Action T4 - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

Action T4 was the name used after World War II for Nazi Germany's

Nazi Germany

Nazi Germany , also known as the Third Reich , but officially called German Reich from 1933 to 1943 and Greater German Reich from 26 June 1943 onward, is the name commonly used to refer to the state of Germany from 1933 to 1945, when it was a totalitarian dictatorship ruled by...

eugenics

Eugenics

Eugenics is the "applied science or the bio-social movement which advocates the use of practices aimed at improving the genetic composition of a population", usually referring to human populations. The origins of the concept of eugenics began with certain interpretations of Mendelian inheritance,...

-based "euthanasia

Euthanasia

Euthanasia refers to the practice of intentionally ending a life in order to relieve pain and suffering....

" program during which physicians killed thousands of people who were "judged incurably sick, by critical medical examination". The program officially ran from September 1939 until August 1941, but it continued unofficially until the end of the Nazi regime in 1945.

During the official stage of Action T4 70,273 people were killed, but the Nuremberg Trials found evidence that German and Austrian physicians continued the murder of patients after October 1941 and that about 275,000 people were killed under T4. More recent research based on files recovered after 1990 gives a figure of at least 200,000 physically or mentally handicapped people killed by medication, starvation, or in the gas chambers between 1939 and 1945.

The name T4 was an abbreviation of "Tiergartenstraße 4", the address of a villa in the Berlin borough of Tiergarten

Tiergarten

Tiergarten is a locality within the borough of Mitte, in central Berlin . Notable for the great and homonymous urban park, before German reunification, it was a part of West Berlin...

which was the headquarters of the Gemeinnützige Stiftung für Heil- und Anstaltspflege, bearing the euphemistic name literally translating into English as Charitable Foundation for Cure and Institutional Care. This body operated under the direction of Reichsleiter

Reichsleiter

Reichsleiter , was the second highest political rank of the NSDAP next only to the office of Führer. Reichsleiter also served as a paramilitary rank, for the Nazi Party and was the highest position attainable in any Nazi-Organisation.The Reichsleiter reported directly to Adolf Hitler, in whose...

Philipp Bouhler

Philipp Bouhler was a senior Nazi Party official who was both a Reichsleiter and Chief of the Chancellery of the Führer of the NSDAP...

, the head of Hitler's private chancellery, and Dr. Karl Brandt

Karl Brandt

Karl Brandt was a German Nazi war criminal. He rose to the rank of SS-Gruppenführer in the Allgemeine-SS and SS-Brigadeführer in the Waffen-SS. Among other positions, Brandt headed the administration of the Nazi euthanasia program from 1939 onwards and was selected as Adolf Hitler's personal...

, Hitler's personal physician. This villa no longer exists, but a plaque set in the pavement on Tiergartenstraße marks its location.

In October 1939, Hitler signed a back dated "euthanasia decree" to 1 September 1939 which authorized Bouhler and Brandt to carry out the program of "euthanasia" (translated into English as follows):

'Reich Leader Bouhler
Philipp Bouhler
Philipp Bouhler was a senior Nazi Party official who was both a Reichsleiter and Chief of the Chancellery of the Führer of the NSDAP...

and Dr. med. Brandt
Karl Brandt
Karl Brandt was a German Nazi war criminal. He rose to the rank of SS-Gruppenführer in the Allgemeine-SS and SS-Brigadeführer in the Waffen-SS. Among other positions, Brandt headed the administration of the Nazi euthanasia program from 1939 onwards and was selected as Adolf Hitler's personal...

are charged with the responsibility of enlarging the competence of certain physicians, designated by name, so that patients who, on the basis of human judgment [menschlichem Ermessen], are considered incurable, can be granted mercy death [Gnadentod] after a discerning diagnosis.'

Background

The T4 program is thought to have developed from the Nazi Party's policy of "racial hygiene

Racial hygiene

Racial hygiene was a set of early twentieth century state sanctioned policies by which certain groups of individuals were allowed to procreate and others not, with the expressed purpose of promoting certain characteristics deemed to be particularly desirable...

", the belief that the German people needed to be "cleansed" of "racially unsound" elements, which included people with disabilities. According to this view, the euthanasia program represents an evolution in policy toward the later Holocaust of the Jews of Europe.

Racial hygienist ideas were far from unique to the Nazi movement. The ideas of social Darwinism

Social Darwinism

Social Darwinism is a term commonly used for theories of society that emerged in England and the United States in the 1870s, seeking to apply the principles of Darwinian evolution to sociology and politics...

were widespread in all western countries in the early 20th century, and the eugenics

Eugenics

movement had many followers among educated people, being particularly strong in the United States

Racial Integrity Act of 1924

On March 20, 1924 the Virginia General Assembly passed two laws that had arisen out of contemporary concerns about eugenics and race: SB 219, entitled "The Racial Integrity Act" and SB 281, "An ACT to provide for the sexual sterilization of inmates of State institutions in certain cases",...

. The idea of sterilising those carrying hereditary defects or exhibiting what was thought to be hereditary antisocial behaviour was widely accepted, and was put into law in the United States, Sweden, Switzerland and other countries. For example, between 1935 and 1975, 63,000 people were sterilised on eugenic grounds in Sweden.

The idea of enforcing "racial hygiene" had been an essential element of Hitler's ideology from its earliest days. In his book Mein Kampf
Mein Kampf
Mein Kampf is a book written by Nazi leader Adolf Hitler. It combines elements of autobiography with an exposition of Hitler's political ideology. Volume 1 of Mein Kampf was published in 1925 and Volume 2 in 1926...

(1924), Hitler wrote:

He who is bodily and mentally not sound and deserving may not perpetuate this misfortune in the bodies of his children. The völkische [people's] state has to perform the most gigantic rearing-task here. One day, however, it will appear as a deed greater than the most victorious wars of our present bourgeois era.

The Nazi regime began to implement "racial hygienist" policies as soon as it came to power. The July 1933 "Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring" prescribed compulsory sterilisation for people with a range of conditions thought to be hereditary, such as schizophrenia

Schizophrenia

Schizophrenia is a mental disorder characterized by a disintegration of thought processes and of emotional responsiveness. It most commonly manifests itself as auditory hallucinations, paranoid or bizarre delusions, or disorganized speech and thinking, and it is accompanied by significant social...

, epilepsy

Epilepsy

Epilepsy is a common chronic neurological disorder characterized by seizures. These seizures are transient signs and/or symptoms of abnormal, excessive or hypersynchronous neuronal activity in the brain.About 50 million people worldwide have epilepsy, and nearly two out of every three new cases...

, Huntington's chorea

Huntington's disease

Huntington's disease, chorea, or disorder , is a neurodegenerative genetic disorder that affects muscle coordination and leads to cognitive decline and dementia. It typically becomes noticeable in middle age. HD is the most common genetic cause of abnormal involuntary writhing movements called chorea...

and "imbecility". Sterilisation was also mandated for chronic alcoholism

Alcoholism

Alcoholism is a broad term for problems with alcohol, and is generally used to mean compulsive and uncontrolled consumption of alcoholic beverages, usually to the detriment of the drinker's health, personal relationships, and social standing...

and other forms of social deviance. This law was administered by the Interior Ministry under Wilhelm Frick

Wilhelm Frick

Wilhelm Frick was a prominent German Nazi official serving as Minister of the Interior of the Third Reich. After the end of World War II, he was tried for war crimes at the Nuremberg Trials and executed...

through special Hereditary Health Courts (Erbgesundheitsgerichte), 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. There were some suggestions that the program should be extended to people with physical disabilities, but such ideas had to be expressed carefully, given that one of the most powerful figures of the regime, Joseph Goebbels

Joseph Goebbels

Paul Joseph Goebbels was a German politician and Reich Minister of Propaganda in Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1945. As one of Adolf Hitler's closest associates and most devout followers, he was known for his zealous oratory and anti-Semitism...

