Tracing the eugenicist roots of Nazi Germany’s genocide, Disposable Humanity confronts the little-known history of the Aktion T4 program—a state-sanctioned campaign that led to the murder of more than 300,000 disabled people between 1939 and 1941. Authorized on Hitler’s personal stationery and carried out by physicians under the guise of “mercy killings,” T4 not only devastated lives but also laid the technological and bureaucratic groundwork for the Nazi death camps.

Spanning over two decades of research and filmmaking, director Cameron S. Mitchell and his collaborators weave together archival records, testimony from descendants, and insights from historians, disability scholars, and activists to examine why this atrocity remained absent from public memory for so long. The film interrogates how perpetrators escaped justice, how survivors were silenced, and why Berlin’s T4 Memorial—only unveiled in 2011—marks the last victim group to be recognized in the city center.

Both a searing work of historical excavation and a profound meditation on cultural memory, Disposable Humanity resists the intended erasure of disabled victims by reinvesting in the value of the lives that were taken. At once intimate and urgent, the film reframes memorialization as a living act of love and responsibility, while offering a timely reminder of how fascism exploits prevailing ideas about health, purity, and human worth.

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Sponsored by the Holocaust Memorial Miami Beach