Little’s Disease During National Socialism: A Comparative Case Study

This article examines how different treatments of Little’s disease reflected the disparate understanding of the illness in Nazi Germany. Some patients were victims of Aktion T4 and were killed, while others received orthopaedic treatments. This emerges from the fact that it was still unclear if this illness was inherited, a result of complications at birth, or a mix of the two causes. Therefore, Little’s disease illustrates how the killing of patients in Nazi Germany depended on various factors, including eugenic concerns, and varied widely depending on location, degree of family advocacy, and the individual doctor’s ideas on how the illness developed.