Interview with Cameron Mitchell, Director of the Documentary Disposable Humanity

Red Carpet Interview – Slamdance 2025

Disposable Humanity follows Cameron Mitchell’s family, who are Disability Studies scholars and filmmakers that have researched the Nazi Aktion T4 program since the 1990s. Through conversations with memorial directors, disabled people, and relatives of T4 victims, they uncover the horrifying truth: that the Nazi Aktion T4 program, was in fact the program where the Nazis trained killing staff and designed the apparatus of mass murder that led to the Holocaust. Disabled people were the first victims to be killed under the Third Reich and in this investigative documentary, the Mitchells reveal how this history has been covered over and erased from international public memory.

RabbleRouse: Hi Cameron, so good to meet you. I watched your documentary Disposable Humanity and it made a huge impact on me. There are so many things I’d like to talk about that just blew me away, things that I knew about but even more things that I didn’t know. At the beginning of the film there is the poem by the Jewish Poet,

Cameron Mitchell: Yes, Heinrich Heine.

RabbleRouse: Where they burned books, They will end burning bodies instead. It stopped me. I’m processing obvious parallels to today… and then they begin this trip.

Cameron Mitchell: My Family.

RabbleRouse: Yes, your family, disability study scholars, on the train to Auschwitz while you are making this Doc about the Nazi Aktion T4 program. You are on this train in Poland, which has no ease of access for people with disabilities. I think many take for granted the protections the Americans With Disabilities Act provide though in reality it is often not enough. I have friends who use a wheelchair and friends who are persons with disabilities or have children with disabilities and I am so worried about them as the US cuts off aid, support and access to policies and programs that sustain their lives. Where is this going? I fear we know. So as you’re releasing this film in early 2025, as the United States, as we… Could you speak to this moment?

Cameron Mitchell: I think disabled people have a natural inclination to know when they hear that disabled people were the first to be killed in the holocaust, they know that it is true. And to be killed in hospitals by doctors, there is already a natural intuition there. So we already know. Even when I was 9 years old my parents took me to my first T4 Gas chamber and I immediately sat down and started drawing these Maus characters from Art Spiegleman’s book “Maus” in Bernberg where we were, because I’d never seen disability represented in the Holocaust as a part of the Holocaust, as in disabled people. Even as a child that was my natural inclination but this film portrays something that is happening right now and there is no more important time for this film to be seen than right now. 

If I could tell you in a nutshell it would be, that this is how fascism occurred in Nazi Germany. Eugenics is the turnkey that unlocks mass killing. If it weren’t for Aktion T4 the other solution, other than “the final solution” was deportation to Madagascar and Lublin. And so at the Wansee Conference, the Nazis present their results from Aktion T4 and deportation as the solutions and “the final solution” was chosen there. They start with math equations that map cost efficiency, if a certain number of hospital beds were empty how much money would be saved. 

RabbleRouse: Sounds familiar. They told the working class that these people were living in magnificent castles while they lived in tenements. 

Cameron Mitchell: Germany goes from a state of the art healthcare country of The Weimar Republic in the 1920s to the greatest betrayal of interdependence in human history with over 200,000 disabled people forcibly sterilized.

RabbleRouse: Did that begin in 1933?

Cameron Mitchell: In ‘33 the second law that was passed after The Reichstag Fire is the law for Prevention of Genetically Diseased Offspring or the “Sterilization Law“.

The first law that was passed was the law against interracial marriage and then they passed the forced sterilization law that included hereditary deafness, hereditary blindness, Huntington’s chorea and Alcoholism as the target because they saw these as undesirable things that they wanted to eliminate from the population.

RabbleRouse: Alcoholism… Weren’t the Nazi’s were pretty big methamphetamine users?

Cameron Mitchell: Oh yeah, the super soldiers..the presence of medicine in the Nazi Regime was incredibly important and it wasn’t something they had to curry favor for because Eugenics was sweeping the world. There was a Eugenics fervor. The Nazis cite California in the sterilization law that they passed because California goes on to forcibly sterilize 20,000 people… 

RabbleRouse: Also recently?

Cameron Mitchell: So this was until 1960. This was the first wave except there were sterilization boards in the United States that were basically out of sight and the Nazis looked at that and said, “Why don’t we do that? We want that.” So Americans did a lot to teach the Nazis.

