THE GALLERY OF MIRACLES AND MADNESS

A powerful and disturbing portrait of a devastating chapter in the history of Nazi terror.

In the fall of 1939, Hitler began a program to cleanse Germany of those he deemed “unworthy of life”—particularly individuals diagnosed with mental illness, epilepsy, “feeblemindedness,” or alcoholism or engaging in criminal or anti-social behavior, however minor. Although an extensive sterilization project already addressed the problem of procreation, Hitler preferred killing, thereby saving the nation the cost of supporting “useless” individuals. Identified by eugenicist physicians and psychiatrists, the individuals were sent to a country mansion to be gassed with carbon monoxide. The euthanasia program had begun earlier with the killing of children identified by midwives as suffering from “certain conditions, including ‘idiocy and mongolism’ (especially cases involving blindness and deafness); microencephaly; severe or progressive hydrocephalus”; or physical “malformations of any kind”; some were condemned because their parents were Jewish. About 6,000 babies were murdered, either by injection or, often, starvation. As journalist and arts editor English reveals in an absorbing contribution to the horrific history of Nazi Germany, the program that began in 1939 was complicated by Hitler’s fraught connection to art. Rejected for admission to Vienna’s stodgy Academy of Fine Arts in 1907, Hitler portrayed himself as an artist for the rest of his life, and he saw art as a potent cultural force. Not surprisingly, he vilified modernist artists—such as Max Ernst, Paul Klee, and Egon Schiele—who exalted the irrational, primitive, and mad. As a prominent theme in modernist art, insanity found a champion in the psychiatrist Hans Prinzhorn, a leading intellectual in the 1920s who saw striking works among his own mental patients. Collecting samples from asylums, he published Artistry of the Mentally Ill, a volume celebrated by modernists. Many of the artists Prinzhorn discovered—men Hitler damned as “degenerates and lunatics”—became victims in the euthanasia program, which the author trenchantly brings to life.

A revelatory look at the “gangplank for the Holocaust.”