, suffered from congenital club foot

Club foot

A club foot, or congenital talipes equinovarus , is a congenital deformity involving one foot or both. The affected foot appears rotated internally at the ankle. TEV is classified into 2 groups: Postural TEV or Structural TEV....

. Philipp Bouhler himself was mobility impaired as a result of war wounds to his legs. After 1937, the acute shortage of labour in Germany arising from the crash rearmament program meant that anyone capable of work was deemed to be "useful" and was exempted from the law, and the rate of sterilisation declined.

Towards a policy of killing

Although officially started in September 1939, Action T4 might have been initiated with a sort of trial balloon; in late 1938, Adolf Hitler

Adolf Hitler

Adolf Hitler was an Austrian-born German politician and the leader of the National Socialist German Workers Party , commonly referred to as the Nazi Party). He was Chancellor of Germany from 1933 to 1945, and head of state from 1934 to 1945...

instructed his personal physician Karl Brandt

Karl Brandt

to evaluate a family's petition for the "mercy killing" of their blind, retarded and disabled infant boy. The boy was eventually killed in July 1939. Hitler also instructed Brandt to proceed in the same manner in similar cases. The foundation of the Committee for the Scientific Treatment of Severe, Genetically Determined Illness in order to prepare and proceed with the massive secret killing of infants took place in May 1939 and the respective secret order to start the registration of ill children, took place on 18 August 1939, three weeks after the murder of the mentioned boy.

Hitler was in favour of killing those whom he judged to be "unworthy of life

Life unworthy of life

The phrase "life unworthy of life" was a Nazi designation for the segments of populace which had no right to live and thus were to be "euthanized". The term included people with serious medical problems and those considered grossly inferior according to racial policy of the Third Reich...

". In a 1939 conference with health minister Leonardo Conti

Leonardo Conti

Leonardo Conti was the Reich Health Leader in Nazi Germany. He was born to a Swiss Italian father and mother in Lugano, Ticino, Switzerland; his mother later became the Reich Midwifery Leader in Nazi Germany....

and the head of the Reich Chancellery, Hans Lammers

Hans Lammers

Dr.jur. Hans Heinrich Lammers was a German jurist and prominent Nazi politician. From 1933 until 1945 he served as head of the Reich Chancellery under Adolf Hitler....

, a few months before the euthanasia decree, Hitler gave as examples of "life unworthy of life" severely mentally ill people who he believed could only be bedded on sawdust or sand because they "perpetually dirtied themselves", or who "put their own excrement into their mouths, eating it and so on".

Both his physician, Dr Karl Brandt, and the head of the Reich Chancellery, Hans Lammers, testified after the war that Hitler had told them as early as 1933, at the time the sterilisation law was passed, that he favoured killing the incurably ill, but recognised that public opinion would not accept this. In 1935, Hitler told the Reich Doctors' Leader, Dr. 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 said. He intended, he wrote, "in the event of a war radically to solve the problem of the mental asylums". The outbreak of war thus opened up for Hitler the possibility of carrying out a policy he had long favoured.

The war also gave this issue a new urgency in the eyes of the Nazi regime. People with severe disabilities, even when sterilised, still needed institutional care. They occupied places in facilities which, during war, would be needed for wounded soldiers and people evacuated from bombed cities. They were housed and fed at the expense of the state, and took up the time of doctors and nurses. The Nazis barely tolerated this even in peacetime, and few would continue to support allowing it in wartime. As a leading Nazi doctor, Dr. Hermann Pfannmüller, said: "The idea is unbearable to me that the best, the flower of our youth must lose its life at the front in order that feebleminded and irresponsible asocial elements can have a secure existence in the asylum".

Even before the Nazis came to power, the German eugenics movement had an extreme wing, led by Alfred Hoche

Alfred Hoche

Alfred Erich Hoche was a German psychiatrist well-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. From 1902 he was a professor at Freiburg im Breisgau and was a director of the...

and Karl Binding

Karl Binding

Karl Ludwig Lorenz Binding was a German jurist known as a promoter of the theory of retributive justice. His influential book, Die Freigabe der Vernichtung Lebensunwertem Lebens , written together with the psychiatrist Alfred Hoche, was used by the Nazis to justify their T-4 Euthanasia Program.-...

, who as early as 1920 had advocated killing those with lives judged to be "life unworthy of life

Life unworthy of life

" (lebensunwertes Leben). Germany in the years after World War I was particularly susceptible to ideas of this kind. They interpreted Darwinism to suggest that a nation must promote the propagation of "beneficial" genes and prevent the propagation of "harmful" ones. Lifton notes: "The argument went that the best young men died in war, causing a loss to the Volk of the best available genes. The genes of those who did not fight (the worst genes) then proliferated freely, accelerating biological and cultural degeneration". The government, the eugenicists argued, must intervene to prevent this.

These views had gained ground after 1930, when the Depression

Great Depression

The Great Depression was a severe worldwide economic depression in the decade preceding World War II. The timing of the Great Depression varied across nations, but in most countries it started in about 1929 and lasted until the late 1930s or early 1940s...

caused sharp cuts in funding to state mental hospitals, creating squalor and overcrowding. Most German eugenicists were already strongly nationalist and anti-Semitic, and embraced the Nazi regime with enthusiasm. Many were appointed to positions in the Health Ministry and German research institutes, and 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 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 (Das Erbe

Das Erbe

Das Erbe was a Nazi propaganda movie published in 1935. Produced by Harold Mayer under the aegis of the Nazi party's Office of Racial Policy and directed by Carl C. Hartmann, it aimed at legitimizing the Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring , which allowed for sterilization...

, 1935), The Victim of the Past (Opfer der Vergangenheit

Opfer der Vergangenheit

Opfer der Vergangenheit was a Nazi propaganda film made in 1937. This movie was a sequel to Erbkrank , which showed horrific images of lunatics in German asylums in order to bolster public support for the planned T-4 Euthanasia Program for the mentally ill...

, 1937), which was given a major premiere in Berlin and was shown in all German cinemas, and I Accuse (Ich klage an

Ich klage an

Ich klage an is a 1941 German pro-euthanasia propaganda film directed by Wolfgang Liebeneiner.It was banned by Allied powers after the war....

, 1941), which was based on a novel by Dr Helmut Unger, a consultant for the child euthanasia program. Catholic institutions, which could be expected to resist bitterly the killing of their patients, were progressively closed and their inmates transferred to already overcrowded state institutions, where the squalid conditions provided further ammunition for campaigns in favour of euthanasia.

Killing of children

In the summer of 1939, the parents of a severely deformed child (identified in 2007 as Gerhard Kretschmar

Gerhard Kretschmar

Gerhard Herbert Kretschmar , was a German child born with severe disabilities. After receiving a petition from the child's parents, the German chancellor Adolf Hitler authorized one of his personal physicians, Dr Karl Brandt, to have the child killed...

