"Unworthy Life" and Historical Memory of the Victims of Nazism in Germany and Ukraine: Theory, Historiography and Political Practices

The purpose of the work is to investigate the situation after the Second World War and in our time, in relation to the memory of the crimes of the Nazi regime, which were related to social and racial experiments, and their reflection in the historiography, memorial, artistic and cultural practices of Germany. Among the tasks that the authors set before themselves was the analysis of the features of the displacement/forgetting of "inconvenient" pages of history for a long period in the post-war period, and the reasons for their "return". Research methodology. Among the methodological approaches used by the authors during the preparation of the article: historiographical and source studies, methods of memory study, comparative studies, history of science, as well as a new interdisciplinary direction - disability studies, which is related to the study of the meaning, nature and consequences of disability. Scientific novelty is determined by comparing the situation of remembering the victims of the Nazi regime, whose lives were called "unworthy", and the presentation of this topic in historical and other special literature, historical memory and commemorative practices of Germany and Ukraine. Conclusions. The ideas of treating people with hereditary and acquired diseases as "social ballast" were born in the European and American intellectual environment long before the Nazis came to power in Germany. The leaders of the National Socialist Party participated in the development of state programs aimed at forced sterilization, and later - taking the lives of people with disabilities in various ways, which during the occupation of European countries acquired "scaling" in concentration camps and not only. Not only the German and Soviet governments joined in the long "forgetting" of this page of history. Not the last role was played by the position of the USA, whose medical and pharmacological fields were interested in using the results of experiments conducted on people within the framework of the outlined programs. Only thanks to the efforts of journalists, psychiatrists and former victims and relatives of the programs "Euthanasia", "Action T-4" and others, since the end of the 1980s, the process of speaking and returning to historical memory the events that led to the destroyed people Although slow, but systematic inclusion in the memorial landscapes of settlements in Germany and Ukraine, brings back the memory of the victims of Nazism and serves as a warning to humanity about the impossibility of violating the general ethical norms that keep us human. This article was written within the framework of the project "European integration and Ukraine: historical memory and migration challenges" of the Jean Monnet Erasmus+ program and consists of two parts. The end of the article will be published in the next issue of Intermarum: History, Politics, Culture magazine.