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(German, ) was a campaign of mass murder by
involuntary euthanasia Involuntary euthanasia occurs when euthanasia is performed on a person who would be able to provide informed consent, but does not, either because they do not want to die, or because they were not asked. Involuntary euthanasia is contrasted with ...
in
Nazi Germany Nazi Germany (lit. "National Socialist State"), ' (lit. "Nazi State") for short; also ' (lit. "National Socialist Germany") (officially known as the German Reich from 1933 until 1943, and the Greater German Reich from 1943 to 1945) was ...
. The term was first used in post-
war War is an intense armed conflict between states, governments, societies, or paramilitary groups such as mercenaries, insurgents, and militias. It is generally characterized by extreme violence, destruction, and mortality, using regular o ...
trials against doctors who had been involved in the killings. The name T4 is an abbreviation of 4, a street address of the Chancellery department set up in early 1940, in the Berlin borough of Tiergarten, which recruited and paid personnel associated with Aktion T4. Certain German physicians were authorised to select patients "deemed incurably sick, after most critical medical examination" and then administer to them a "mercy death" (). In October 1939,
Adolf Hitler Adolf Hitler (; 20 April 188930 April 1945) was an Austrian-born German politician who was dictator of Nazi Germany, Germany from 1933 until Death of Adolf Hitler, his death in 1945. Adolf Hitler's rise to power, He rose to power as the le ...
signed a "euthanasia note", backdated to 1 September 1939, which authorised his physician
Karl Brandt Karl Brandt (8 January 1904 – 2 June 1948) was a German physician and ''Schutzstaffel'' (SS) officer in Nazi Germany. Trained in surgery, Brandt joined the Nazi Party in 1932 and became Adolf Hitler's escort doctor in August 1934. A member of ...
and ''Reichsleiter'' Philipp Bouhler to begin the killing. The killings took place from September 1939 until the end of the war in 1945; from 275,000 to 300,000 people were killed in psychiatric hospitals in Germany and Austria, occupied Poland and the
Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia The Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia; cs, Protektorát Čechy a Morava; its territory was called by the Nazis ("the rest of Czechia"). was a partially annexed territory of Nazi Germany established on 16 March 1939 following the German oc ...
(now the Czech Republic). The number of victims was originally recorded as 70,273 but this number has been increased by the discovery of victims listed in the archives of the former
East Germany East Germany, officially the German Democratic Republic (GDR; german: Deutsche Demokratische Republik, , DDR, ), was a country that existed from its creation on 7 October 1949 until its dissolution on 3 October 1990. In these years the state ...
. About half of those killed were taken from church-run asylums, often with the approval of the Protestant or Catholic authorities of the institutions. The
Holy See The Holy See ( lat, Sancta Sedes, ; it, Santa Sede ), also called the See of Rome, Petrine See or Apostolic See, is the jurisdiction of the Pope in his role as the bishop of Rome. It includes the apostolic episcopal see of the Diocese of R ...
announced on 2 December 1940 that the policy was contrary to divine law and that "the direct killing of an innocent person because of mental or physical defects is not allowed" but the declaration was not upheld by all Catholic authorities in Germany. In the summer of 1941, protests were led in Germany by the Bishop of Münster, Clemens von Galen, whose intervention led to "the strongest, most explicit and most widespread protest movement against any policy since the beginning of the Third Reich", according to Richard J. Evans. Several reasons have been suggested for the killings, including
eugenics Eugenics ( ; ) is a fringe set of beliefs and practices that aim to improve the genetic quality of a human population. Historically, eugenicists have attempted to alter human gene pools by excluding people and groups judged to be inferior o ...
,
racial hygiene The term racial hygiene was used to describe an approach to eugenics in the early 20th century, which found its most extensive implementation in Nazi Germany (Nazi eugenics). It was marked by efforts to avoid miscegenation, analogous to an animal ...
, and saving money. Physicians in German and Austrian asylums continued many of the practices of until the defeat of Germany in 1945, in spite of its official cessation in August 1941. The informal continuation of the policy led to 93,521 "beds emptied" by the end of 1941. Technology developed under , particularly the use of lethal gas on large numbers of people, was taken over by the medical division of the Reich Interior Ministry, along with the personnel of , who participated in mass murder of Jewish people. The programme was authorised by Hitler but the killings have since come to be viewed as murders in Germany. The number of people killed was about 200,000 in Germany and Austria, with about 100,000 victims in other European countries.


Background

At the beginning of the twentieth century, the sterilisation of people carrying what were considered to be hereditary defects and in some cases those exhibiting what was thought to be hereditary "antisocial" behaviour, was a respectable field of medicine.
Canada Canada is a country in North America. Its ten provinces and three territories extend from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean and northward into the Arctic Ocean, covering over , making it the world's second-largest country by tot ...
,
Denmark ) , song = ( en, "King Christian stood by the lofty mast") , song_type = National and royal anthem , image_map = EU-Denmark.svg , map_caption = , subdivision_type = Sovereign state , subdivision_name = Kingdom of Denmark , establish ...
, Switzerland and the US had passed laws enabling
coerced sterilisation Compulsory sterilization, also known as forced or coerced sterilization, is a government-mandated program to involuntarily sterilize a specific group of people. Sterilization removes a person's capacity to reproduce, and is usually done throug ...
. Studies conducted in the 1920s ranked Germany as a country that was unusually reluctant to introduce sterilisation legislation. In his book '' Mein Kampf'' (1924), Hitler wrote that one day racial hygiene "will appear as a deed greater than the most victorious wars of our present bourgeois era". In July 1933, the "Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring" prescribed
compulsory sterilisation Compulsory sterilization, also known as forced or coerced sterilization, is a government-mandated program to involuntarily sterilize a specific group of people. Sterilization removes a person's capacity to reproduce, and is usually done throug ...
for people with conditions thought to be hereditary, such as schizophrenia,
epilepsy Epilepsy is a group of non-communicable neurological disorders characterized by recurrent epileptic seizures. Epileptic seizures can vary from brief and nearly undetectable periods to long periods of vigorous shaking due to abnormal electrica ...
,
Huntington's chorea Huntington's disease (HD), also known as Huntington's chorea, is a neurodegenerative disease that is mostly inherited. The earliest symptoms are often subtle problems with mood or mental abilities. A general lack of coordination and an unst ...
and "imbecility". Sterilisation was also legalised for chronic alcoholism and other forms of social deviance. The law was administered by the Interior Ministry under
Wilhelm Frick Wilhelm Frick (12 March 1877 – 16 October 1946) was a prominent German politician of the Nazi Party (NSDAP), who served as Reich Minister of the Interior in Adolf Hitler's cabinet from 1933 to 1943 and as the last governor of the Protectorate ...
through special
Hereditary Health Court The Hereditary Health Court (german: Erbgesundheitsgericht, EGG), also known as the Genetic Health Court, was a court that decided whether people should be forcibly sterilized in Nazi Germany. That method of using courts to make decisions on heredi ...
s (), which examined the inmates of nursing homes, asylums, prisons, aged-care homes and special schools, to select those to be sterilised. It is estimated that 360,000 people were sterilised under this law between 1933 and 1939. The policy and research agenda of racial hygiene and eugenics were promoted by
Emil Kraepelin Emil Wilhelm Georg Magnus Kraepelin (; ; 15 February 1856 – 7 October 1926) was a German psychiatrist. H. J. Eysenck's ''Encyclopedia of Psychology'' identifies him as the founder of modern scientific psychiatry, psychopharmacology and psych ...
. The eugenic sterilisation of persons diagnosed with (and viewed as predisposed to)
schizophrenia Schizophrenia is a mental disorder characterized by continuous or relapsing episodes of psychosis. Major symptoms include hallucinations (typically hearing voices), delusions, and disorganized thinking. Other symptoms include social wit ...
was advocated by Eugen Bleuler, who presumed racial deterioration because of "mental and physical cripples" in his ''Textbook of Psychiatry'', Within the Nazi administration, the idea of including in the program people with physical disabilities had to be expressed carefully, because the Reich Minister of Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, had a deformed right leg. After 1937, the acute shortage of labour in Germany arising from rearmament, meant that anyone capable of work was deemed to be "useful", exempted from the law and the rate of sterilisation declined. The term is a post-war coining; contemporary German terms included ( euthanasia) and (merciful death). The T4 programme stemmed from the Nazi Party policy of "racial hygiene", a belief that the German people needed to be cleansed of racial enemies, which included anyone confined to a mental health facility and people with simple physical disabilities. New insulin shock treatments were used by German psychiatrists to find out if patients with schizophrenia were curable.


