What Happened Here in the Summer of 1940?
In a series of six interrelated short videos, Kenny Fries reads excerpts from his forthcoming book Stumbling over History: Disability and the Holocaust. The readings are supplemented by personal and historical photographs from his visits to the six Aktion T4 killing sites, where disabled people were mass murdered during the Third Reich.
"Unlike the Holocaust, there are no T4 survivors. We know about T4 and its aftermath mainly through medical records and from the perpetrators. Aktion T4 does not have its Elie Wiesel or Primo Levi. That is the main reason I write about what happened to disabled people during the Third Reich. I want to be what Susanne C. Knittel and other scholars call a 'vicarious witness.' . . . This is my way of bridging the silence, of keeping alive something that is too often forgotten."
— Kenny Fries
1. Brandenburg an der Havel: The Behavior of the Delinquents
Kenny visits Brandenburg an der Havel, the site of the first “test killing” of disabled people in early 1940.
2. Bernburg: Family Trees
Kenny visits Bernburg, which opened when the killing center at Brandenburg was closed. He meets Ute Hoffmann, director of the memorial site, and discovers why there was a tile floor leading from the gas chamber to the crematorium.