Disposable Humanity

SUNDANCE FILM FESTIVAL 2025 REVIEW! Nazi Germany under dictator Adolf Hitler was all about the “master race,” which viewed the mentally ill and disabled as subhuman drains on the rest of their society. There was a secret German government program called the Aktion T4 that started in 1939, which was used to target the death of over 300,000 of the above-mentioned “undesirables.” Filmmaker Cameron S. Mitchell and his co-writer/father David’s documentary Disposable Humanity explores this little-discussed atrocity that started before the Holocaust.

The Nazis took extreme steps to keep T4 a secret by falsifying death report documents in order to make everything harder to track. We learn that what complicated matters even further for the victims was that many relatives at the time were ashamed of their conditions, so they wouldn’t talk about it, thereby making it extremely difficult to leave information for future generations. 

“…a secret German government program used to target the death of the mentally ill and disabled…”

This documentary shows that the power of the dark side of film can be strong. The Nazis would make propaganda films choosing only the “ugliest” actors to portray the people who were targeted by T4. The movies would show these disabled people in squalor-like conditions and depicted as only “takers” in society. In the same way, as would come a little later with the Holocaust, this dehumanization would help to sway public German opinion so that they would accept these terrible things without a fight. 

Another method that the Third Reich utilized was the forced sterilization of around 400,000 people who were deemed unfit. The documentary shows that there were even some States in America that used this inhumane treatment on disabled citizens, which given our own history of government atrocities (mostly affecting minorities) does not entirely surprise me. The general thinking at the time was this was a liberation instead of a punishment.