), born near Leipzig

Leipzig

Leipzig Leipzig has always been a trade city, situated during the time of the Holy Roman Empire at the intersection of the Via Regia and Via Imperii, two important trade routes. At one time, Leipzig was one of the major European centres of learning and culture in fields such as music and publishing...

, wrote to Hitler seeking his permission for their child to be put to death. Hitler approved this, and authorized the creation of the Reich Committee for the Scientific Registering of Serious Hereditary and Congenital Illnesses (Reichsausschuss zur wissenschaftlichen Erfassung erb- und anlagebedingter schwerer Leiden), headed by Karl Brandt, his personal physician, and administered by Herbert Linden of the Interior Ministry and SS-Oberführer

Oberführer

Oberführer was an early paramilitary rank of the Nazi Party dating back to 1921. Translated as “Senior Leader”, an Oberführer was typically a Nazi Party member in charge of a group of paramilitary units in a particular geographical region...

, Viktor Brack. Brandt and Bouhler were authorized to approve applications to kill children in similar circumstances. Although, Bouhler left the details to subordinates, such as, SA-Oberführer Werner Blankenburg

Werner Blankenburg

Werner Blankenburg was head of the Section IIa in the Kanzlei des Führers in Nazi Germany, and thus one of the main responsible persons for the National Socialist "Euthanasia"-program Action T4, the annihilation of the Polish Jews in the "Aktion Reinhard", and the experiments with castration by...

and Brack.

This precedent was used to establish a program of killing children with severe disabilities from which the 'guardian' consent element soon disappeared. From August, the Interior Ministry required doctors and midwives to report all cases of newborns with severe disabilities. Those to be killed were "all children under three years of age in whom any of the following 'serious hereditary diseases' were 'suspected': idiocy

Stupidity

Stupidity is a lack of intelligence, understanding, reason, wit, or sense. It may be innate, assumed, or reactive - 'being "stupid with grief" as a defence against trauma', a state marked with 'grief and despair...making even simple daily tasks a hardship'....

and Down syndrome

Down syndrome

Down syndrome, or Down's syndrome, trisomy 21, is a chromosomal condition caused by the presence of all or part of an extra 21st chromosome. It is named after John Langdon Down, the British physician who described the syndrome in 1866. The condition was clinically described earlier in the 19th...

(especially when associated with blindness and deafness); microcephaly

Microcephaly

Microcephaly is a neurodevelopmental disorder in which the circumference of the head is more than two standard deviations smaller than average for the person's age and sex. Microcephaly may be congenital or it may develop in the first few years of life...

; hydrocephaly; malformations of all kinds, especially of limbs, head, and spinal column; and paralysis, including spastic

Cerebral palsy

Cerebral palsy is an umbrella term encompassing a group of non-progressive, non-contagious motor conditions that cause physical disability in human development, chiefly in the various areas of body movement....

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.

Various methods of deception were used to gain consent – particularly in Catholic areas, where parents were generally uncooperative. Parents were told that their children were being sent to "Special Sections" for children, 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

Phenol, also known as carbolic acid, phenic acid, is an organic compound with the chemical formula C6H5OH. It is a white crystalline solid. The molecule consists of a phenyl , bonded to a hydroxyl group. It is produced on a large scale as a precursor to many materials and useful compounds...

; their deaths were recorded as "pneumonia

Pneumonia

Pneumonia is an inflammatory condition of the lung—especially affecting the microscopic air sacs —associated with fever, chest symptoms, and a lack of air space on a chest X-ray. Pneumonia is typically caused by an infection but there are a number of other causes...

". Autopsies were usually performed, and brain samples were taken to be used for "medical research." This apparently helped to ease the consciences of many of those involved, since it gave them the feeling that the children had not died in vain, and that the whole programme had a genuine medical purpose.

Once war broke out in September 1939, the program adopted less rigorous standards of assessment and a quicker approval process. It expanded to include older children and adolescents. The conditions covered also expanded and came to include "various borderline or limited impairments in children of different ages, culminating in the killing of those designated as juvenile delinquents. Jewish children could be placed in the net' primarily because they were Jewish; and at one of the institutions, a special department was set up for 'minor Jewish-Aryan half-breeds'". At the same time, increased pressure was placed on parents to agree to their children's being sent away. Many parents suspected what was really happening, especially when it became apparent that institutions for children with disabilities were being systematically cleared out, and refused consent. The parents were warned that they could lose custody of all their children and if that did not suffice, the parents themselves could be threatened with call-up for "labour duty". By 1941, over 5,000 children had been killed.

Killing of adults

Brandt and Bouhler soon developed plans to expand the program to adults. In July 1939, they held a meeting attended by Dr. Leonardo Conti

Leonardo Conti

, Reich Health Leader and state secretary for health in the Interior Ministry, and Professor Werner Heyde

Werner Heyde

Werner Heyde was a German psychiatrist. He was one of the main organizers of Nazi Germany's T-4 Euthanasia Program.-Education:Heyde completed his Abitur in 1920...

, head of the SS medical department. This meeting had made preliminary arrangements for a national register of all institutionalised people with mental illnesses or physical disabilities.

The first adults with disabilities to be killed by the Nazi regime, however, were not Germans, but Poles, as the SS men of Einsatzkommando

Einsatzkommando

During World War II, the Nazi German Einsatzkommandos were a sub-group of five Einsatzgruppen mobile killing squads—up to 3,000 men each—usually composed of 500-1,000 functionaries of the SS and Gestapo, whose mission was to kill Jews, Romani, communists and the NKVD collaborators in the captured...

16 cleared the hospitals and mental asylums of the Wartheland, a region of western Poland which was earmarked for incorporation into Germany and resettlement by ethnic Germans following the German conquest of Poland. In the Danzig

Reichsgau Danzig-West Prussia

The Reichsgau Danzig-West Prussia was a Nazi German province created on 8 October 1939 from the territory of the annexed Free City of Danzig, the annexed Polish province Greater Pomeranian Voivodship , and the Nazi German Regierungsbezirk West Prussia of Gau East Prussia. Before 2 November 1939,...

(now Gdańsk

Gdansk

Gdańsk is a Polish city on the Baltic coast, at the centre of the country's fourth-largest metropolitan area.The city lies on the southern edge of Gdańsk Bay , in a conurbation with the city of Gdynia, spa town of Sopot, and suburban communities, which together form a metropolitan area called the...

) area, some 7,000 Polish inmates of various institutions were shot, while 10,000 were killed in the Gdynia

Gdynia

Gdynia is a city in the Pomeranian Voivodeship of Poland and an important seaport of Gdańsk Bay on the south coast of the Baltic Sea.Located in Kashubia in Eastern Pomerania, Gdynia is part of a conurbation with the spa town of Sopot, the city of Gdańsk and suburban communities, which together...

area. Similar measures were taken in other areas of Poland destined for incorporation into Germany. At Posen

Poznan

Poznań is a city on the Warta river in west-central Poland, with a population of 556,022 in June 2009. It is among the oldest cities in Poland, and was one of the most important centres in the early Polish state, whose first rulers were buried at Poznań's cathedral. It is sometimes claimed to be...

