Marti Stelling

Thirteen disabled people born in Britain were killed between 1940 and 1941 after moving to Germany and Austria. Their stories will be told for the first time at Huddersfield University’s Holocaust Centre North.

The exhibition, Finding Ivy: A Life Worth Living, refers to Ivy Angerer who was born to Austrian and German parents in Broughty Ferry near Dundee in 1911.

When Ivy’s Austrian father was arrested as an enemy alien and imprisoned in an internment camp in Britain, Ivy and her mother travelled back to Germany.

In 1930 Ivy was institutionalised in a large psychiatric hospital in Vienna called Am Steinhof, where she worked in the laundry room. Her records show she was unhappy and wanted to go home.

In 1940 she was sent to the Hartheim killing centre at Alkoven in Upper Austria and was murdered aged 29. Ivy’s family have played a key role in telling her story and bringing the exhibition to life.

Helen Atherton, a Lecturer in Nursing at the University of Leeds, founded the Finding Ivy project and leads the international team of researchers who put the exhibition together.

She first learned about the British-born victims of a programme called Aktion T4 by chance in 2010 when she was visiting Hartheim in Austria, one of six killing centres used by the Nazis.

Between 1940 and 1941 70,000 disabled adults who were selected for the T4 programme were sent to killing centres in Germany and Austria where they were killed in gas chambers disguised as showers.

After Ivy died her father was sent a letter saying she had died of a liver atrophy at one of the other killing centres. Ivy’s father may have died never knowing the truth of how his daughter died.

Helen said: “I saw a display which broke down the T4 deaths at the centre by country and to the right I saw the UK. It was such a surprise because it never entered my mind that it was a possibility for British-born people to be killed in one of these centres.”

After successfully unearthing Ivy’s story she started researching the 12 others. Helen was joined by Dr Simon Jarrett from the Open University and colleagues in Austria and Germany who helped to put the stories together.

Helen said: “As a learning disability nurse I am acutely aware that this group of people rarely have their voices heard. They rarely have an opportunity to tell their stories and I am insistent that these people will be recognised.

“Telling these stories is not just a part of history. We are able to restore these people of their dignity and personhood. The Nazis stripped them of any sense of being a human being and we want to restore that. We can never restore their lives but we can restore their memories.

“These were people perceived as having a life unworthy of life which is a term the Nazis used to describe a group of people with hereditary illnesses who were deemed an economic burden.”

The research involved using genealogy sites such as Ancestry, viewing physical records and contacting descendants of the victims. Many of the records in both England and Germany were destroyed during World War Two which made accessing information challenging.

Helen said: “One of the hardest things to accept is that there is always going to be gaps in the research and we are never going to have a full story. In some cases we were never able to track down living family members so their story is much less complete.

“However in one case we were able to complete a piece of family history for a 91-year-old woman who never knew how her father died. She was very young when she lost him and her mother refused to talk about it. She finally knew what happened to her dad all those years ago and was able to close that chapter.

“We are the first country that has researched victims born outside Austria and Germany to this extent and we are hoping this will encourage other countries to think about their own subsets of victims. We are sending a message that the lives of disabled people are valuable and we must appreciate the contribution they make to society.”

Published in print for the Yorkshire Post