Bay Area advocates fighting for Nazis’ ‘invisible victims’

Not a single memorial in the world attests to any memory of the nearly 300,000 disabled German citizens who were slaughtered during the Holocaust, often with the help of their own physicians.

To deliver the disabled from being just a footnote in history, the small yet vocal Disabled Rights Advocates in Oakland is entering the fray for Holocaust reparations.

"This is a forgotten, secret story," said Larry Paradis, executive director of Disability Rights Advocates, who is Jewish and uses a wheelchair.

It's forgotten, Paradis noted, even among Jews.

That's why Paradis and Sid Wolinsky, Disability Rights Advocates' litigation director, are championing what Wolinsky calls the "invisible victims."

People with disabilities were among the first in Germany to be killed for sullying the purity of the Aryan race, Wolinsky said.

Disability Rights Advocates --part of the Bay Area's influential nexus of disability-rights groups -- is beginning the monumental task of pulling the Holocaust's disabled victims out of obscurity into the forefront of public memory.

Although few disabled Holocaust victims are still alive, Disabled Rights Advocates is filing for a portion of the billion-dollar restitution deals now in progress. Such settlement money could also underwrite monuments and museum exhibits that address the Holocaust's disabled victims, said Wolinsky, who is Jewish, as are half his organization's eight attorneys.

They also want to create a monument in the Bay Area.

While researching the plight of the disabled under Hitler, Wolinsky found most Holocaust museums -- and most Jews -- either don't know or seriously downplay the issue.

Some museum officials have told Wolinsky he's plunging into a thorny issue that will cause some in the Jewish community to bristle defensively. The nay-sayers fear such claims on reparations and memorials are a revisionist tactic that lessens the magnitude of the "final solution," leveled primarily at Jews.

Others argue that disabled victims of the Holocaust -- along with gays, Gypsies, Jehovah's Witnesses and political prisoners persecuted by the Third Reich -- should also receive due justice through settlements.

"I think any group that was targeted by Nazis for reasons of inferiority are entitled to some form of reparations." said Ali Cannon, program director at San Francisco's Holocaust Center of Northern California.

"Sometimes Holocaust agencies can have a narrow sense of why they are there. I don't think it undermines the Jewish experience to talk about other victims."

Cannon's response is unusual, Wolinsky said. More typically, museums and research centers view his work with apprehension.

"There's some concern that attention to disabled victims somehow dilutes the Jewish experience of the Holocaust," he said. "We believe there is enough grief to go around. Our work does not detract one bit from what happened to Jewish people."

Gideon Taylor, president of the New York-based Conference on Jewish Material Claims against Germany, is in favor of restitution for any living person who was persecuted under the Nazi regime.

"I think everyone feels nothing but revulsion of Germany's conduct toward the disabled" during the Holocaust, Taylor said. Settlements "should include non-Jewish victims. Whoever survived the genocidal policy should receive monetary help."

Paradis has a succinct response to concerns that disabled victims would detract from the 6 million Jews killed.

"I would have been doubly damned," said Paradis, who has an advanced case of Gaucher's disease, a debilitating genetic disorder that largely affects Ashkenazic Jews.

Jews and disabled victims of the Holocaust have much in common, he said, because such victims were often one and the same. And disabled Jews were almost always the first to be killed, even before the mass executions.

But under the Third Reich, a disability -- whether blindness, mental retardation or physical impairment -- was frequently a death sentence. In many cases, lethal injections were delivered by the doctors that these patients trusted with their lives.

In Germany, the records of victims are exact since doctors kept meticulous notes on their government-sponsored work. More than 400,000 disabled people were sterilized using crude methods of forced radiation to the genitals. Sometimes the disabled were summarily cleared from hospitals to make room for the war wounded. Approximately 300,000 disabled people were killed, and many were charred in village crematoriums.

"Smoke came out of these chimneys every day, and people knew," Wolinsky said.

Adding the number of disabled people killed in other countries where few records were kept to those killed in Germany, Wolinsky estimates a total of nearly 1 million victims.

Because few survivors remain to receive reparations, Wolinsky would like to see such money used to fund disabled rights programs in Eastern Europe, where he said the treatment of the disabled remains appalling .

"These dollars do not make anyone whole," Paradis said. "They are only to make a point, to bring attention to the crimes."

Wolinsky also wants Germans, especially the Reich's doctors, to acknowledge their deeds. So far, he said, "the overwhelming response has been denial."

Some Germans have offered a chillingly direct admission but show no remorse, Wolinsky said. "They claimed disabled people could not receive reparations on the theory that they hadn't been killed. It was just euthanasia -- a mercy killing."

Attorney Melissa Kasnitz of Disability Rights Advocates has been working with Wolinsky and other lawyers to compile a case to serve to the judge handling the Swiss bank settlement. She's helped cull information from a wealth of books on disabled Holocaust victims.

But even now, Wolinsky said, the topic is still languishing in obscurity.

For him, it's a burning issue that began while listening to a radio report on Holocaust reparations. He realized that "no one ever mentions any of the disabled victims. I set upon the objective of correcting this historical inaccuracy."

Wolinsky said part of his persistence comes from his own deep-rooted Jewish liberalism. Additionally, his disabled brother stands as a "reality check," since he's able to hold a typical job and support a family.

"We spend our lives here dealing with negative images and myths and dehumanization" dished out to disabled citizens, he said.

In addition to building memorials, Wolinsky wants to create a remembrance center specific to disabled victims. Paradis said in order for such an institution blossom, "there needs to be a movement to create a groundswell of political pressure."

Disability Rights Advocates is already inching toward that goal. This year, during the Yom HaShoah observance at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, Paradis was flown in to light a special candle.

It was the first flame to flicker nationally for the memory of disabled victims. Wolinsky and Paradis hope it lights the way to a thousand more.

"We believe that adding another chapter to the record of horrors can do nothing but help understanding of the Holocaust," said Wolinsky.