(occupied Poznań), hundreds of patients were killed by means of carbon monoxide

Carbon monoxide

Carbon monoxide , also called carbonous oxide, is a colorless, odorless, and tasteless gas that is slightly lighter than air. It is highly toxic to humans and animals in higher quantities, although it is also produced in normal animal metabolism in low quantities, and is thought to have some normal...

gas in an improvised gas chamber

Gas chamber

A gas chamber is an apparatus for killing humans or animals with gas, consisting of a sealed chamber into which a poisonous or asphyxiant gas is introduced. The most commonly used poisonous agent is hydrogen cyanide; carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide have also been used...

developed by Dr Albert Widmann

Albert Widmann

Albert Widmann was an SS officer and German chemist who worked for the Action T4 euthanasia program during the regime of Nazi Germany....

, chief chemist of the German Criminal Police (Kripo). In December 1939, the SS head, Heinrich Himmler

Heinrich Himmler

Heinrich Luitpold Himmler was Reichsführer of the SS, a military commander, and a leading member of the Nazi Party. As Chief of the German Police and the Minister of the Interior from 1943, Himmler oversaw all internal and external police and security forces, including the Gestapo...

, witnessed one of these gassings, ensuring that this invention would later be put to much wider uses.

The idea of killing "useless" mental patients soon spread from occupied Poland to adjoining areas of Germany itself, 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, creating a demand for hospital space. The Gauleiter

Gauleiter

A Gauleiter was the party leader of a regional branch of the NSDAP or the head of a Gau or of a Reichsgau.-Creation and Early Usage:...

of Pomerania

Pomerania

Pomerania is a historical region on the south shore of the Baltic Sea. Divided between Germany and Poland, it stretches roughly from the Recknitz River near Stralsund in the West, via the Oder River delta near Szczecin, to the mouth of the Vistula River near Gdańsk in the East...

, Franz Schwede-Coburg, dispatched 1,400 patients from five Pomeranian hospitals to Poland, where they were shot. The Gauleiter

Gauleiter

A Gauleiter was the party leader of a regional branch of the NSDAP or the head of a Gau or of a Reichsgau.-Creation and Early Usage:...

of East Prussia

East Prussia

East Prussia is the main part of the region of Prussia along the southeastern Baltic Coast from the 13th century to the end of World War II in May 1945. From 1772–1829 and 1878–1945, the Province of East Prussia was part of the German state of Prussia. The capital city was Königsberg.East Prussia...

, Erich Koch

Erich Koch

Erich Koch was a Gauleiter of the Nazi Party in East Prussia from 1928 until 1945. Between 1941 and 1945 he was the Chief of Civil Administration of Bezirk Bialystok. During this period, he was also the Reichskommissar in Reichskommissariat Ukraine from 1941 until 1943...

, likewise had 1,600 patients killed. In all, more than 8,000 Germans were killed in this initial wave of killings. These were carried out on the initiative of local officials, although Himmler certainly knew and approved of them.

The program for killing adults with mental or physical disabilities began with a letter from Hitler issued in October 1939. The letter charged Bouhler and Brandt with "enlarging the authority of certain physicians, to be designated by name, in such a manner that persons who, according to human judgement, are incurable, can, upon a most careful diagnosis of their condition of sickness, be accorded a mercy death." The letter was backdated to 1 September to provide legality to the killings already carried out, and to link the program more definitely to the war, giving it a rationale of wartime necessity. This letter, which provided the sole legal basis for the program, was not a formal "Führer decree", which in Nazi Germany had the force of law. For this reason Hitler deliberately bypassed Health Minister Conti and his department, who were held to be not sufficiently imbued with National Socialist ruthlessness and who might have raised awkward questions about the legality of the program, and entrusted it to his personal agents Bouhler and Brandt.

The program was administered by Brack's staff from Tiergartenstraße 4, under the guise of the Charitable Foundation for Cure and Institutional Care, supervised by Bouhler and Brandt. Others closely involved included Dr Herbert Linden, who had been heavily involved in the children's program, Dr Ernst-Robert Grawitz

Ernst-Robert Grawitz

Ernst-Robert Grawitz was a German physician in Nazi Germany during World War II.- Early life :Grawitz was born in Charlottenburg, in the western part of Berlin, Germany.- Career :...

, chief physician of the SS, and August Becker

August Becker

August Becker was during the Nazi regime in Germany an SS lieutenant colonel and chemist in the Central Reich Security Office...

, an SS chemist. These officials chose the doctors who were to carry out the operational part of the program. They were chosen for their political reliability, professional reputation, and known sympathy for radical eugenics. They included several who had proved their worth in the child-killing program, such as Unger, Heinze, and Hermann Pfannmüller. The new recruits were mostly psychiatrists, notably Professor Carl Schneider

Carl Schneider

Carl Schneider , professor at Heidelberg University, chairman of its department of Psychiatry, director of its clinic, was a senior researcher for the Action T4 Euthanasia program....

of Heidelberg, Professor Max de Crinis

Max de Crinis

Professor Max de Crinis held a Chair in psychiatry in Cologne and Berlin, and was a medical expert for the Action T4 Euthanasia Program....

of Berlin and Professor Paul Nitsche

Paul Nitsche

Hermann Paul Nitsche was a German psychiatrist known for his expert endorsement of the Third Reich's euthanasia authorization and who later headed the T-4 Euthanasia Program....

from the Sonnenstein state institution. Heyde became the operational leader of the program, succeeded later by Nitsche.

In early October all hospitals, nursing homes, old-age homes, 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

Aryan

Aryan is an English language loanword derived from Sanskrit ārya and denoting variously*In scholarly usage:**Indo-Iranian languages *in dated usage:**the Indo-European languages more generally and their speakers...

race", or who had been diagnosed with any of a list of specified conditions. These included schizophrenia, epilepsy

Epilepsy

, Huntington's chorea, advanced syphilis

Syphilis

Syphilis is a sexually transmitted infection caused by the spirochete bacterium Treponema pallidum subspecies pallidum. The primary route of transmission is through sexual contact; however, it may also be transmitted from mother to fetus during pregnancy or at birth, resulting in congenital syphilis...

, senile dementia, paralysis

Paralysis

Paralysis is loss of muscle function for one or more muscles. Paralysis can be accompanied by a loss of feeling in the affected area if there is sensory damage as well as motor. A study conducted by the Christopher & Dana Reeve Foundation, suggests that about 1 in 50 people have been diagnosed...

, encephalitis

Encephalitis

Encephalitis is an acute inflammation of the brain. Encephalitis with meningitis is known as meningoencephalitis. Symptoms include headache, fever, confusion, drowsiness, and fatigue...

and "terminal neurological conditions generally". Many doctors and administrators assumed that the purpose of the reports was to identify inmates who were capable of being drafted for "labour service". They therefore tended to overstate the degree of incapacity of their patients, to protect them from labour conscription — with fatal consequences. When some institutions, often in Catholic

Catholic

The word catholic comes from the Greek phrase , meaning "on the whole," "according to the whole" or "in general", and is a combination of the Greek words meaning "about" and meaning "whole"...

areas, refused to co-operate, teams of T4 doctors (or in some cases Nazi medical students) visited them and compiled their own lists, sometimes in a very haphazard and ideologically motivated way. At the same time, all Jewish patients were removed from institutions and were killed during 1940.

