I Loved My Wife (Killing Children Is Good for the Economy)

I Loved My Wife (Killing Children Is Good for the Economy) confronts a largely unexamined chapter of the Holocaust: the Nazi program that murdered tens of thousands of children in Austrian psychiatric institutions between 1939 and 1941, framed by the regime as mercy killing.

De Lathauwer traveled to sixteen former care centers and psychiatric institutions across Austria, combining his own in-situ photographs with stills from Nazi propaganda films on euthanasia, digital collage, and images of historical objects. The book is a 112-page softcover with a separate 24-page booklet in a two-pocket folder; every copy is finished by hand, with the artist stamping a red cross on the cover, the mark once used to designate patients for elimination. Its title is drawn from a line spoken by a man in Nazi propaganda footage, boasting of having sacrificed his wife for the fatherland.

De Lathauwer is a Belgian photographer whose work investigates suppressed histories through archival research and in-situ documentation. I Loved My Wife won the Unseen Dummy Award in 2016 and was longlisted for the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize in 2018.