Alice Ricciardi-von Platen presents a historically grounded account of the Nazi regime’s program for murdering psychiatric patients, disabled people, and others judged “life unworthy of life.” Drawing on documentation and testimony connected with the postwar medical trials, the work exposes the administrative, medical, and ideological machinery that enabled mass killing inside German institutions. Its focus is not abstract ideology alone, but the concrete procedures by which doctors, officials, transport networks, and state offices turned discriminatory policy into systematic murder. First published in the aftermath of the Second World War, the book remains an important early testimony to the Holocaust’s broader scope beyond the extermination camps. It is a sober historical document and a moral indictment of professional complicity, showing how medicine and bureaucracy were mobilized in service of state violence.

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