Götz Aly

Among historians, Götz Aly is considered to be original, inspired and difficult. He has gained this reputation by writing with stamina and panache. His texts thrive on precise, often new questions and details, on his succinct language, on his efforts to take up clear positions, and sometimes on his targeted provocation and smug polemics, directed in particular against the historian fraternity. It is no surprise that many people sit up and pay attention as soon as a “new Aly” is published. His latest book, on euthanasia, the targeted murder of some 200,000 helpless, innocent people in World War II, does not disappoint expectations. The text is vividly written and overflowing with detail, which Aly combines with reflections on his own past experience and sideswipes in the direction of Germany’s contemporary history scholars. (…) Readers find descriptions of the medical and psychiatric thought of contemporary discourses and views on racial hygiene, the cultivation of genetic heath and the general context of a zeitgeist that aimed to make human engineering possible, together with descriptions of everyday murder, moving accounts by victims and their families and lists of the names and curricula vitae of both murderers and their victims. Aly’s book also looks beyond the German Reich at the conquered territories to the east, presenting examples of the murder of the sick in the context of warfare and resettlement plans.

Magnus Brechtken: ”An die Namen der Ermordeten erinnern”
© Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 9 March 2013