As with the child inmates, the adults had their cases assessed by a panel of experts, working at the Tiergartenstraße offices. The experts were required to make their judgments solely on the basis of the reports, rather than on detailed medical histories, let alone examinations. Sometimes they dealt with hundreds of reports at a time. On each they marked a + (meaning death), a - (meaning life), or occasionally a ? meaning that they were unable to decide. Three "death" verdicts condemned the person concerned. As with the children, over time these processes 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

At first patients were killed by lethal injection, the method established for killing children, but the slowness and inefficiency of this method for killing adults, who needed larger doses of increasingly scarce and expensive drugs and who were more likely to need restraint, was soon apparent. Hitler himself recommended to Brandt that carbon monoxide gas be used. At his trial, Brandt described this as a "major advance in medical history". The first gassings took place at Brandenburg Euthanasia Centre

Brandenburg Euthanasia Centre

The Brandenburg Euthanasia Centre , officially known as the Brandenburg an der Havel State Welfare Institute The Brandenburg Euthanasia Centre , officially known as the Brandenburg an der Havel State Welfare Institute The Brandenburg Euthanasia Centre , officially known as the Brandenburg an der...

in January 1940, under the supervision of Widmann, Becker, and Christian Wirth

Christian Wirth

Christian Wirth was a German police and SS officer who was one of the leading contributors to the program to exterminate the Jewish people of Poland, known as Operation Reinhard....

, a Kripo (criminal police) officer who was later to play a prominent role in the "final solution

Final Solution

The Final Solution was Nazi Germany's plan and execution of the systematic genocide of European Jews during World War II, resulting in the most deadly phase of the Holocaust...

" extermination of the Jews. Once the efficacy of this method was established, it became standardised and was instituted at a number of centres across Germany. As well as Brandenburg, these included Grafeneck Castle

Grafeneck Castle

The Grafeneck Euthanasia Centre housed in Grafeneck Castle was one of Nazi Germany's killing centres as part of their euthanasia programme...

in Baden-Württemberg

Baden-Württemberg

Baden-Württemberg is one of the 16 states of Germany. Baden-Württemberg is in the southwestern part of the country to the east of the Upper Rhine, and is the third largest in both area and population of Germany's sixteen states, with an area of and 10.7 million inhabitants...

(10,824 dead), Schloss Hartheim

Schloss Hartheim

Schloss Hartheim, located at Alkoven in Upper Austria, some 14 km. from Linz, Austria, became notorious as one of the Nazi Euthanasia killing centers, where the killing program Action T4 took place.The castle was built by Jakob von Aspen in 1600...

near Linz

Linz

Linz is the third-largest city of Austria and capital of the state of Upper Austria . It is located in the north centre of Austria, approximately south of the Czech border, on both sides of the river Danube. The population of the city is , and that of the Greater Linz conurbation is about...

in Austria (over 8,000 dead), Sonnenstein Euthanasia Clinic in Saxony (15,000 dead), Bernburg

Bernburg

Bernburg is a town in Saxony-Anhalt, Germany, capital of the district of Salzlandkreis. It is situated on the river Saale, approx. 30 km downstream from Halle. The town is dominated by its huge Renaissance castle featuring a museum as well as a popular, recently updated bear pit in its...

in Saxony-Anhalt

Saxony-Anhalt

Saxony-Anhalt is a landlocked state of Germany. Its capital is Magdeburg and it is surrounded by the German states of Lower Saxony, Brandenburg, Saxony, and Thuringia.Saxony-Anhalt covers an area of...

and Hadamar Clinic

Hadamar Clinic

The Hadamar Euthanasia Centre was a psychiatric hospital in the German town of Hadamar, used by the Nazis as the site of their T-4 Euthanasia Programme, which performed mass sterilizations and mass murder of "undesirable" members of Nazi society, specifically those with physical and mental...

in Hesse

Hesse

Hesse or Hessia is both a cultural region of Germany and the name of an individual German state.* The cultural region of Hesse includes both the State of Hesse and the area known as Rhenish Hesse in the neighbouring Rhineland-Palatinate state...

(14,494 dead). As well as killing patients from mental homes, nursing homes and sanatoria, these centres were also used to kill prisoners transferred from concentration camps in Germany and Austria.

Patients were transferred from their institutions to the killing centres in buses

Charitable Ambulance

The Charitable Ambulance GmbH was a National Socialist subdivision of the Action T4 organization...

operated by teams of SS men wearing white coats to give an air of medical authenticity called the Community Patients Transports Service. To prevent the families and the doctors of the patients tracing them, they were often sent to transit centres in major hospitals where they were supposedly assessed before being moved again to "special treatment" (Sonderbehandlung
Sonderbehandlung
Sonderbehandlung is a German noun meaning special treatment in English, also existing as a verb: sonderbehandeln . While it can refer to any sort of preferential treatment, it is known primarily as a euphemism used by Nazi functionaries and the SS for murder...

) centres. (The expression was later widely employed as a euphemism for killing during the extermination of the Jews.) Families were sent letters explaining that owing to wartime regulations it would not be possible to visit relatives in these centres. In fact 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, and sent to the family along with an urn of ashes (random ashes, since the victims were cremated en masse). The preparation of thousands of falsified death certificates in fact 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 Bernberg and Sonnenstein increased their operations, while Hartheim (where Wirth and Franz Stangl

Franz Stangl

Franz Paul Stangl was an Austrian-born SS commandant of the Sobibor and Treblinka extermination camps during the Operation Reinhard phase of the Holocaust. He was arrested in Brazil in 1967, extradited and tried in West Germany for the mass murder of 900,000 people, and in 1970 was found guilty...

were successively commandants) continued as before. As a result, another 35,000 people were killed before August 1941, when the T4 program was shut down. Even after that date, however, the centres continued to be used to kill concentration camp inmates: eventually some 20,000 people in this category were killed.

In 1971 the Austrian-born journalist Gitta Sereny

Gitta Sereny

Gitta Sereny is an Austrian-born biographer, historian and investigative journalist whose writing focuses mainly on the Holocaust and child abuse. She is the stepdaughter of the economist Ludwig von Mises....

conducted a series of interviews with Franz Stangl

Franz Stangl

, who was in prison in Düsseldorf

Düsseldorf

Düsseldorf is the capital city of the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia and centre of the Rhine-Ruhr metropolitan region.Düsseldorf is an important international business and financial centre and renowned for its fashion and trade fairs. Located centrally within the European Megalopolis, the...

after having been convicted of co-responsibility for killing 900,000 people as commandant of the Sobibor

Sobibór extermination camp

Sobibor was a Nazi German extermination camp located on the outskirts of the town of Sobibór, Lublin Voivodeship of occupied Poland as part of Operation Reinhard; the official German name was SS-Sonderkommando Sobibor...

and Treblinka

Treblinka extermination camp

Treblinka was a Nazi extermination camp in occupied Poland during World War II near the village of Treblinka in the modern-day Masovian Voivodeship of Poland. The camp, which was constructed as part of Operation Reinhard, operated between and ,. During this time, approximately 850,000 men, women...

extermination camps in Poland. Stangl gave Sereny a detailed account of the operations of the T4 program 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 then induced to enter what appeared to be a shower block, where they were gassed with carbon monoxide

Carbon monoxide

(this ruse was later used on a much larger scale at the extermination camps).