Implementation

Karl Brandt Karl Brandt (8 January 1904 – 2 June 1948) was a German physician and ''Schutzstaffel'' (SS) officer in Nazi Germany. Trained in surgery, Brandt joined the Nazi Party in 1932 and became Adolf Hitler's escort doctor in August 1934. A member of ...
, doctor to Hitler and
Hans Lammers Hans Heinrich Lammers (27 May 1879 – 4 January 1962) was a German jurist and prominent Nazi politician. From 1933 until 1945 he served as Chief of the Reich Chancellery under Adolf Hitler. During the 1948–1949 Ministries Trial, Lammers was ...
, the head of the Reich Chancellery, testified after the war that Hitler had told them as early as 1933—when the sterilisation law was passed—that he favoured the killing of the incurably ill but recognised that public opinion would not accept this. In 1935, Hitler told the Leader of Reich Doctors, Gerhard Wagner, that the question could not be taken up in peacetime; "Such a problem could be more smoothly and easily carried out in war". He wrote that he intended to "radically solve" the problem of the mental asylums in such an event. began with a "trial" case in late 1938. Hitler instructed Brandt to evaluate a petition sent by two parents for the "mercy killing" of their son who was blind and had physical and developmental disabilities. The child, born near
Leipzig Leipzig ( , ; Upper Saxon: ) is the most populous city in the German state of Saxony. Leipzig's population of 605,407 inhabitants (1.1 million in the larger urban zone) as of 2021 places the city as Germany's eighth most populous, as ...
and eventually identified as
Gerhard Kretschmar Gerhard Herbert Kretschmar (20 February 1939 – 25 July 1939) was a German child born with severe disabilities. After receiving a petition from the child's parents, the German Führer Adolf Hitler authorized one of his personal physicians, Karl Br ...
, was killed in July 1939. Hitler instructed Brandt to proceed in the same manner in all similar cases. On 18 August 1939, three weeks after the killing of the boy, the ''Reich Committee for the Scientific Registering of Hereditary and Congenital Illnesses'' was established to register sick children or newborns identified as defective. The secret killing of infants began in 1939 and increased after the war started; by 1941, more than 5,000 children had been killed. Hitler was in favour of killing those whom he judged to be ('
Life unworthy of life The phrase "life unworthy of life" (german: Lebensunwertes Leben) was a Nazi designation for the segments of the populace which according to the Nazi regime had no right to live. Those individuals were targeted to be murdered by the state (" ...
'). A few months before the "euthanasia" decree, in a 1939 conference with Leonardo Conti, Reich Health Leader and State Secretary for Health in the Interior Ministry, and Hans Lammers, Chief of the Reich Chancellery, Hitler gave as examples the mentally ill who he said could only be "bedded on sawdust or sand" because they "perpetually dirtied themselves" and "put their own excrement into their mouths". This issue, according to the Nazi regime, assumed a new urgency in wartime. After the
invasion of Poland The invasion of Poland (1 September – 6 October 1939) was a joint attack on the Republic of Poland by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union which marked the beginning of World War II. The German invasion began on 1 September 1939, one week aft ...
, Hermann Pfannmüller (Head of the State Hospital near
Munich Munich ( ; german: München ; bar, Minga ) is the capital and most populous city of the German state of Bavaria. With a population of 1,558,395 inhabitants as of 31 July 2020, it is the third-largest city in Germany, after Berlin and Ha ...
) said Pfannmüller advocated killing by a gradual decrease of food, which he believed was more merciful than poison injections. The German eugenics movement had an extreme wing even before the Nazis came to power. As early as 1920,
Alfred Hoche Alfred Erich Hoche (; 1 August 1865 – 16 May 1943) was a German psychiatrist known for his writings about eugenics and euthanasia. Life Hoche studied in Berlin and Heidelberg and became a psychiatrist in 1890. He moved to Strasbourg in 1891. ...
and Karl Binding advocated killing people whose lives were "unworthy of life" (). Darwinism was interpreted by them as justification of the demand for "beneficial" genes and eradication of the "harmful" ones. Robert Lifton wrote, "The argument went that the best young men died in war, causing a loss to the of the best genes. The genes of those who did not fight (the worst genes) then proliferated freely, accelerating biological and cultural degeneration". The advocacy of eugenics in Germany gained ground after 1930, when the Depression was used to excuse cuts in funding to state mental hospitals, creating squalor and overcrowding. Many German eugenicists were nationalists and
antisemites Antisemitism (also spelled anti-semitism or anti-Semitism) is hostility to, prejudice towards, or discrimination against Jews. A person who holds such positions is called an antisemite. Antisemitism is considered to be a form of racism. Antis ...
, who embraced the Nazi regime with enthusiasm. Many were appointed to positions in the Health Ministry and German research institutes. Their ideas were gradually adopted by the majority of the German medical profession, from which Jewish and communist doctors were soon purged. During the 1930s, the Nazi Party had carried out a campaign of propaganda in favour of euthanasia. The National Socialist Racial and Political Office (NSRPA) produced leaflets, posters and short films to be shown in cinemas, pointing out to Germans the cost of maintaining asylums for the incurably ill and insane. These films included ''The Inheritance'' (, 1935), ''The Victim of the Past'' (, 1937), which was given a major première in Berlin and was shown in all German cinemas, and ''I Accuse'' (, 1941) which was based on a novel by Hellmuth Unger, a consultant for "child euthanasia".


