Read so as not to forget - All’Insegna del Giglio

Wednesday 15th March
17,30 hours
PAOLO LOMBARDI – GIANLUCA NESI
Learning to Kill The T4 Program and Genocide (All’insegna del Giglio, 2022)
Presents: Lisa ARIANI

In the autumn of 1939, the Nazi regime launched its first mass extermination operation: the elimination of the mentally ill. Authorized by Hitler without a precise plan or an indication of ways and means, the execution of the action was entrusted to the Führer's Chancellery, which transformed itself from an all in all secondary institution into a veritable Ministry of Death. Recruiting the necessary personnel, inaugurating organizational and managerial practices, developing skills, and experimenting with methods of assassination, the Führer's Chancellery built from scratch an apparatus of assassination which was soon extended also to the disabled, the chronically ill, and anyone deemed antisocial, from delete in complete secrecy. Human resources, expertise, means and homicidal solutions - from the invention of the gas chamber to the use of Zyklon B - would then be transferred to the East for a larger-scale enterprise: the genocide of the Jews. This operation (called T4), which became the general rehearsal of the subsequent genocide, was attended by drivers, gardeners, cooks, nurses, doctors and men of the most varied professions and origins, each adhering to it without constraint and resorting to their own inventiveness to transform the murderous desires of the regime. The mass murders were an enterprise wanted by the top of the Nazi dictatorship, but designed and implemented at a lower level by many participants, who joined it according to different paths, and yet all converging in implementing the regime's policies as a means of advancement of the community and German culture, as well as a condition for the advancement of one's disciplines and careers. Without this intimate adhesion, in the absence of any detailed central plan, no extermination program would have been possible.

Paolo lombardi he was president of the Center for Historical Studies of Psychoanalysis and Psychiatry in Florence. In 1998 he won the Castiglioncello prize with The Philosopher and the Witch. His latest books are Another Seicento (2011), A secret recomposing. Albert Speer from individual memory to history (2013) and, with Gianluca Nesi, Sangue e Suolo. The esoteric roots of the Nazi New European Order (2016), A solar myth. Otto Rahn from the Cathars to the SS (2018).

Gianluca Nesi he is the author of various essays on the ideology of the death of Nazi-fascism and its emergence in the work of Martin Heidegger and Mircea Eliade. With Paolo Lombardi, he is the author of the volumes Blood and soil. The Esoteric Roots of the Nazi New European Order (2017); and Seeking in the dark. Identity Construction and the Making of the Past in Five Stories of Nazis (2015). He edited the critical edition of Noi Arditi by Mario Carli (ETS, Pisa, 2019).