James Tyner is Professor of Geography at Kent State University, author of 20 books and over 100 articles and book chapters.    For ordering information, please click here.     Genocide and the Geographical Imagination: Life and Death in Germany, China, and Cambodia This groundbreaking book brings a significant perspective to our understanding of genocide through a fresh interpretation of Germany under Hitler, Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, and China’s Great Leap Forward under Mao.

Chapter II of Genocide and the Geographical Imagination (James Tyner), “The State Must Own Death,” is the best synthesis of research articulating the origins and development of the Nazi’s “Euthanasia Movement”—how medical killing led directly to the Holocaust.
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Scroll down to the right for information on Genocide & the Geographical Imagination: Life & Death in Germany, China & Cambodian and how to purchase it.
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Tyner cites this famous passage from the 1920 book by Alfred Hoche and Karl Binding, Allowing the Destruction of Life Unworthy of Life, the foundational text justifying, authorizing state murder:

If one thinks of a battlefield covered with thousands of dead youth and contrasts this with our institutions for the feebleminded with their solicitude for the living patients—then one would be deeply shocked by the glaring disjunction between the sacrifice of the most valuable possession of humanity on the one side, and on the other the greatest care of beings who are not only worthless but even manifest negative value.

The message is clear: If the state is willing to sacrifice the lives of its own soldiers, why should so many resources be expended keeping mental patients alive? If the state is willing to kill its soldiers, its most valuable citizens, why can’t it also kill human beings deemed “worthless?”

Beginning with this syllogism, we understand the origins of mass-murder in Germany: why Hitler and the Nazis believed that the state gave them the “right” to kill.