Killing of children

In mid-1939, Hitler authorised the creation of the Reich Committee for the Scientific Registering of Serious Hereditary and Congenital Illnesses () led by his physician, Karl Brandt, administered by Herbert Linden of the Interior Ministry, leader of
German Red Cross The German Red Cross (german: Deutsches Rotes Kreuz ; DRK) is the national Red Cross Society in Germany. With 4 million members, it is the third largest Red Cross society in the world. The German Red Cross offers a wide range of services withi ...
Ernst-Robert Grawitz Ernst-Robert Grawitz (8 June 1899 – 24 April 1945) was a German physician and an Schutzstaffel, SS functionary (''Reichsarzt'', "arzt" meaning "physician") during the Nazi era. Biography Grawitz was born in Charlottenburg, in the western par ...
and SS-
Viktor Brack Viktor Hermann Brack (9 November 1904 – 2 June 1948) was a member of the ''Schutzstaffel'' (SS) and a convicted Nazi war criminal, who was one of the prominent organisers of the euthanasia programme Aktion T4; this Nazi initiative resulted in the ...
. Brandt and Bouhler were authorised to approve applications to kill children in relevant circumstances, though Bouhler left the details to subordinates such as Brack and SA-
Werner Blankenburg Werner Blankenburg (19 June 1905 – 28 November 1957) was a high official in Nazi Germany who led the commission of numerous crimes against humanity. As section head in Hitler's chancellery, he was one of the persons mainly responsible for the Ak ...
. Extermination centres were established at six existing psychiatric hospitals:
Bernburg Bernburg (Saale) is a town in Saxony-Anhalt, Germany, capital of the Salzlandkreis district. The former residence of the Anhalt-Bernburg princes is known for its Renaissance castle. Geography The town centre is situated in the fertile Magdeburg ...
,
Brandenburg Brandenburg (; nds, Brannenborg; dsb, Bramborska ) is a state in the northeast of Germany bordering the states of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Lower Saxony, Saxony-Anhalt, and Saxony, as well as the country of Poland. With an area of 29,480 sq ...
,
Grafeneck Grafeneck is a small rural village in the German municipality of Gomadingen, south of Stuttgart. World War II history Grafeneck Castle, which had previously been an asylum for crippled people, was turned by the Nazis into an extermination fa ...
,
Hadamar Hadamar is a small town in Limburg-Weilburg district in Hesse, Germany. Hadamar is known for its Clinic for Forensic Psychiatry/Centre for Social Psychiatry, lying at the edge of town, in whose outlying buildings is also found the Hadamar Mem ...
, Hartheim, and Sonnenstein. One thousand children under the age of 17 were killed at the institutions Am Spiegelgrund and Gugging in Austria. They played a crucial role in developments leading to the Holocaust. As a related aspect of the "medical" and scientific basis of this programme, the Nazi doctors took thousands of brains from 'euthanasia' victims for research. From August 1939, the Interior Ministry registered children with disabilities, requiring doctors and midwives to report all cases of newborns with severe disabilities; the 'guardian' consent element soon disappeared. Those to be killed were identified as "all children under three years of age in whom any of the following 'serious hereditary diseases' were 'suspected': idiocy and
Down syndrome Down syndrome or Down's syndrome, also known as trisomy 21, is a genetic disorder caused by the presence of all or part of a third copy of chromosome 21. It is usually associated with physical growth delays, mild to moderate intellectual dis ...
(especially when associated with blindness and deafness);
microcephaly Microcephaly (from New Latin ''microcephalia'', from Ancient Greek μικρός ''mikrós'' "small" and κεφαλή ''kephalé'' "head") is a medical condition involving a smaller-than-normal head. Microcephaly may be present at birth or it ...
; hydrocephaly; malformations of all kinds, especially of limbs, head, and spinal column; and paralysis, including spastic conditions". The reports were assessed by a panel of medical experts, of whom three were required to give their approval before a child could be killed. The Ministry used deceit when dealing with parents or guardians, particularly in Catholic areas, where parents were generally uncooperative. Parents were told that their children were being sent to "Special Sections", where they would receive improved treatment. The children sent to these centres were kept for "assessment" for a few weeks and then killed by injection of toxic chemicals, typically
phenol Phenol (also called carbolic acid) is an aromatic organic compound with the molecular formula . It is a white crystalline solid that is volatile. The molecule consists of a phenyl group () bonded to a hydroxy group (). Mildly acidic, it ...
; their deaths were recorded as "
pneumonia Pneumonia is an inflammatory condition of the lung primarily affecting the small air sacs known as alveoli. Symptoms typically include some combination of productive or dry cough, chest pain, fever, and difficulty breathing. The severi ...
". Autopsies were usually performed and brain samples were taken to be used for "medical research". Post mortem examinations apparently helped to ease the consciences of many of those involved, giving them the feeling that there was a genuine medical purpose to the killings. The most notorious of these institutions in Austria was Am Spiegelgrund, where from 1940 to 1945, 789 children were killed by lethal injection, gas poisoning and physical abuse. Children's brains were preserved in jars of formaldehyde and stored in the basement of the clinic and in the private collection of Heinrich Gross, one of the institution's directors, until 2001. When the Second World War began in September 1939, less rigorous standards of assessment and a quicker approval process were adopted. Older children and adolescents were included and the conditions covered came to include More pressure was placed on parents to agree to their children being sent away. Many parents suspected what was happening and refused consent, especially when it became apparent that institutions for children with disabilities were being systematically cleared of their charges. The parents were warned that they could lose custody of all their children and if that did not suffice, the parents could be threatened with call-up for 'labour duty'. By 1941, more than 5,000 children had been killed. The last child to be killed under was Richard Jenne on 29 May 1945, in the children's ward of the
Kaufbeuren Kaufbeuren (; Bavarian: ''Kaufbeiren'') is an independent town in the ''Regierungsbezirk'' of Swabia, Bavaria. The town is an enclave within the district of Ostallgäu. Districts Kaufbeuren consists of nine districts: * Kaufbeuren (town core i ...
-
Irsee Irsee is a village and municipality in the district of Ostallgäu in Bavaria in Germany. The centre of the village is dominated by a monastery (Klosterbau), dedicated to the Virgin Mary The monastery was founded in 1186 by Margrave Henry of Ron ...
state hospital in
Bavaria Bavaria ( ; ), officially the Free State of Bavaria (german: Freistaat Bayern, link=no ), is a state in the south-east of Germany. With an area of , Bavaria is the largest German state by land area, comprising roughly a fifth of the total lan ...
, Germany, more than three weeks after US Army troops had occupied the town.


