Holocaust North Hosts Temporary Exhibition Telling the Stories of the 13 British-Born Disabled Victims of the Holocaust’s Aktion T4 Programme

Posted By: Christopher Morganon: September 27, 2024In: Current Affairs, Education & Training, News, Regional News

Ivy Angerer

Reading Time: 5 minutes

By Joshua Robinson –

Between 1940 and 1941 around 70,000 adults with mental and physical disabilities were systematically murdered in Germany and Austria under a Nazi state-led programme called Aktion T4. They were deemed to have ‘lives unworthy of life.’

Thirteen of these victims were British-born and for the very first time, Holocaust Centre North tells their remarkable and devastating stories in a new, temporary Exhibition – Finding Ivy: A Life Worth Living – opening on Wednesday 2nd October.

Of these 13 British-born victims, some were from mixed British-German or British-Austrian marriages, others were from the families of German and Austrian immigrants who moved to Britain to work in the early twentieth century before fatefully returning to Germany before the Second World War.

Finding Ivy has been created specifically to tell their stories as a means of restoring some dignity and humanity to them and all those people who had their lives cruelly taken away.

The Exhibition’s title refers to Ivy Angerer, born in Broughty Ferry near Dundee in 1911. Her father was Austrian, and her mother was German. Ivy had learning disabilities. Her father was one of many Germans and Austrians in Britain rounded up as an enemy alien and kept in an enemy internment camp. At that time, Ivy and her mum went back to live in Germany. Her mum died in 1916 whilst her husband was still in the camps. He came back around 1919 and went back to Vienna with Ivy. But in 1930, she was admitted to a large psychiatric hospital in Vienna called Am Steinhof, and there she stayed living and working in the laundry room until 1940, when she was transported to Hartheim and killed.

The Finding Ivy Exhibition will show how Ivy and all the other victims came from loving and supportive homes but sadly none were able to remain living with their families. At this time, families had very little choice over their care and if psychiatrists and doctors declared that they needed to go into an institution to be “treated” then they were not able to resist that.

Moreover, families were not made aware of the T4 programme, it was carried out through deception. While the victims were being rounded up from their institutions, their relatives were simply told they were moving somewhere else. They had no idea they were going to be murdered. As the Exhibition materials will show, families were often – months afterward – given a fake death certificate saying their loved one had died of a false cause.

To mark the Exhibition opening, a special one-off launch event will take place at Holocaust Centre North on the evening of Wednesday 2nd October. This is free to attend and will feature presentations from Exhibition Curators Dr. Helen Atherton (University of Leeds), and Dr. Simon Jarrett (Open University), alongside historian Professor Paul Weindling, a Professor of History at Oxford Brookes University and one of the world’s leading experts on the history of psychiatry in Nazi Germany. Together they will discuss the T4 programme and shed light on the meticulous research that has unearthed these 13 heart-breaking and unique life stories.

Dr. Helen Atherton said: “It was on a trip to Hartheim in Austria in 2010, one of the six centres where the Nazis killed people with disabilities and mental illnesses, that I first found out about the British-born victims of Aktion T4. I was surprised and obviously shocked. At that point, I couldn’t quite understand how they’d managed to get from Britain to Germany and Austria and end up in that situation. Together with Simon, and a team working with us in Germany and Austria, we set about uncovering their stories as we very much wanted to honour them in some way. We used evidence from local, regional and national archives to find out more. We also talked to relatives of the victims, some of whom who knew nothing of the truth. Hence Finding Ivy was created and curated. We are thrilled to bring it to Holocaust Centre North to share and be a part of the remarkable work they are doing to preserve the lives and legacies of those whose lives were affected by the atrocities of Nazi persecution.”

Dr Simon Jarrett said: “We are incredibly pleased and extremely grateful that Holocaust Centre North have agreed to take this Exhibition. The T4 programme was a precursor to the wider Holocaust and was where the Nazi regime tried and tested its methods to commit genocide, including mass killing by gas, public deception, calming techniques to ensure orderly killing process and recruitment of German civilians into killing programmes. Much of the equipment used at T4 killing centres was packed up and sent to be reassembled at the death camps in Poland, and perpetrators of T4 went on to become perpetrators, sometimes at a very senior level, in the Holocaust. It is therefore an important element of the Holocaust story, and it is important that it is given prominence. It shows how the medical profession at all levels easily and willingly became complicit in mass murder. The exhibition also has important ramifications today in raising issues about how society perceives and treats its most vulnerable members. People with learning disabilities suffer constant injustice and discrimination in medical treatment, and the shadows of eugenic thinking and the T4 programme hang over much practice and policy towards disabled and mentally ill people today. Finally, the presence of British-born victims in the programme is a surprise and of great interest to the British public.”

Hannah Randall, Head of Learning at Holocaust Centre North commented: “We are very proud to be hosting ‘Finding Ivy – A Life Worth Living’ at Holocaust Centre North. This will be the first time we have hosted an Exhibition which tells the largely untold story of those persecuted and killed under Nazi occupied Germany for having a disability – and the focus on British-born victims fits in perfectly with our permanent exhibition uniquely telling the stories of Survivors and their families who created new lives following the Holocaust in the north of England.”

Tickets to this Exhibition launch event at Holocaust Centre North on Wednesday 2nd October are free but must be booked in advance: https://holocaustcentrenorth.org.uk/events/finding-ivy-exhibition-launch/

About the Curators:

Helen Atherton is a lecturer in nursing at the School of Healthcare at Leeds University. She initiated the Finding Ivy project after a chance discovery 14 years ago and has been working on it, in her own time, ever since. She now leads the international team of researchers who have put the exhibition together.

Simon Jarrett is a historian and Visiting Fellow at the Open University, a member of the Finding Ivy research team, and co-curator with Helen of the Finding Ivy exhibition. He is the author of two books on the history of disabled people.

About Holocaust Centre North:

Holocaust Centre North was founded in the mid-1990s by survivors and refugees of the Holocaust in Leeds to provide friendship and community support. It has had a permanent home on the University of Huddersfield campus since 2018. Its archive contains the collections of around 120 families who rebuilt their lives in the North of England following persecution and genocide. The stories preserved are ones of discrimination, displacement, migration, forced labour, loss, difficult decisions, and building new lives in the North of England. The Centre works to ensure that the atrocities of Nazi persecution are never forgotten.