RabbleRouse: They learned a lot from us. You’ve made a very important film that certainly touched me and I believe people need to see it. Now is the time. What is next for you after Slamdance? Are you traveling to any other festivals? How can we help get your documentary in front of people.

Cameron Mitchell: There is a unique window of opportunity right now. Tell everyone that sees this, tell your friends and readers to sign up for the Slamdance Online portion of the festival. From February 24th thru March 7th it will be live and you can watch the film through the Slamdance APP.

We go to DOCUTAH after this which is in St. George, Utah, we’re nominated for awards there. Then we are waiting to hear what’s next. This is the world premiere at Slamdance, this is the first exposure. Everybody that sees it, we tell them Welcome to the Revolution. You are now a part of it and every person you tell to see this film is going to gain this knowledge and it’s going to better equip them to be better able to fight fascism and the fascist regime that is taking over the United States right now.

RabbleRouse: Thank you so much for making this film, for doing what you’re doing, it is profoundly important and I thank you. Every American should watch your film Disposable Humanity.

Cameron Mitchell: Thank you, and I don’t say this, what I said about this is a “fascist regime” lightly.

RabbleRouse: Oh, it’s the truth 100%. For the last ten years, since the golden escalator, I’ve been saying this is fascism and people respond with “Well that’s kind of harsh” and now I ask… can we say it now? And even now people will respond with “Well, let’s just see what happens.”

Cameron Mitchell: What happens is…my uncle is Timothy Snyder who literally wrote the book…

RabbleRouse: “On Tyranny” Oh my gosh, I didn’t know that.

Cameron Mitchell: So the most important lesson, remember from Twenty Lessons from the 20th Century is do not obey in advance.

Cameron Mitchell & RabbleRouse: Do not obey in advance.

Cameron Mitchell: We’re seeing institutions do that now.

RabbleRouse: Almost all the national press.

Cameron Mitchell: We’re seeing it in the media, we’re seeing it even in the NEA and the NEH. There are federal mandates but there are many, many institutions obeying in advance right now and just remember that resistance is the thing that would have derailed T4.

RabbleRouse: When people who lived near these killing centers said Well, we saw the buses, we saw the smoke but we didn’t know.

Cameron Mitchell: Leon Jaworski who was the prosecutor in Watergate, he tried the  Nürnberg trials of doctors and he proved the Weimar Murder Mill Theory which is that if any cog in the machine, any nurse, a doctor, any stoker, body dragger… If anybody had said no, the whole thing would have fallen apart.

RabbleRouse: Others would have taken courage from that. Courage is contagious.

Cameron Mitchell: Bishop von Galen protested the Nazis publicly and was able to get parts of T4 shut down. So there is resistance that we can look to in Germany and it’s more important than ever now.

RabbleRouse: It is. Thank you, it’s great to meet you. 

Cameron Mitchell: Great questions.

RabbleRouse: Thank you. This is an important conversation. We’re going to… I don’t know what’s going to happen, but we’re going to fight as long and as hard as we can. That’s what I do know. That’s right.

Cameron Mitchell: Take care. 

RabbleRouse: Take care.

Cameron Mitchell:  Can I give you a hug?

RabbleRouse: Yes please, thank you very much. I promise to reach out to people in the community and to our readers to find and watch this film because they need to know and there are some fierce resistance voices there. A lot of people don’t know this part of the story. They didn’t know that a lot of the doctors weren’t convicted, they walked. 

Cameron Mitchell: Yes, they went back to practicing medicine in the same jobs that they had under national socialism.

RabbleRouse: Is there anything else you would tell our readers?

Cameron Mitchell: We’ve got Steve Way and Nic Novicki on board as our executive producers. Steve was the EP on the Grand Jury Winner here at Slamdance last year Good Bad Things that was just released on Apple TV. Jim Lebrecht the Oscar Nominated producer of Crip Camp, we have his support. I think we’re going to go on his podcast The Art of the Documentary, you’re the first person to hear about that. There’s a groundswell of support for this film and I think it’s because people like yourself realize how important it is and how much it needs to be seen by as many people as possible. 

RabbleRouse: Thank you, we will do everything we can to help get the word out. Hear that RabbleRousers? Get on it. The Nuremberg trials and other war crimes trials after World War II established that German leaders and citizens were responsible for the Nazi regime’s crimes.  The Wright Museum. We the people, which side are you on?

*Images courtesy Disposable Humanity and Wildworks PR.

**Special thanks to John Wildman at Wildworks PR.