Killing of adults


Invasion of Poland

Brandt and Bouhler developed plans to expand the programme of euthanasia to adults. In July 1939 they held a meeting attended by Conti and Professor
Werner Heyde Werner Heyde (aka Fritz Sawade) (25 April 1902 – 13 February 1964) was a German psychiatrist. He was one of the main organizers of Nazi Germany's T-4 Euthanasia Program. Early life Heyde was born in Forst (Lausitz), on May 25, in 1902, and com ...
, head of the SS medical department. This meeting agreed to arrange a national register of all institutionalised people with mental illnesses or physical disabilities. The first adults with disabilities to be killed en masse by the Nazi regime were Poles. After the invasion on 1 September 1939, adults with disabilities were shot by the SS men of 16, and under the command of SS- Rudolf Tröger, with overall command by
Reinhard Heydrich Reinhard Tristan Eugen Heydrich ( ; ; 7 March 1904 – 4 June 1942) was a high-ranking German SS and police official during the Nazi era and a principal architect of the Holocaust. He was chief of the Reich Security Main Office (inclu ...
, during the genocidal Operation Tannenberg. All hospitals and mental asylums of the
Wartheland The ''Reichsgau Wartheland'' (initially ''Reichsgau Posen'', also: ''Warthegau'') was a Nazi German ''Reichsgau'' formed from parts of Polish territory annexed in 1939 during World War II. It comprised the region of Greater Poland and adjacent ...
were emptied. The region was incorporated into Germany and earmarked for resettlement by following the German conquest of Poland. In the Danzig (now Gdańsk) area, some 7,000 Polish patients of various institutions were shot and 10,000 were killed in the
Gdynia Gdynia ( ; ; german: Gdingen (currently), (1939–1945); csb, Gdiniô, , , ) is a city in northern Poland and a seaport on the Baltic Sea coast. With a population of 243,918, it is the 12th-largest city in Poland and the second-largest in th ...
area. Similar measures were taken in other areas of Poland destined for incorporation into Germany. The first experiments with the gassing of patients were conducted in October 1939 at Fort VII in Posen (occupied Poznań), where hundreds of prisoners were killed by means of
carbon monoxide Carbon monoxide (chemical formula CO) is a colorless, poisonous, odorless, tasteless, flammable gas that is slightly less dense than air. Carbon monoxide consists of one carbon atom and one oxygen atom connected by a triple bond. It is the simple ...
poisoning, in an improvised
gas chamber A gas chamber is an apparatus for killing humans or other animals with gas, consisting of a sealed chamber into which a poisonous or asphyxiant gas is introduced. Poisonous agents used include hydrogen cyanide and carbon monoxide. History ...
developed by
Albert Widmann Albert Widmann (8 June 1912 – 24 December 1986) was an SS officer and German chemist who worked for the Action T4 euthanasia program during the regime of Nazi Germany. He was convicted in two separate trials in the West German courts in t ...
, chief chemist of the German Criminal Police (Kripo). In December 1939,
Heinrich Himmler Heinrich Luitpold Himmler (; 7 October 1900 – 23 May 1945) was of the (Protection Squadron; SS), and a leading member of the Nazi Party of Germany. Himmler was one of the most powerful men in Nazi Germany and a main architect of th ...
witnessed one of these gassings, ensuring that this invention would later be put to much wider uses. The idea of killing adult mental patients soon spread from occupied Poland to adjoining areas of Germany, probably because Nazi Party and SS officers in these areas were most familiar with what was happening in Poland. These were also the areas where Germans wounded from the Polish campaign were expected to be accommodated, which created a demand for hospital space. The of
Pomerania Pomerania ( pl, Pomorze; german: Pommern; Kashubian: ''Pòmòrskô''; sv, Pommern) is a historical region on the southern shore of the Baltic Sea in Central Europe, split between Poland and Germany. The western part of Pomerania belongs to ...
, Franz Schwede-Coburg, sent 1,400 patients from five Pomeranian hospitals to undisclosed locations in occupied Poland, where they were shot. The of East Prussia, Erich Koch, had 1,600 patients killed out of sight. More than 8,000 Germans were killed in this initial wave of killings carried out on the orders of local officials, although Himmler certainly knew and approved of them. The legal basis for the programme was a 1939 letter from Hitler, not a formal "Führer's decree" with the force of law. Hitler bypassed Conti, the Health Minister and his department, who might have raised questions about the legality of the programme and entrusted it to Bouhler and Brandt. The killings were administered by Viktor Brack and his staff from 4, disguised as the "Charitable Foundation for Cure and Institutional Care" offices which served as the front and was supervised by Bouhler and Brandt. The officials in charge included Herbert Linden, who had been involved in the child killing programme; Ernst-Robert Grawitz, chief physician of the SS and August Becker, an SS chemist. The officials selected the doctors who were to carry out the operational part of the programme; based on political reliability as long-term Nazis, professional reputation and sympathy for radical eugenics. The list included physicians who had proved their worth in the child-killing programme, such as Unger, Heinze and Hermann Pfannmüller. The recruits were mostly psychiatrists, notably Professor Carl Schneider of Heidelberg, Professor Max de Crinis of Berlin and Professor
Paul Nitsche Hermann Paul Nitsche (November 25, 1876 – March 25, 1948) was a German psychiatrist known for his expert endorsement of the Third Reich's euthanasia authorization and who later headed the Medical Office of the T-4 Euthanasia Program. Paul N ...
from the Sonnenstein state institution. Heyde became the operational leader of the programme, succeeded later by Nitsche.


Listing of targets from hospital records

In early October, all hospitals, nursing homes, old-age homes and sanatoria were required to report all patients who had been institutionalised for five years or more, who had been committed as "criminally insane", who were of "non- Aryan race" or who had been diagnosed with any on a list of conditions. The conditions included schizophrenia, epilepsy,
Huntington's chorea Huntington's disease (HD), also known as Huntington's chorea, is a neurodegenerative disease that is mostly inherited. The earliest symptoms are often subtle problems with mood or mental abilities. A general lack of coordination and an unst ...
, advanced syphilis, senile dementia, paralysis, encephalitis and "terminal neurological conditions generally". Many doctors and administrators assumed that the reports were to identify inmates who were capable of being drafted for "labour service" and tended to overstate the degree of incapacity of their patients, to protect them from labour conscription. When some institutions refused to co-operate, teams of T4 doctors (or Nazi medical students) visited and compiled the lists, sometimes in a haphazard and ideologically motivated way. During 1940, all Jewish patients were removed from institutions and killed. As with child inmates, adults were assessed by a panel of experts, working at the offices. The experts were required to make their judgements on the reports, not medical histories or examinations. Sometimes they dealt with hundreds of reports at a time. On each they marked a + (death), a - (life), or occasionally a ? meaning that they were unable to decide. Three "death" verdicts condemned the person and as with reviews of children, the process became less rigorous, the range of conditions considered "unsustainable" grew broader and zealous Nazis further down the chain of command increasingly made decisions on their own initiative.


