Wilhelm Werner’s life unworthy of live: a voice from the Nazi Euthanasia Program

Wilhelm Werner was born into a family of humble origins on 18 September 1898 in Schnieglin, near Nuremberg. In 1902, his mother moved to the poorhouse, together with Wilhelm and a baby, born two years after Wilhelm. Probably deaf, at the age of ten Wilhelm was admitted to St. Joseph’s Home, a Catholic institute for the feeble-minded located in Gemünden, Franconia, where he learned to read and write. In 1919 he was transferred to the Werneck mental hospital, where he was diagnosed as having Idiotie and where he remained until 1940. We do not know the exact date on which he was forcibly sterilized, but it happened between 1934 and 1938. On July 14, 1933, just six months after Hitler became Chancellor, interior minister Wilhelm Frick enacted the Gesetz zur Verhütung erbkranken Nachwuchses, which came into force in January 1934 and involved the forced sterilization of individuals whose offspring had hereditary physical or mental “damage,” and of all the people suffering from certain pathologies considered hereditary.3 The text of the law was inspired by the Model Eugenical Sterilization Law that Harry Laughlin presented in his essay Eugenical Sterilization in the United States, published in 1922. Each case had to be examined by an Erbgesundheitsgericht, a Hereditary Health Tribunal. According to Aly Götz, 350,000 people, including Wilhelm Werner, were sterilized in the first seven years of the Third Reich.