Charis Hill | they/them

@beingcharis.bsky.social

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Disabled. Queer. Living in forced poverty. Cat theydy. Urban farmer. Punny. Free Palestine. (@BeingCharisBlog on Twitter) Profile image alt text: a headshot of a white person with short brown & bleached hair wearing glasses, smiling

A photo of Alice Wong and me from 2019

It’s a largely unwritten chapter in Holocaust history. Between 1939 and 1945, Nazi doctors, under the guise of medical advancement, killed 300,000 disabled children and adults. Throughout German cities and townships, disabled “patients” were identified by clinicians, psychiatrists and social workers, and required to register with Nazi officials. Diagnostic records characterized them as “useless eaters,” “lives unworthy of living” and “burdens upon themselves and the nation’s resources.” They were loaded into vans with black-painted windows—nicknamed “death buses” by local children—and transported to the killing centers, countryside hospitals and institutions just outside of picturesque cities such as Dresden and Potsdam. In Berlin, “death committees” of physicians determined whether disabled people should be released, or, if their documents were marked with an ominous red cross, taken to their deaths.

A blushing peach nearly ready for harvest on its mother peach tree