Gassing

The first gassings in Germany proper took place in January 1940 at the Brandenburg Euthanasia Centre. The operation was headed by Brack, who said "the needle belongs in the hand of the doctor". Bottled pure carbon monoxide gas was used. At trials, Brandt described the process as a "major advance in medical history". Once the efficacy of the method was confirmed, it became standard and was instituted at a number of centres in Germany under the supervision of Widmann, Becker and
Christian Wirth ), Christian the CruelZenter, Christian and Bedürftig, Friedemann (1991). ''Encyclopedia of the Third Reich'' (pg. 1053), New York: Macmillan; , allegiance = , branch = Schutzstaffel , serviceyears = , rank = Sturmbannführer (Major) , ...
– a Kripo officer who later played a prominent role in the
Final Solution The Final Solution (german: die Endlösung, ) or the Final Solution to the Jewish Question (german: Endlösung der Judenfrage, ) was a Nazi plan for the genocide of individuals they defined as Jews during World War II. The "Final Solution to th ...
(extermination of Jews) as commandant of newly built
death camp Nazi Germany used six extermination camps (german: Vernichtungslager), also called death camps (), or killing centers (), in Central Europe during World War II to systematically murder over 2.7 million peoplemostly Jewsin the Holocaust. The v ...
s in occupied Poland. In addition to Brandenburg, the killing centres included
Grafeneck Castle The Grafeneck Euthanasia Centre (german: NS-Tötungsanstalt Grafeneck) housed in Grafeneck Castle was one of Nazi Germany's killing centres as part of their forced euthanasia programme. Today, it is a memorial site dedicated to the victims of ...
in Baden-Württemberg (10,824 dead), Schloss Hartheim near
Linz Linz ( , ; cs, Linec) is the capital of Upper Austria and third-largest city in Austria. In the north of the country, it is on the Danube south of the Czech border. In 2018, the population was 204,846. In 2009, it was a European Capital ...
in Austria (over 18,000 dead), Sonnenstein in
Saxony Saxony (german: Sachsen ; Upper Saxon: ''Saggsn''; hsb, Sakska), officially the Free State of Saxony (german: Freistaat Sachsen, links=no ; Upper Saxon: ''Freischdaad Saggsn''; hsb, Swobodny stat Sakska, links=no), is a landlocked state of ...
(15,000 dead),
Bernburg Bernburg (Saale) is a town in Saxony-Anhalt, Germany, capital of the Salzlandkreis district. The former residence of the Anhalt-Bernburg princes is known for its Renaissance castle. Geography The town centre is situated in the fertile Magdeburg ...
in Saxony-Anhalt and
Hadamar Hadamar is a small town in Limburg-Weilburg district in Hesse, Germany. Hadamar is known for its Clinic for Forensic Psychiatry/Centre for Social Psychiatry, lying at the edge of town, in whose outlying buildings is also found the Hadamar Mem ...
in Hesse (14,494 dead). The same facilities were also used to kill mentally sound prisoners transferred from
concentration camp Internment is the imprisonment of people, commonly in large groups, without charges or intent to file charges. The term is especially used for the confinement "of enemy citizens in wartime or of terrorism suspects". Thus, while it can simpl ...
s in Germany, Austria and occupied parts of Poland. Condemned patients were transferred from their institutions to new centres in T4 Charitable Ambulance buses, called the Community Patients Transports Service. They were run by teams of SS men wearing white coats, to give it an air of medical care. To prevent the families and doctors of the patients from tracing them, the patients were often first sent to transit centres in major hospitals, where they were supposedly assessed. They were moved again to ''special treatment'' () centres. Families were sent letters explaining that owing to wartime regulations, it was not possible for them to visit relatives in these centres. Most of these patients were killed within 24 hours of arriving at the centres and their bodies cremated. For every person killed, a death certificate was prepared, giving a false but plausible cause of death. This was sent to the family along with an urn of ashes (random ashes, since the victims were cremated ). The preparation of thousands of falsified death certificates took up most of the working day of the doctors who operated the centres. During 1940, the centres at Brandenburg, Grafeneck and Hartheim killed nearly 10,000 people each, while another 6,000 were killed at Sonnenstein. In all, about 35,000 people were killed in T4 operations that year. Operations at Brandenburg and Grafeneck were wound up at the end of the year, partly because the areas they served had been cleared and partly because of public opposition. In 1941, however, the centres at Bernburg and Sonnenstein increased their operations, while Hartheim (where Wirth and
Franz Stangl Franz Paul Stangl (; 26 March 1908 – 28 June 1971) was an Austrian-born police officer and commandant of the Nazi extermination camps Sobibor and Treblinka. Stangl, an employee of the T-4 Euthanasia Program and an SS commander in Nazi German ...
were successively commandants) continued as before. Another 35,000 people were killed before August 1941, when the T4 programme was officially shut down by Hitler. Even after that date the centres continued to be used to kill concentration camp inmates: eventually some 20,000 people in this category were killed. In 1971, Gitta Sereny conducted interviews with Stangl, who was in prison in
Düsseldorf Düsseldorf ( , , ; often in English sources; Low Franconian and Ripuarian language, Ripuarian: ''Düsseldörp'' ; archaic nl, Dusseldorp ) is the capital city of North Rhine-Westphalia, the most populous state of Germany. It is the second- ...
, after having been convicted of co-responsibility for killing 900,000 people, while commandant of the
Sobibor Sobibor (, Polish: ) was an extermination camp built and operated by Nazi Germany as part of Operation Reinhard. It was located in the forest near the village of Żłobek Duży in the General Government region of German-occupied Poland. As an ...
and
Treblinka Treblinka () was an extermination camp, built and operated by Nazi Germany in occupied Poland during World War II. It was in a forest north-east of Warsaw, south of the village of Treblinka in what is now the Masovian Voivodeship. The cam ...
extermination camp Nazi Germany used six extermination camps (german: Vernichtungslager), also called death camps (), or killing centers (), in Central Europe during World War II to systematically murder over 2.7 million peoplemostly Jewsin the Holocaust. The v ...
s in Poland. Stangl gave Sereny a detailed account of the operations of the T4 programme based on his time as commandant of the killing facility at the Hartheim institute. He described how the inmates of various asylums were removed and transported by bus to Hartheim. Some were in no mental state to know what was happening to them but many were perfectly sane and for them various forms of deception were used. They were told they were at a special clinic where they would receive improved treatment and were given a brief medical examination on arrival. They were induced to enter what appeared to be a shower block, where they were gassed with carbon monoxide (the ruse was also used at extermination camps).


Number of euthanasia victims

The SS functionaries and hospital staff associated with in the German Reich were paid from the central office at 4 in Berlin from the spring of 1940. The SS and police from responsible for murdering the majority of patients in the annexed territories of Poland since October 1939, took their salaries from the normal police fund, supervised by the administration of the newly formed ''Wartheland'' district; the programme in Germany and
occupied Poland ' ( Norwegian: ') is a Norwegian political thriller TV series that premiered on TV2 on 5 October 2015. Based on an original idea by Jo Nesbø, the series is co-created with Karianne Lund and Erik Skjoldbjærg. Season 2 premiered on 10 Octobe ...
was overseen by Heinrich Himmler. Before 2013, it was believed that 70,000 persons were murdered in the euthanasia programme, but the German Federal Archives reported that research in the archives of former East Germany indicated that the number of victims in Germany and Austria from 1939 to 1945 was about 200,000 persons and that another 100,000 persons were victims in other European countries. In the German T4 centres there was at least the semblance of legality in keeping records and writing letters. In Polish psychiatric hospitals no one was left behind. Killings were inflicted using gas-vans, sealed army bunkers and machine guns; families were not informed about the murdered relatives and the empty wards were handed over to the SS.


Technology and personnel transfer to death camps

After the official end of the euthanasia programme in 1941, most of the personnel and high-ranking officials, as well as gassing technology and the techniques used to deceive victims, were transferred under the jurisdiction of the national medical division of the Reich Interior Ministry. Further gassing experiments with the use of mobile gas chambers () were conducted at
Soldau concentration camp The Soldau concentration camp established by Nazi Germany during World War II was a concentration camp for Polish and Jewish prisoners. It was located in Działdowo (german: Soldau), a town in north-eastern Poland, which after the Nazi-Soviet inva ...
by Herbert Lange following
Operation Barbarossa Operation Barbarossa (german: link=no, Unternehmen Barbarossa; ) was the invasion of the Soviet Union by Nazi Germany and many of its Axis allies, starting on Sunday, 22 June 1941, during the Second World War. The operation, code-named after ...
. Lange was appointed commander of the Chełmno extermination camp in December 1941. He was given three gas vans by the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA), converted by the Gaubschat GmbH in Berlin and before February 1942, killed 3,830
Polish Jews The history of the Jews in Poland dates back at least 1,000 years. For centuries, Poland was home to the largest and most significant Ashkenazi Jewish community in the world. Poland was a principal center of Jewish culture, because of the l ...
and around 4,000 Romani, under the guise of "resettlement". After the Wannsee conference, implementation of gassing technology was accelerated by Heydrich. Beginning in the spring of 1942, three killing factories were built secretly in east-central Poland. The ''SS'' officers responsible for the earlier , including Wirth, Stangl and
Irmfried Eberl Irmfried Eberl (8 September 1910 – 16 February 1948) was an Austrian psychiatrist and medical director of the euthanasia institutes in Brandenburg and Bernburg, who helped set up and was the first commandant of the Treblinka extermination camp ...
, had important roles in the implementation of the "Final Solution" for the next two years. The first killing centre equipped with stationary gas chambers modelled on technology developed under was established at Bełżec in the General Government territory of occupied Poland; the decision preceded the Wannsee Conference of January 1942 by three months.


