Zygmunt Bauman argues in Modernity and the Holocaust (1989) that Nazism was not merely an aberrant phenomenon but, above all, an expression of what we now call modernity. It should be noted, however, that this thesis did not gain widespread acceptance, as it was simpler and more “convenient” to consider the Nazi horror as the product of psychopathic and perverse individuals. Yet historical research into the lives of those involved in this tragedy demonstrates otherwise: many German physicians and eminent psychiatrists, brilliant academics and rigorous researchers, proved to be, in fact, “ordinary” people.

Eichmann was neither an Iago nor a Macbeth, and nothing could have been further from his mindset than 'being evil' out of cold determination. Apart from his exceptional diligence in advancing his own career, he had no reasons to be cruel, and even his diligence was not, in itself, criminal. To put it plainly, he never understood what he was doing. (…) He was not stupid; he was simply without ideas (a very different matter from stupidity), and this lack of ideas made him predisposed to become one of the greatest criminals of that period. (…) That detachment from reality, that absence of ideas, can be far more dangerous than all the evil instincts that may be innate in man.
(H. Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil) 

I have changed my mind and no longer speak of 'radical evil'. […] What I now truly think is that evil is never 'radical', only extreme, and that it possesses neither depth nor a demonic dimension. It can invade and devastate the entire world because it spreads across its surface like a fungus. It 'defies' […] thought, because thought seeks depth, seeks the roots, and when it attempts to grasp evil, it is frustrated because it finds nothing. This is its 'banality'. Only goodness is deep and can be radical.
(H. Arendt, Letter to Scholem, 1963)

A biopolitics not driven by life itself but concerned with bare life—the zoē before the bíos—and manifesting in the indistinction of these dimensions, degenerates, through a constant invocation of the state of exception as a cause-necessity, into a thanato-politics. According to historian Robert Jay Lifton, author of the seminal book The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide (2003), the National Socialist conception of “euthanasia” was based on the work of physician Adolf Jost (1874–1908) in 1895, Das Recht auf den Tod (The Right to Die). Jost argued that the State should possess the right to control the death of individuals and, consequently, be entrusted with compassion and the relief of suffering for incurably ill patients through euthanasia.

A few years later, Ernst H. P. A. Haeckel argued in Die Lebenswunder (The Wonders of Life, 1903) that, following the model of Sparta, children who were “weak”—idiots, deaf, mute, or afflicted with hereditary and incurable diseases—should be eliminated via morphine. Lifton’s analysis reveals that, within a process of national ethical construction, granting the social organism and the State authority over individual death explicitly entailed the right and duty to eliminate lives deemed “unworthy of living.” The Aktion T4 programme (1939–1945) was one of many monstrous measures of radical eugenics aimed at restoring the “racial integrity” of the German nation. The term T4 is an abbreviation of Tiergartenstraße 4, the street and house number in Berlin where the headquarters of the Gemeinnützige Stiftung für Heil- und Anstaltspflege, the public institution for health and social welfare, was located. The objective was to eliminate individuals whom proponents of eugenics considered “unworthy of life,” namely those who, due to severe psychiatric, neurological, or physical disabilities, were deemed a genetic and financial burden on society and the German state. The concept of “life unworthy of living” had begun circulating in Europe to justify practices of active euthanasia, following the initiative of two German-speaking authors: the jurist Karl Binding and the psychiatrist Alfred Hoche. In 1920, they published a chilling study entitled The Permission to Destroy Life Unworthy of Life, which contained two terms later appropriated by the Nazis: Vernichtung (annihilation) and Lebensunwertes Leben (life unworthy of life). Other terms were also used to describe the categories of those deemed unworthy: weak, parasites of the people, enemies of the state, “useless eaters,” valueless lives, or “deadweight existences.” It is estimated that during the initial phase of the T4 programme, which officially ended on 1 September 1941, between 60,000 and 100,000 people were killed, including many children. Regarding the programme’s third phase alone, the doctors in charge decided to kill 20% of the patients in care institutions, amounting to an estimated 70,000 victims. The killings continued even after the programme’s official end, bringing the total number of German nationals killed to around 275,000–300,000, including an estimated 5,000–7,000 children, infants, and young people.