Opposition

Hitler and his helpers were aware from the start that a program of killing large numbers of Germans with disabilities would be unpopular with the German public. Although Hitler had a fixed policy of not issuing written instructions for policies relating to what would later be classed as crimes against humanity, he made an exception when he provided Bouhler and Brack with written authority for the T4 program in his confidential October 1939 letter. This was apparently to overcome opposition within the German state bureaucracy – the Justice Minister, Franz Gürtner

Franz Gürtner

Franz Gürtner was a German Minister of Justice in Adolf Hitler's cabinet, responsible for coordinating jurisprudence in the Third Reich. Detesting the cruel ways of the Gestapo and SA in dealing with prisoners of war, he protested unsuccessfully to Hitler, nevertheless staying on in the cabinet,...

, needed to be shown Hitler's letter in August 1940 to gain his cooperation.

Hitler told Bouhler at the outset that "the Führer's Chancellery must under no circumstances be seen to be active in this matter." There was a particular need for caution in Catholic areas, which after the annexations of Austria and the Sudetenland

Sudetenland

Sudetenland is the German name used in English in the first half of the 20th century for the northern, southwest and western regions of Czechoslovakia inhabited mostly by ethnic Germans, specifically the border areas of Bohemia, Moravia, and those parts of Silesia being within Czechoslovakia.The...

in 1938 included nearly half the population of Greater Germany, and where public opinion could be expected to be hostile. In March 1940 a confidential report from the SD

Sicherheitsdienst

Sicherheitsdienst , full title Sicherheitsdienst des Reichsführers-SS, or SD, was the intelligence agency of the SS and the Nazi Party in Nazi Germany. The organization was the first Nazi Party intelligence organization to be established and was often considered a "sister organization" with the...

in Austria warned that the killing program must be implemented with stealth "in order to avoid a probable backlash of public opinion during the war".

Opposition persisted within the bureaucracy. A district judge and member of the Confessing Church

Confessing Church

The Confessing Church was a Protestant schismatic church in Nazi Germany that arose in opposition to government-sponsored efforts to nazify the German Protestant church.-Demographics:...

, Lothar Kreyssig

Lothar Kreyssig

Lothar Kreyssig was a German judge during the 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 World War, he was again offered a judgeship, but declined...

, wrote to Gürtner protesting that the T4 program 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.

The Catholic Church had agreed to withdraw from all political activity in the Concordat of 1933

Reichskonkordat

The Reichskonkordat is a treaty that was agreed between the Holy See and Nazi government, that guarantees the rights of the Catholic Church in Germany. It was signed on July 20, 1933 by Secretary of State Eugenio Pacelli and Vice Chancellor Franz von Papen on behalf of Pope Pius XI and President...

between Germany and the Holy See

Holy See

The Holy See is the episcopal jurisdiction of the Catholic Church in Rome, in which its Bishop is commonly known as the Pope. It is the preeminent episcopal see of the Catholic Church, forming the central government of the Church. As such, diplomatically, and in other spheres the Holy See acts and...

, but the prospect of state-sanctioned mass killing of German citizens had not occurred to the Church in 1933, and such a challenge to fundamental Christian belief in the sanctity of human life posed a serious dilemma for German Catholics. In 1935 the Church had protested in a private memorandum against proposals to pass a law legalising euthanasia (in the true sense of the word): this was one reason the law was not enacted.

In January 1939, however, Brack commissioned a paper from Dr Joseph Mayer, Professor of Moral Theology

Moral theology

Moral theology is a systematic theological treatment of Christian ethics. It is usually taught on Divinity faculties as a part of the basic curriculum.- External links :*...

at the University of Paderborn

University of Paderborn

The University of Paderborn in Paderborn, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany was founded in 1972. 15,228 students were enrolled at the university as of December 2010....

, on the likely reactions of the churches in the event of a state euthanasia program being instituted. Mayer – a longstanding euthanasia advocate – reported that the churches would not oppose such a program 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" program would be acceptable to German public opinion. (When Gitta Sereny interviewed Mayer shortly before his death in 1967, he denied that he had approved of killing people with disabilities, but since no copies of this paper are known to survive, this cannot be determined.) This turned out not to be the case. In fact the T4 program was the sole example of an action by the Nazi regime which provoked large-scale public protests.

It was impossible to keep the T4 program secret, given that thousands of doctors, nurses and administrators were involved in it, and given that the majority of those killed had families who were actively concerned about their welfare. Despite the strictest orders to maintain secrecy, some of the staff at the killing centres talked about what was going on there. In some cases families could tell that the causes of death notified were false, e.g. when a patient was claimed to have died of appendicitis

Appendicitis

Appendicitis is a condition characterized by inflammation of the appendix. It is classified as a medical emergency and many cases require removal of the inflamed appendix, either by laparotomy or laparoscopy. Untreated, mortality is high, mainly because of the risk of rupture leading to...

, even though his appendix had been surgically removed some years earlier. In other cases several families in the same town would receive death certificates on the same day. In the towns where the killing centres were located, many people saw the inmates arrive in buses, saw the smoke from the crematoria chimneys, noticed that no bus-loads of inmates ever left the killing centres, and drew the correct conclusion. In Hadamar

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 Memorial...

ashes containing human hair rained down on the town. 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, had them transferred to private clinics where the reach of T4 did not extend. Other doctors agreed to "re-diagnose" some patients so that they no longer met the T4 criteria, although this ran the risk of exposure when the Nazi zealots from Berlin conducted inspections. In Kiel

Kiel

Kiel is the capital and most populous city in the northern German state of Schleswig-Holstein, with a population of 238,049 .Kiel is approximately north of Hamburg. Due to its geographic location in the north of Germany, the southeast of the Jutland peninsula, and the southwestern shore of the...

, Professor Hans Gerhard Creutzfeldt

Hans Gerhard Creutzfeldt

Hans Gerhard Creutzfeldt was a German neuropathologist, who first described the Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. He was born in Harburg upon Elbe and died in Munich.-Biography:...

managed to save nearly all of his patients. For the most part, however, doctors co-operated with the program, either out of ignorance as to its true nature or out of agreement with Nazi eugenicist policies.

During 1940 protest letters began to arrive at the Reich Chancellery and the Ministry of Justice, some of them from Nazi Party members. The first open protest against the removal of people from asylums took place at Absberg

Absberg

Absberg is a municipality in the Weißenburg-Gunzenhausen district, in Bavaria, Germany.The Absberg family was named by this place and had their home castle there....

in Franconia

Franconia

Franconia is a region of Germany comprising the northern parts of the modern state of Bavaria, a small part of southern Thuringia, and a region in northeastern Baden-Württemberg called Tauberfranken...

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. Opposition to the T4 policy sharpened after the German attack on the Soviet Union in June 1941, because the war in the east produced for the first time large-scale German casualties, and the hospitals and asylums began to fill up with maimed and disabled young German soldiers. Rumours began to circulate that these men would also be subject to "euthanasia", although in fact no such plans existed.

During 1940 and 1941 some Protestant churchmen protested privately against T4, but none made any public comment. Bishop Theophil Wurm

Theophil Wurm

Theophil Wurm was the son of a pastor and was a leader in the German Protestant Church in the early twentieth century....

, presiding the Evangelical-Lutheran Church in Württemberg

Evangelical-Lutheran Church in Württemberg

The Evangelical-Lutheran Church in Württemberg is a Protestant church in the German former state of Württemberg, now the part of the state Baden-Württemberg. The seat of the church is in Stuttgart.It is a full member of the Evangelical Church in Germany , and is a Lutheran Church...

