The most recent upload is the video recording of the entire two and half hour live performance “The First To Go” as presented at the Tron Theatre, Glasgow in 2008. I have subtitled the whole show, a) for deaf and hard of hearing viewers, but also b) because the audio quality is not consistently good due to the show being filmed from the back of the auditorium with a single camera and microphone.
This is the link to YouTube video.
“The First To Go”
Everyone knows about the millions of Jews who died in the Nazi extermination camps. Countless books, plays and films have been produced to ensure that we never forget and so remain vigilant against any likely recurrence. Yet until Nabil Shaban decided to do something about it, there has never been a play or film which seeks to tell the story of Hitler’s Euthanasia program for disabled people.
In fact, THE FIRST TO GO, the First Victims, in Hitler’s systematic drive to purify the Aryan race were people with physical, sensory, mental and psychiatric disabilities. Gas chambers were originally created to speed up the culling of such unwanted “Useless Eaters”, the term used by Hitler to describe disabled people.
Nabil Shaban’s play, THE FIRST TO GO, doesn’t just tell the story of Disabled Victims, it also tells of Disabled Heroes and Disabled Villains.
The Disabled Victims, Siegfried, Heide and Helmut….it is their destiny to be given lethal injections.
The Disabled Villain, Dr. Josef Goebbels, a man who so hated being crippled with a clubbed foot, he chose to hate all disabled people, he masterminded the propaganda campaign advocating Euthanasia.
The Disabled Heroes, Claus von Stauffenberg, the one armed, one eyed “terrorist” who attempted to blow up Hitler
And Brunhilde, the German Army nurse who becomes disabled and consequently joins the ranks of the persecuted but in doing so, helps thwart Hitler’s plan to rid the world of so-called “imperfect” people.