While ethics dictates that not everything that can be done should be done, and that one cannot derive an ought from an is, it remains true, unfortunately, that in practical experience, everything that can be done will sooner or later be attempted. Science certainly mitigates the fatality of events affecting us, but this imposes a greater responsibility in relation to them. In this regard, Autiero’s analysis is compelling: the management of new biomedical technologies requires adopting new ways of life, including wisdom—understood as a balance between demonising and glorifying technology—and modesty, meaning an awareness that one’s talents are not invalidated if not consistently applied.

So, what follows? The moral category of dignity remains, even today, a principle or pretext for re-evaluating the profound meaning attributed to the human person. Specifically, there is a tendency to conceive the value of life as the outcome of a contractual compromise, in which the criteria regulating its validity may be variably negotiable. In reality, as Robert Spaemann observes in his essay Persons—a view I share—the human person is a nomen dignitatis, designating a being of incommensurable worth, entitled to unconditional rights. For empiricism, only the exercise of specifically human activities constitutes being a person; not all living members of the species Homo sapiens sapiens are persons. Spaemann, in contrast, asserts that mere membership in the human species suffices to demarcate the personal from the non-personal. I personally hold that every human being should always be considered fundamentally a person: although the qualities constituting corporeality and personality may mature, change, diminish, or even disappear over a lifetime, this never undermines the intrinsic nature of being a person.

From a secular perspective, Jurgen Habermas (2002) warned of the risks of what he termed “liberal genetics,” noting that modernity remains rife with “dark potentials,” and that past tragedies could, in new guises, be repeated. Consider the resurgence of xenophobia, often irresponsibly fomented, echoing the crises of post-World War I Europe and 1929, which ended tragically. It is not difficult to recall the mechanisms triggered against those whose appearance or behaviour deviates from “normality”: disgust, revulsion, fear of contamination, anger veiled as pity, contempt disguised as timid and insincere charity, relentless rejection, hatred aimed at annihilation, or tolerant acceptance for institutional convenience. Clearly, it is both unacceptable and dangerous to slide into the insidious slope of culpable indifference and inhuman arbitrariness, to which even parts of the political and healthcare sectors have contributed, often incapable of recognising or understanding human diversity.

An aspirational goal in our social and civic reality should be to pursue a path leading to shared understanding, even within limited political spaces, that allows the legal reconciliation of major moral conflicts, including, but not limited to, genetic selection. Tolerance cannot legitimise claims whose recognition would undermine the principle of equal respect: is a project of coexistence truly feasible if it does not envisage the renunciation of ethically unacceptable practices? Certain perspectives—exemplified, albeit in outdated form, by Engelhardt’s theses—still aim to establish an ethical “neutral ground,” enacted through widely shared procedures, on which individuals, bound to their communities, feel free from alien moral coercion. Yet such “permission or consent,” as a source of authority, constitutes a negative form of tolerance, understood as non-interference. I therefore question how a pluralistic society can rest on solid democratic foundations if, on one hand, ecumenical communication between human communities is denied, and on the other, extreme individual autonomy is theorised, daring to encompass life-and-death decisions.

We must never forget the historical horrors inflicted on people with disabilities during Nazism and, with careful, critical, and aware attention, observe what is happening in contemporary society. Between 1921 and 1932, three International Eugenics Congresses were held in London and New York. During the 1920s and 1930s, policies of compulsory sterilisation of certain mental patients were implemented in countries including Belgium, Brazil (including Indigenous peoples), Canada, Japan, and Sweden. Between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, laws in Europe and the USA prohibited marriage for the mentally ill and enforced sterilisation to prevent the “transmission of insanity, idiocy, imbecility, epilepsy and crime.”