Opposition

In January 1939, Brack commissioned a paper from Professor of
Moral Theology Ethics involves systematizing, defending, and recommending concepts of right and wrong behavior.''Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy''"Ethics"/ref> A central aspect of ethics is "the good life", the life worth living or life that is simply sati ...
at the University of Paderborn, Joseph Mayer, on the likely reactions of the churches in the event of a state euthanasia programme being instituted. Mayera longstanding euthanasia advocatereported that the churches would not oppose such a programme if it was seen to be in the national interest. Brack showed this paper to Hitler in July and it may have increased his confidence that the "euthanasia" programme would be acceptable to German public opinion. Notably, when Sereny interviewed Mayer shortly before his death in 1967, he denied that he formally condoned the killing of people with disabilities but no copies of this paper are known to survive. Some bureaucrats opposed the T4 programme;
Lothar Kreyssig Lothar Kreyssig (; 30 October 1898 – 6 July 1986) was a German judge during the Weimar and Nazi era. He was the only German judge who attempted to stop the Action T4 euthanasia program, an intervention that cost him his job. After the Second Wor ...
, a district judge and member of the
Confessing Church The Confessing Church (german: link=no, Bekennende Kirche, ) was a movement within German Protestantism during Nazi Germany that arose in opposition to government-sponsored efforts to unify all Protestant churches into a single pro-Nazi German ...
, wrote to Gürtner protesting that the action was illegal since no law or formal decree from Hitler had authorised it. Gürtner replied, "If you cannot recognise the will of the Führer as a source of law, then you cannot remain a judge" and had Kreyssig dismissed. Hitler had a policy of not issuing written instructions for matters which could later be condemned by the international community but made an exception when he provided Bouhler and Brack with written authority for the T4 programme. Hitler wrote a confidential letter in October 1939 to overcome opposition within the German state bureaucracy. Hitler told Bouhler that, "the Führer's Chancellery must under no circumstances be seen to be active in this matter". The Justice Minister, Franz Gürtner, had to be shown Hitler's letter in August 1940 to gain his co-operation.


Exposure

In the towns where the killing centres were located, some people saw the inmates arrive in buses, saw smoke from the crematoria chimneys and noticed that the buses were returning empty. In Hadamar, ashes containing human hair rained down on the town and despite the strictest orders, some of the staff at the killing centres talked about what was going on. In some cases families could tell that the causes of death in certificates were false, e.g. when a patient was claimed to have died of
appendicitis Appendicitis is inflammation of the appendix. Symptoms commonly include right lower abdominal pain, nausea, vomiting, and decreased appetite. However, approximately 40% of people do not have these typical symptoms. Severe complications of a ru ...
, even though his appendix had been removed some years earlier. In other cases, families in the same town would receive death certificates on the same day. In May 1941, the Frankfurt County Court wrote to Gürtner describing scenes in Hadamar, where children shouted in the streets that people were being taken away in buses to be gassed. During 1940, rumours of what was taking place spread and many Germans withdrew their relatives from asylums and sanatoria to care for them at home, often with great expense and difficulty. In some places doctors and psychiatrists co-operated with families to have patients discharged or if the families could afford it, transferred them to private clinics beyond the reach of T4. Other doctors "re-diagnosed" patients so that they no longer met the T4 criteria, which risked exposure when Nazi zealots from Berlin conducted inspections. In
Kiel Kiel () is the capital and most populous city in the northern German state of Schleswig-Holstein, with a population of 246,243 (2021). Kiel lies approximately north of Hamburg. Due to its geographic location in the southeast of the Jutland ...
, Professor
Hans Gerhard Creutzfeldt Hans Gerhard Creutzfeldt (June 2, 1885 – December 30, 1964) was a German neurologist and neuropathologist. Although he is typically credited as the physician to first describe the Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease, this has been disputed. He was bor ...
managed to save nearly all of his patients. Lifton listed a handful of psychiatrists and administrators who opposed the killings; many doctors collaborated, either through ignorance, agreement with Nazi eugenicist policies or fear of the regime. Protest letters were sent to the Reich Chancellery and the Ministry of Justice, some from Nazi Party members. The first open protest against the removal of people from asylums took place at Absberg in
Franconia Franconia (german: Franken, ; Franconian dialect: ''Franggn'' ; bar, Frankn) is a region of Germany, characterised by its culture and Franconian languages, Franconian dialect (German: ''Fränkisch''). The three Regierungsbezirk, administrative ...
in February 1941 and others followed. The SD report on the incident at Absberg noted that "the removal of residents from the Ottilien Home has caused a great deal of unpleasantness" and described large crowds of Catholic townspeople, among them Party members, protesting against the action. Similar petitions and protests occurred throughout Austria as rumours spread of mass killings at the Hartheim Euthanasia Centre and of mysterious deaths at the children's clinic, in Vienna. Anna Wödl, a nurse and mother of a child with a disability, vehemently petitioned to Hermann Linden at the Reich Ministry of the Interior in Berlin to prevent her son, Alfred, from being transferred from Gugging, where he lived and which also became a euthanasia center. Wödl failed and Alfred was sent to , where he was killed on 22 February 1941. His brain was preserved in formaldehyde for "research" and stored in the clinic for sixty years.


Church protests

The Lutheran theologian Friedrich von Bodelschwingh (director of the
Bethel Institution The Bethel Foundation, officially the Bodelschwingh Foundation Bethel (german: von Bodelschwinghsche Stiftungen Bethel as of 2009, previously ''v. Bodelschwinghsche Anstalten Bethel'') is a diaconal (i.e. Protestant charitable) psychiatric ho ...
for Epilepsy at
Bielefeld Bielefeld () is a city in the Ostwestfalen-Lippe Region in the north-east of North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany. With a population of 341,755, it is also the most populous city in the administrative region (''Regierungsbezirk'') of Detmold and the ...
) and Pastor Paul-Gerhard Braune (director of the Hoffnungstal Institution near Berlin) protested. Bodelschwingh negotiated directly with Brandt and indirectly with
Hermann Göring Hermann Wilhelm Göring (or Goering; ; 12 January 1893 – 15 October 1946) was a German politician, military leader and convicted war criminal. He was one of the most powerful figures in the Nazi Party, which ruled Germany from 1933 to 1 ...
, whose cousin was a prominent psychiatrist. Braune had meetings with Gürtner, who was always dubious about the legality of the programme. Gürtner later wrote a strongly worded letter to Hitler protesting against it; Hitler did not read it but was told about it by Lammers. Bishop Theophil Wurm, presiding over the
Evangelical-Lutheran Church in Württemberg The Evangelical-Lutheran Church in Württemberg (german: Evangelische Landeskirche in Württemberg) is a Lutheran member church of the Evangelical Church in Germany in the German former state of Württemberg, now part of the state of Baden-Württem ...
, wrote to Interior Minister Frick in March 1940 and that month a confidential report from the (SD) in Austria, warned that the killing programme must be implemented with stealth "...to avoid a probable backlash of public opinion during the war". On 4 December 1940, Reinhold Sautter, the Supreme Church Councillor of the Württemberg State Church, complained to the Nazi Ministerial Councillor Eugen Stähle against the murders in Grafeneck Castle. Stähle said "The fifth commandment Thou shalt not kill, is no commandment of God but a Jewish invention". Bishop Heinrich Wienken of Berlin, a leading member of the Caritas Association, was selected by the Fulda episcopal synod to represent the views of the Catholic Church in meetings with T4 operatives. In 2008,
Michael Burleigh Michael Burleigh (born 3 April 1955) is an English author and historian whose primary focus is on Nazi Germany and related subjects. He has also been active in bringing history to television. Early life Michael Burleigh was born on 3 April 1955. ...
wrote Despite a decree issued by the Vatican on 2 December 1940 stating that the T4 policy was "against natural and positive Divine law" and that "The direct killing of an innocent person because of mental or physical defects is not allowed", the Catholic Church hierarchy in Germany decided to take no further action. Incensed by the Nazi appropriation of Church property in
Münster Münster (; nds, Mönster) is an independent city (''Kreisfreie Stadt'') in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany. It is in the northern part of the state and is considered to be the cultural centre of the Westphalia region. It is also a state di ...
to accommodate people made homeless by an air raid, in July and August 1941, the Bishop of Münster, Clemens August Graf von Galen, gave four sermons criticising the Nazis for arresting Jesuits, confiscating church property and for the euthanasia program. Galen sent the text to Hitler by telegram, calling on Galen's sermons were not reported in the German press but were circulated illegally in leaflets. The text was dropped by the
Royal Air Force The Royal Air Force (RAF) is the United Kingdom's air and space force. It was formed towards the end of the First World War on 1 April 1918, becoming the first independent air force in the world, by regrouping the Royal Flying Corps (RFC) an ...
over German troops. In 2009, Richard J. Evans wrote that "This was the strongest, most explicit and most widespread protest movement against any policy since the beginning of the Third Reich". Local Nazis asked for Galen to be arrested but Goebbels told Hitler that such action would provoke a revolt in Westphalia and Hitler decided to wait until after the war to take revenge. In 1986, Lifton wrote, "Nazi leaders faced the prospect of either having to imprison prominent, highly admired clergymen and other protesters – a course with consequences in terms of adverse public reaction they greatly feared – or else end the programme". Evans considered it "at least possible, even indeed probable" that the T4 programme would have continued beyond Hitler's initial quota of 70,000 deaths but for the public reaction to Galen's sermon. Burleigh called assumptions that the sermon affected Hitler's decision to suspend the T4 program "wishful thinking" and noted that the various Church hierarchies did not complain after the transfer of T4 personnel to . Henry Friedlander wrote that it was not the criticism from the Church but rather the loss of secrecy and "general popular disquiet about the way euthanasia was implemented" that caused the killings to be suspended. Galen had detailed knowledge of the euthanasia program by July 1940 but did not speak out until almost a year after Protestants had begun to protest. In 2002, Beth A. Griech-Polelle wrote: On 29 June 1943, Pope Pius XII issued the encyclical , in which he condemned the fact that "physically deformed people, mentally disturbed people and hereditarily ill people have at times been robbed of their lives" in Germany. Following this, in September 1943, a bold but ineffectual condemnation was read by bishops from pulpits across Germany, denouncing the killing of "the innocent and defenceless mentally handicapped and mentally ill, the incurably infirm and fatally wounded, innocent hostages and disarmed prisoners of war and criminal offenders, people of a foreign race or descent".


