was always interested in the fate of disabled people in the Holocaust, it was never something I can say I wanted to know felt I should. Within the massive volume of Holocaust Scholarship, I was surprised to find only a couple on the Aktion T4 the extermination of people with disabilities and far fewer in English. My primary research took form of updating a master's thesis written in 2000 about a particular asylum at Eichberg Germany. I wanted to see if there was more, I could add in the 23 years since the paper had been written, with a particular focus on names of the victims and memorializing them. I searched the collections of many post-secondary institutions and sought academic papers in German and English looking for names and solving question's identity. In my research I discovered that the identity of first victim of Aktion T4-arguably the first victim of the entire holocaust had not been definitively known until 2007, it was one of many revelations that lead me to conclude that there needed to be more careful research done on Aktion T4 overall. Frustratingly investigating the topic thoroughly required German fluency I did not possess. I found it odd because nowhere else in WWII scholarship is knowledge of the original language a requirement. The research took a mental tole but I would like to continue it one day in Germany and explore similar Eugenic policies in Canada. Essay submission was sponsored by RIO (Research and Innovation Office), and was presented at the Coquitlam campus on April 8, 2025, for Student Research Days 2025.