It is evident, then, that the Nazis were not acting in opposition to prevailing scientific theories. What came to be called social Darwinism combined with interpretations of human development influenced by the English demographer Thomas Malthus (1766–1834), who in An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798) argued that population growth could outpace resources. Social Darwinism thus developed in the mid-nineteenth century as a form of Malthusianism aimed at rigidly controlling births. The first eugenic law, enacted by the State of Indiana (USA) in 1907, restricted the reproductive capacity of the “unfit” (people with disabilities, mental illness, or epilepsy) and certain “dangerous races” (such as Native Americans and Roma). Between 1907 and 1979, 27 American states adopted eugenic measures, and five U.S. presidents—T. Roosevelt, W. Taft, W. Wilson, C. Coolidge, and H. Hoover—explicitly endorsed eugenic positions. In parallel, there were the so-called “fitter families,” families deemed to have an enviable genetic pedigree, with brochures displayed at national fairs in Texas. In 1911, the American Eugenics Society even organised a Better Babies Day, celebrating the “healthiest” children—a phenomenon strikingly similar to the Nazi practice of pairing young Aryans.

In the United States, the peak of eugenic sterilisation of the “insane” occurred between 1927 and 1963, with approximately 64,000 people forcibly sterilised: repeat offenders, rapists, epileptics, patients with mental disorders or “idiocy and mongolism,” and occasionally alcoholics or drug addicts were subjected to these laws. Comparable estimates elsewhere include: Germany (1933–1941), over 400,000; USA (1899–1979), ~65,000; Sweden (1934–1976), 62,888; Finland (1935–1970), 58,000; Norway (1934–1977), 40,891; Denmark (1929–1967), 11,000; Canada (1928–1972), ~3,000; Switzerland (1928–1985), fewer than 1,000. Italy also had eugenics proponents, such as Alfredo Niceforo and Corradino Gini, the latter becoming Mussolini’s right-hand man in shaping fascist demographic policy. Anthropologist Giuseppe Sergi (1842–1936) founded the Italian Committee for Eugenics, advocating an ecological and social approach rather than active racial selection and elimination. He believed that improved environmental conditions and education could shape hereditary traits, purifying society of “atavistic brutality.” Sergi, who taught Maria Montessori and considered individuals with disabilities educable and integrable into society, explicitly distanced his vision from racial eugenics.

Research of this kind sought to understand what determined human “types” and why some individuals were afflicted with diseases while others remained asymptomatic, thereby enabling medical Darwinism to flourish until the mid-twentieth century. In Italy, the only case resembling the infamous Aktion T4 concerned disabled children in South Tyrol sent to the sanatorium in Kaufbeuren, Bavaria: some were euthanised, others used as human guinea pigs. After 8 September 1943, episodes in Italian psychiatric hospitals also merit attention, though they differed from Aktion T4 in the absence of physician complicity and the context of the wider extermination of Jews. The most significant case involved patients at the psychiatric hospital in Pergine Valsugana, Trento, while other tragic incidents occurred in Trieste, Venice, and Treviso. Jews hospitalised in these institutions were forcibly removed by German military units under Franz Stangl, an Austrian police officer previously assigned to the Hartheim castle, one of six centres used for the elimination of people with disabilities, where over 18,000 individuals were killed and cremated. In September 1943, Stangl was transferred to Trieste and employed at the Risiera di San Sabba, a rice-milling facility converted into a Polizeihaftlager (police detention camp), for the suppression of partisans and the deportation of Jews, including in Venice, following the German occupation of northern Italy and the establishment of the Italian Social Republic, a nominally collaborative regime. Stangl knew how to locate Jews admitted to asylums to avoid capture, or those with genuine mental illnesses. At the San Giovanni psychiatric hospital, on 28 March 1944, of 39 patient files, the discharge column read: “forcibly removed by an SS unit; destination unknown.” In Treviso, on 7 April, four individuals were taken away. When Stangl moved to Venice in October, additional patient removals occurred at the hospitals of San Clemente and San Servolo.

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