A history of the T4 program, or "euthanasia program", in Nazi Germany - that is, the murder of handicapped persons by the Nazis. This program was preceded by the politicization of science, which incorporated popular prejudices into "scientific" theories and declared some individuals and even "racial" groups, like Jews and Gypsies, to be "valueless"; by the eugenic movement; and by the misuse of scientific hypotheses by politicians. The policy of exclusion of the "racially inferior" stood at the center of the Nazi utopia. The "euthanasia program", implemented in 1939-40, paved the way for the mass extermination of Jews and Gypsies in 1942-44. Many of those involved in the T4 program (e.g. Franz Stangl) were later involved in the operation of the death camps. Special attention is devoted to the murder of handicapped Jews. These, progressively excluded from the public welfare system and from the medical institutions, were concentrated in 1939-40 in special Jewish hospitals and later killed in the course of the "euthanasia program".

Compares certain forms of behavior in German society during the Nazi period in relation to genocide (and actions and reactions in the rest of the world) with American and Soviet behavior in connection with nuclear weapons. Warns that "nuclear professionals" may bring about universal genocide by psychological mechanisms similar to those of the Nazi perpetrators of Jewish genocide. Shows how in both cases there is a totalist, black-and-white ideology in response to trauma; socialization in the killing profession, made possible by "doubling" of identities; the momentum of irreversible progression to ever more inhuman deeds; and dissociation, involving dehumanization of victims and disavowal of the meaning of one's actions. However, in the nuclear arms race, unlike the Holocaust, the potential victims are willing collaborators. Also, in the Holocaust, psychological numbing tended to paralyze the victims and bystanders; along with motives of expediency, this explains the failure of the German public, of world Jewry, and of the Allies to intervene.