Suspension and continuity

On 24 August 1941, Hitler ordered the suspension of the T4 killings. After the invasion of the Soviet Union in June, many T4 personnel were transferred to the eastern front. The projected death total for the T4 program of 70,000 deaths had been reached by August 1941. The termination of the T4 programme did not end the killing of people with disabilities; from the end of 1941, on the initiative of institute directors and local party leaders, the killing of adults and children continued, albeit less systematically, until the end of the war. After the bombing of Hamburg in July 1943, occupants of old age homes were killed. In the post-war trial of Dr. Hilda Wernicke, Berlin, August 1946, testimony was given that "500 old, broken women" who had survived the bombing of Stettin in June 1944 were euthanised at the Meseritz-Oberwalde Asylum. The Hartheim, Bernberg, Sonnenstein and Hardamar centres continued in use as "wild euthanasia" centres to kill people sent from all over Germany, until 1945. The methods were lethal injection or starvation, those employed before use of gas chambers. By the end of 1941, about 100,000 people had been killed in the T4 programme. From mid-1941, concentration camp prisoners too feeble or too much trouble to keep alive were murdered after a cursory psychiatric examination under
Action 14f13 Action 14f13, also called '' Sonderbehandlung'' (special treatment) 14f13 and Aktion 14f13, was a campaign by Nazi Germany to murder Nazi concentration camp prisoners. Also called ''invalid'' or ''prisoner euthanasia'', the sick, the elderly and ...
.


Post-war


Doctors' trial

After the war a series of trials was held in connection with the Nazi euthanasia programme at various places including:
Dresden Dresden (, ; Upper Saxon: ''Dräsdn''; wen, label= Upper Sorbian, Drježdźany) is the capital city of the German state of Saxony and its second most populous city, after Leipzig. It is the 12th most populous city of Germany, the fourth ...
,
Frankfurt Frankfurt, officially Frankfurt am Main (; Hessian: , " Frank ford on the Main"), is the most populous city in the German state of Hesse. Its 791,000 inhabitants as of 2022 make it the fifth-most populous city in Germany. Located on it ...
, Graz,
Nuremberg Nuremberg ( ; german: link=no, Nürnberg ; in the local East Franconian dialect: ''Nämberch'' ) is the second-largest city of the German state of Bavaria after its capital Munich, and its 518,370 (2019) inhabitants make it the 14th-largest ...
and
Tübingen Tübingen (, , Swabian: ''Dibenga'') is a traditional university city in central Baden-Württemberg, Germany. It is situated south of the state capital, Stuttgart, and developed on both sides of the Neckar and Ammer rivers. about one in three ...
. In December 1946 an American military tribunal (commonly called the Doctors' trial) prosecuted 23 doctors and administrators for their roles in war crimes and crimes against humanity. These crimes included the systematic killing of those deemed "unworthy of life", including people with mental disabilities, the people who were institutionalised mentally ill, and people with physical impairments. After 140 days of proceedings, including the testimony of 85 witnesses and the submission of 1,500 documents, in August 1947 the court pronounced 16 of the defendants guilty. Seven were sentenced to death; the men, including Brandt and Brack, were executed on 2 June 1948. The indictment read in part: Earlier, in 1945, American forces tried seven staff members of the Hadamar killing centre for the killing of Soviet and Polish nationals, which was within their jurisdiction under international law, as these were the citizens of wartime allies. (Hadamar was within the American Zone of Occupation in Germany. This was before the Allied resolution of December 1945, to prosecute individuals for "crimes against humanity" for such mass atrocities.) Alfons Klein, Heinrich Ruoff and Karl Willig were sentenced to death and executed; the other four were given long prison sentences. In 1946, reconstructed German courts tried members of the Hadamar staff for the murders of nearly 15,000 German citizens there. The chief physician, Adolf Wahlmann and Irmgard Huber, the head nurse, were convicted.