, wrote a strong letter to Interior Minister Frick in March 1940. On December 4, 1940 Reinhold Sautter, Supreme Church Councillor of Württemberg's State Church, reproached the Nazi Ministerial Councillor Eugen Stähle for the murders in Grafeneck Castle

Grafeneck Castle

The Grafeneck Euthanasia Centre housed in Grafeneck Castle was one of Nazi Germany's killing centres as part of their euthanasia programme...

, the latter then confronted him with the Nazi government opinion, that "The fifth commandment: Thou shalt not kill

Thou Shalt Not Kill

Thou Shalt Not Kill may refer to:*"Thou Shalt Not Kill" , an episode of Spooks*Thou Shalt Not Kill , a film starring Lane Smith*Thou Shalt Not Kill , a film starring Steven Webb...

, is no commandment of God but a Jewish invention" and cannot claim any validity any more.

Others who privately protested were the Lutheran theologian Friedrich von Bodelschwingh

Friedrich von Bodelschwingh

Friedrich von Bodelschwingh, Junior was a German theologian and public health advocate. His father was Friedrich von Bodelschwingh, Senior , founder of the Bodelschwinghsche Anstalten Bethel charitable foundations.-Public health activities:Friedrich was the son of Reverend Friedrich von...

, who was director of the Bethel Institution

Bethel Institution

The Bethel Institution is a diaconal hospital for the mentally ill in Bielefeld, Germany....

for epileptics at Bielefeld

Bielefeld

Bielefeld is an independent city in the Ostwestfalen-Lippe Region in the north-east of North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany. With a population of 323,000, it is also the most populous city in the Regierungsbezirk Detmold...

, and Pastor Paul-Gerhard Braune, director of the Hoffnungstal Institution near Berlin. Both used their connections with the regime to negotiate exemptions for their institutions: Bodelschwingh negotiated directly with Brandt and indirectly with Hermann Göring

Hermann Göring

Hermann Wilhelm Göring, was a German politician, military leader, and a leading member of the Nazi Party. He was a veteran of World War I as an ace fighter pilot, and a recipient of the coveted Pour le Mérite, also known as "The Blue Max"...

, whose cousin was a prominent psychiatrist. Braune had meetings with Justice Minister Gürtner, who was always dubious about the legality of the program, and later wrote a strongly worded letter to Hitler protesting against it: Hitler did not read it, but was told about it by Lammers. In general, however, the Protestant church was more enmeshed with the Nazi regime than was the case for the Catholics and was unwilling to criticise its actions.

The Catholic Church, which since 1933 had pursued a policy of avoiding confrontation with the Nazi regime in the hope of preserving its core institutions intact, became increasingly unable to keep silent in the face of mounting evidence about the killing of inmates of hospitals and asylums. Leading Catholic churchmen, led by Cardinal Michael von Faulhaber of Munich

Munich

Munich The city's motto is "" . Before 2006, it was "Weltstadt mit Herz" . Its native name, , is derived from the Old High German Munichen, meaning "by the monks' place". The city's name derives from the monks of the Benedictine order who founded the city; hence the monk depicted on the city's coat...

, wrote privately to the government protesting against the policy. In July 1941 the Church broke its silence when a pastoral letter from the bishops was read out in all churches, declaring that it was wrong to kill (except in self-defence or in a morally justified war). This emboldened Catholics to make more outspoken protests.

A few weeks after the pastoral letter was read out, the Catholic Bishop of Münster in Westphalia

Westphalia

Westphalia is a region in Germany, centred on the cities of Arnsberg, Bielefeld, Dortmund, Minden and Münster.Westphalia is roughly the region between the rivers Rhine and Weser, located north and south of the Ruhr River. No exact definition of borders can be given, because the name "Westphalia"...

, Clemens August Graf von Galen

Clemens August Graf von Galen

Blessed Clemens August Graf von Galen was a German count, Bishop of Münster, and Cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church....

, publicly denounced the T4 program in a sermon, and telegrammed his text to Hitler, calling on "the Führer to defend the people against the Gestapo

Gestapo

The Gestapo was the official secret police of Nazi Germany. Beginning on 20 April 1934, it was under the administration of the SS leader Heinrich Himmler in his position as Chief of German Police...

". "It is a terrible, unjust and catastrophic thing when man opposes his will to the will of God", Galen said. "We are talking about men and women, our compatriots, our brothers and sisters. Poor unproductive people if you wish, but does this mean that they have lost their right to live?" Robert Lifton says of this sermon: "This powerful, populist sermon was immediately reproduced and distributed throughout Germany — indeed, it was dropped among German troops by British Royal Air Force pilots. Galen's sermon probably had a greater impact than any other statement in consolidating anti-'euthanasia' sentiment." Another Bishop, Franz Bornewasser of Trier

Trier

Trier, historically called in English Treves is a city in Germany on the banks of the Moselle. It is the oldest city in Germany, founded in or before 16 BC....

, also sent protests to Hitler, though not in public. In August Galen was even more outspoken, broadening his attack to include the Nazi persecution of religious orders and the closing of Catholic institutions. He attributed the heavy allied bombing of Westphalian towns to the wrath of God against Germany for breaking His laws. Galen's sermons were not reported in the German press, but were widely circulated in the form of illegally printed leaflets. Local Nazis asked for Galen to be arrested, but Goebbels told Hitler that if this happened there would be an open revolt in Westphalia.

By August the protests had spread to Bavaria. According to Gitta Sereny, Hitler himself was jeered by an angry crowd at Hof

Hof, Germany

Hof is a city located on the banks of the Saale in the northeastern corner of the German state of Bavaria, in the Franconia region, at the Czech border and the forested Fichtelgebirge and Frankenwald upland regions....

– the only time he was opposed in public during his 12 years of rule. Despite his private fury, Hitler knew that he could not afford a confrontation with the Church at a time when Germany was engaged in a life-and-death war, a belief which was reinforced by the advice of Goebbels, Martin Bormann

Martin Bormann

Martin Ludwig Bormann was a prominent Nazi official. He became head of the Party Chancellery and private secretary to Adolf Hitler...

, head of the Party Chancellery, and Heinrich Himmler

Heinrich Himmler

, head of the SS. Robert Lifton writes: "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 program." Himmler said: "If operation T4 had been entrusted to the SS, things would have happened differently", because "when the Führer entrusts us with a job, we know how to deal with it correctly, without causing useless uproar among the people."

On 24 August 1941 Hitler ordered the cancellation of the T4 program, and also issued strict instructions to the Gauleiters that there were to be no further provocations of the churches for the duration of the war. The invasion of the Soviet Union in June had opened up new opportunities for the T4 personnel, who were soon transferred to the east to begin work on a vastly greater program of killing: the "final solution

Final Solution

The Final Solution was Nazi Germany's plan and execution of the systematic genocide of European Jews during World War II, resulting in the most deadly phase of the Holocaust...

of the Jewish question". But the winding up of the T4 program did not bring the killing of people with disabilities to an end, although from the end of 1941 the killing became less systematic. Lifton documents that the killing of both adults and children continued to the end of the war, on the local initiative of institute directors and party leaders. The methods reverted to those employed before the gas chambers were employed: lethal injection, or simple starvation. Kershaw estimates that by the end of 1941 75,000 to 100,000 people had been killed as a result of the program, but that further tens of thousands of concentration camp inmates, and people judged incapable of work, were killed in Germany between 1942 and 1945 (this figure does not include the Jews who were deported to their deaths in 1942 and 1943). Hartheim, for example, continued to kill people sent to it from all over Germany until 1945.