Other perpetrators

*
Hans Asperger Johann Friedrich Karl Asperger (, ; 18 February 1906 – 21 October 1980) was an Austrian psychiatrist. He is remembered for his pioneering studies of autism, specifically in children. His name was given to Asperger syndrome, a form of autism ...
was not discovered to be involved in the program until after his death in 1980. *
Erich Bauer Erich Bauer (26 March 1900 – 4 February 1980), sometimes referred to as "Gasmeister", was a low-level commander in the ''Schutzstaffel'' (SS) of Nazi Germany and a Holocaust perpetrator. He participated in Action T4 program and later in Operati ...
, arrested in 1949 and sentenced to death, which was automatically commuted to life in prison due to West Germany's abolition of capital punishment. He died in prison in 1980. * August Becker, initially sentenced to three years after the war, in 1960 was tried again and sentenced to ten years in prison. He was released early due to ill health and died in 1967. *
Werner Blankenburg Werner Blankenburg (19 June 1905 – 28 November 1957) was a high official in Nazi Germany who led the commission of numerous crimes against humanity. As section head in Hitler's chancellery, he was one of the persons mainly responsible for the Ak ...
lived under an alias and died in 1957. * Philipp Bouhler committed suicide in captivity, May 1945. *
Werner Catel Werner Catel (27 June 1894 – 30 April 1981), Professor of Pediatrics at the University of Leipzig, was one of three doctors considered an expert on the programme of euthanasia for children and participated in the Action T4 "euthanasia" programm ...
was cleared by a denazification board after World War II and was head of paediatrics at the
University of Kiel Kiel University, officially the Christian-Albrecht University of Kiel, (german: Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel, abbreviated CAU, known informally as Christiana Albertina) is a university in the city of Kiel, Germany. It was founded in ...
. He retired early after his role in the T4 program was exposed but continued to support the killing of children with mental and physical disabilities. * Leonardo Conti hanged himself in captivity on 6 October 1945. * Professor Max de Crinis committed suicide via a cyanide capsule after poisoning his family. * Fritz Cropp d. 6 April 1984, Bremen. A Nazi official in Oldenburg, Cropp was appointed the country medical officer of health in 1933. In 1935 he transferred to Berlin, where he worked as a ministerial adviser in the Division IV (health care and people care) in the Ministry of the Interior. In 1939, he became assistant director; Cropp was involved in the Nazi "euthanasia" ''Aktion T4'' in 1940. He was Herbert Linden's superior and was responsible for patient transfers. *
Irmfried Eberl Irmfried Eberl (8 September 1910 – 16 February 1948) was an Austrian psychiatrist and medical director of the euthanasia institutes in Brandenburg and Bernburg, who helped set up and was the first commandant of the Treblinka extermination camp ...
captured 1948; committed suicide to avoid trial. *
Gottfried von Erdmannsdorff __NOTOC__ Gottfried von Erdmannsdorff (25 April 1893 – 30 January 1946) was a German general during World War II. He was convicted by a Soviet military tribunal for war crimes at the Minsk Trial and executed in 1946. Fortress Mogilev On 27 Jun ...
, commander of Fortress Mogilev, where many physically and mentally disabled prisoners were killed; executed by the
Soviet Union The Soviet Union,. officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR),. was a List of former transcontinental countries#Since 1700, transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 to 1991. A flagship communist state, ...
in 1946. *
Ernst-Robert Grawitz Ernst-Robert Grawitz (8 June 1899 – 24 April 1945) was a German physician and an Schutzstaffel, SS functionary (''Reichsarzt'', "arzt" meaning "physician") during the Nazi era. Biography Grawitz was born in Charlottenburg, in the western par ...
killed himself shortly before the fall of Berlin in April 1945. * Heinrich Gross was tried twice. One sentence was overturned and the charges in the second trial in 2000 were dropped as a result of his dementia; he died in 2005. *
Lorenz Hackenholt Lorenz Hackenholt (26 June 1914 missing 1945, declared legally dead as of 31 December 1945, but believed to have still been alive) was a member of the ''Schutzstaffel'' (SS) with the rank of ''Hauptscharführer'' (First Sergeant). During World W ...
vanished in 1945. *
Philipp, Landgrave of Hesse Philipp, Prince and Landgrave of Hesse (6 November 1896 – 25 October 1980) was head of the Electoral House of Hesse from 1940 to 1980. He joined the Nazi Party in 1930, and, when they gained power with the appointment of Adolf Hitler as Chancel ...
, the governor of
Hesse-Nassau The Province of Hesse-Nassau () was a province of the Kingdom of Prussia from 1868 to 1918, then a province of the Free State of Prussia until 1944. Hesse-Nassau was created as a consequence of the Austro-Prussian War of 1866 by combining the ...
, was tried in 1947 at Hadamar for his role in ''Aktion T4'' but was sentenced only to two years' "time served"; he died in 1980. *
Werner Heyde Werner Heyde (aka Fritz Sawade) (25 April 1902 – 13 February 1964) was a German psychiatrist. He was one of the main organizers of Nazi Germany's T-4 Euthanasia Program. Early life Heyde was born in Forst (Lausitz), on May 25, in 1902, and com ...
escaped detection for 18 years and committed suicide in 1964, before his trial. * Ernst Illing was the director of the Vienna Psychiatric-Neurological Clinic for Children Am Spielgrund, where he killed about 200 children; he was sentenced to death on 18 July 1946. * Erich Koch served time in prison from 1950 to his death in 1986. * Erwin Lambert died in 1976. *
Hans Lammers Hans Heinrich Lammers (27 May 1879 – 4 January 1962) was a German jurist and prominent Nazi politician. From 1933 until 1945 he served as Chief of the Reich Chancellery under Adolf Hitler. During the 1948–1949 Ministries Trial, Lammers was ...
was sentenced to 20 years imprisonment after being convicted in the Ministries Trial. This was later commuted to 10 years, and Lammers was released in 1951. He died in 1962. *
Herbert Lange Herbert Lange (29 September 1909 – 20 April 1945) was an '' SS-Sturmbannführer'' and the commandant of Chełmno death camp until April 1942; leader of the ''SS Special Detachment Lange'' conducting the murder of Jews from the Łódź Ghetto. ...
was killed by Allied troops during the Battle of Berlin. * Herbert Linden committed suicide in 1945. Overseers of the program were initially Herbert Linden and Werner Heyde. Linden was later replaced by Hermann Paul Nitsche. * Heinrich Matthes was sentenced to life imprisonment at the Treblinka trials. * Friedrich Mennecke died in 1947 while awaiting trial. * Franz Niedermoser, chief doctor of the Klagenfurt extermination center, was executed in 1946 after being convicted in the Klagenfurt trial. *
Paul Nitsche Hermann Paul Nitsche (November 25, 1876 – March 25, 1948) was a German psychiatrist known for his expert endorsement of the Third Reich's euthanasia authorization and who later headed the Medical Office of the T-4 Euthanasia Program. Paul N ...
was tried and executed by an East German court in 1948. * Franz Reichleitner was killed by Italian partisans in 1944. * Professor Carl Schneider hanged himself in his prison cell in 1946, while awaiting trial. * Franz Schwede was sentenced to 10 years in prison in 1948 and was released in 1956; he died in 1960. *
Franz Stangl Franz Paul Stangl (; 26 March 1908 – 28 June 1971) was an Austrian-born police officer and commandant of the Nazi extermination camps Sobibor and Treblinka. Stangl, an employee of the T-4 Euthanasia Program and an SS commander in Nazi German ...
, after being caught in Brazil in 1967, was sentenced to life imprisonment. He died of heart failure six months into the sentence. * Marianne Türk was a doctor at Vienna Psychiatric-Neurological Clinic for Children Am Spielgrund where, with Ernst Illing, she killed 200 children. She was sentenced to 10 years prison on 18 July 1946. *
Christian Wirth ), Christian the CruelZenter, Christian and Bedürftig, Friedemann (1991). ''Encyclopedia of the Third Reich'' (pg. 1053), New York: Macmillan; , allegiance = , branch = Schutzstaffel , serviceyears = , rank = Sturmbannführer (Major) , ...
was killed by Yugoslav partisans in 1944. The Stasi (Ministry for State Security) of East Germany stored around 30,000 files of in their archives. Those files became available to the public after German Reunification in 1990, leading to a new wave of research on these wartime crimes.


Memorials

The German national memorial to the people with disabilities murdered by the Nazis was dedicated in 2014 in Berlin. It is located in the pavement of a site next to the Tiergarten park, the location of the former villa at Tiergartenstraße 4 in Berlin, where more than 60 Nazi bureaucrats and doctors worked in secret under the "T4" program to organise the mass murder of sanatorium and psychiatric hospital patients deemed unworthy to live.


See also


Notes


Footnotes


References

Books * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * Conferences * Journals * * * * * * * Newspapers * * Websites * * * * * * * * *


Further reading

Books * * * * * * * * * * * * * * Journals * Websites * *


External links


Website with photo of Philipp Bouhler and facsimile of Hitler's letter to Bouhler and Brandt authorising the T4 programme
* United States Holocaust Memorial Museu
Final Solutions: Murderous Racial Hygiene 1939–1945
* United States Holocaust Memorial Museu
Euthanasia programme
* Nazis euthanasia files made public by the BMJ/British Medical Association
files relating to the 200,000 euthanasia crimes
{{Authority control Aktion T4, Nazi eugenics The Holocaust in Germany The Holocaust in Austria The Holocaust in Poland Law in Nazi Germany Psychiatry controversies The Holocaust Political abuses of psychiatry Euthanasia law Mass murder in Germany Ableism