The Doctors' Trial

In December 1946, an American military tribunal (commonly called the Doctors' Trial) tried 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 the mentally disabled, the institutionalized mentally ill, and the physically impaired. 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 and executed on 2 June 1948. They included Dr. Karl Brandt

Karl Brandt

and Viktor Brack

Viktor Brack

Viktor Brack , was a Nazi war criminal, the organiser of the Euthanasia Programme, Action T4, where the Nazi state systematically murdered disabled German people...

.
The indictment read in part:
Also in 1945, seven staff members of the Hadamar institute were tried for the killing of Soviet and Polish nationals, but not for the large-scale killing of German nationals at the institute. Alfons Klein, Karl Ruoff and Wilhelm Willig were sentenced to death and executed, the other four were given long prison sentences.

Others involved in the program

August Becker
August Becker
August Becker was during the Nazi regime in Germany an SS lieutenant colonel and chemist in the Central Reich Security Office...

, initially sentenced to three years after the war, then in 1960 was tried again and sentenced to 10 years in prison. He served very little of the later term because of an early release due to ill-health. He died in 1967.
Werner Blankenburg
Werner Blankenburg
Werner Blankenburg was head of the Section IIa in the Kanzlei des Führers in Nazi Germany, and thus one of the main responsible persons for the National Socialist "Euthanasia"-program Action T4, the annihilation of the Polish Jews in the "Aktion Reinhard", and the experiments with castration by...

, lived under an alias and died in 1957
Philipp Bouhler
Philipp Bouhler
Philipp Bouhler was a senior Nazi Party official who was both a Reichsleiter and Chief of the Chancellery of the Führer of the NSDAP...

, killed himself in captivity, May 1945.
Leonardo Conti
Leonardo Conti
Leonardo Conti was the Reich Health Leader in Nazi Germany. He was born to a Swiss Italian father and mother in Lugano, Ticino, Switzerland; his mother later became the Reich Midwifery Leader in Nazi Germany....

, hanged himself in captivity, October 6, 1945.
Dr Ernst-Robert Grawitz
Ernst-Robert Grawitz
Ernst-Robert Grawitz was a German physician in Nazi Germany during World War II.- Early life :Grawitz was born in Charlottenburg, in the western part of Berlin, Germany.- Career :...

killed himself shortly before the fall of Berlin in April 1945.
Werner Heyde
Werner Heyde
Werner Heyde was a German psychiatrist. He was one of the main organizers of Nazi Germany's T-4 Euthanasia Program.-Education:Heyde completed his Abitur in 1920...

, after having escaped detection for 18 years, killed himself in 1964 before being brought to trial.
Dr Heinrich Gross
Heinrich Gross
Heinrich Gross was an Austrian psychiatrist, medical doctor and neurologist, best known for his proven involvement in the killing of at least nine children with physical, mental and/or emotional/behavioral characteristics considered "unclean" by the Nazi regime, under its Euthanasia Program...

was tried twice. One sentence was overturned and another was suspended; he died in 2005.
Lorenz Hackenholt
Lorenz Hackenholt
Lorenz Marie Hackenholt built and operated the gas chamber at the Bełżec extermination camp...

, vanished 1945.
Erich Koch
Erich Koch
Erich Koch was a Gauleiter of the Nazi Party in East Prussia from 1928 until 1945. Between 1941 and 1945 he was the Chief of Civil Administration of Bezirk Bialystok. During this period, he was also the Reichskommissar in Reichskommissariat Ukraine from 1941 until 1943...

served time in prison from 1950 to his death in 1986.
Erwin Lambert
Erwin Lambert
Erwin Hermann Lambert was a perpetrator of the Holocaust. In profession, he was a master mason, building trades foreman, Nazi Party member and member of the Schutzstaffel with the rank of SS-Unterscharführer...

, died in 1976.
Dr Friedrich Mennecke died in 1947 while awaiting trial.
Philipp, Landgrave of Hesse, the governor of Hesse-Nassau, was not tried for his part in the T4 program; he died in 1980.
Paul Nitsche
Paul Nitsche
Hermann Paul Nitsche was a German psychiatrist known for his expert endorsement of the Third Reich's euthanasia authorization and who later headed the T-4 Euthanasia Program....

was tried and executed by an East German court in 1948.
Professor Carl Schneider
Carl Schneider
Carl Schneider , professor at Heidelberg University, chairman of its department of Psychiatry, director of its clinic, was a senior researcher for the Action T4 Euthanasia program....

hanged himself in his prison cell in 1946, while awaiting trial.
Franz Schwede
Franz Schwede
Franz Schwede was a German Nazi politician, administrator, and war criminal. He was also known as "Franz Schwede-Coburg" during World War II.-Early years:...

was sentenced to 10 years in prison in 1948 and was pardoned in 1956; he died in 1960.
Dr. Ernst Illing was the director of the Vienna Psychiatric-Neurological Clinic for Children Am Spielgrund
Am Spiegelgrund clinic
Am Spiegelgrund was the name of a children's clinic in Vienna where hundreds of children were killed under the Nazi RegimeChildren's Euthanasia Program.-Context:Hitler's "Final Solution" was the order for the genocide of Jews in Europe...

, where he killed about 200 children, sentenced to death on July 18, 1946
Dr. Marianne Türk, was a doctor at Vienna Psychiatric-Neurological Clinic for Children Am Spielgrund
Am Spiegelgrund clinic
Am Spiegelgrund was the name of a children's clinic in Vienna where hundreds of children were killed under the Nazi RegimeChildren's Euthanasia Program.-Context:Hitler's "Final Solution" was the order for the genocide of Jews in Europe...

where together with Ernst Illing, she killed 200 children. She was sentenced to 10 years prison on July 18, 1946.

The Ministry for State Security

Stasi

The Ministry for State Security The Ministry for State Security The Ministry for State Security (German: Ministerium für Staatssicherheit (MfS), commonly known as the Stasi (abbreviation , literally State Security), was the official state security service of East Germany. The MfS was headquartered...

of East Germany had around 30,000 files of the T4 project stored away in their archives. Those files became available to the public in 1990 after the downfall of East Germany's totalitarian government and triggered a new wave of research.

External links

Website with photo of Philipp Bouhler and facsimile of Hitler's letter to Bouhler and Brandt authorising the T4 program
The complete text of Robert Lifton's The Nazi Doctors online
List of Action T-4 personnel
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Final Solutions: Murderous Racial Hygiene 1939–1945
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Euthanasia Program
Non-Jewish Victims of Persecution in Germany - About the Holocaust - Yad Vashem
Nazis euthanasia files made public by the BMJ/British Medical Association: files relating to the 200,000 euthanasia crimes
Holocaust Studies, personal story.Holocaust Studies: My Cousin Karlchen
A Report by Disability Rights Advocates in Arabic.A Report by Disability Rights Advocates in Arabic

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.

Background

Towards a policy of killing

Killing of children

Killing of adults

Gassing

Opposition

The Doctors' Trial

Others involved in the program

See also

External links