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Euthanasia Program and Aktion T4
The goal
of the Nazi Euthanasia Program was to kill people with mental and physical
disabilities. In the Nazi view, this would cleanse the “Aryan” race of
people considered genetically defective and a financial burden to society.
Key Facts
·
1
The term
"euthanasia" means literally "good death". It usually
refers to causing a painless death for a chronically or terminally ill
individual who would otherwise suffer.
·
2
In the
Nazi context, however, "euthanasia" was a euphemistic or indirect
term for a clandestine murder program.
·
3
The
"euthanasia" program targeted, for systematic killing, patients with
mental and physical disabilities living in institutional settings in Germany
and German-annexed territories.
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Program to Murder People with Disabilities
The
Euthanasia Program was the systematic murder of institutionalized patients with
disabilities in Germany. It started in 1939, about two years before the Nazis
began systematically murdering Europe's Jews as part of the "Final Solution." The program was one of many radical
eugenic measures which aimed to restore the racial "integrity" of the
German nation. It aimed to eliminate what eugenicists and their supporters
considered "life unworthy of life": those individuals who—they
believed—because of severe psychiatric, neurological, or physical disabilities
represented both a genetic and a financial burden on German society and the
state.
Child "Euthanasia" Program
Photo
Nazi physician Karl Brandt(Photo)
Nazi
physician Karl Brandt, director of the Euthanasia Program. August 27, 1942.
Credits:
·
Instytut Pamieci Narodowej
In the
spring and summer months of 1939, a number of planners began to organize a
secret killing operation targeting disabled children. They were led by Philipp
Bouhler, the director of Hitler's private chancellery, and Karl Brandt,
Hitler's attending physician.
On August
18, 1939, the Reich Ministry of the Interior circulated a decree requiring all
physicians, nurses, and midwives to report newborn infants and children under
the age of three who showed signs of severe mental or physical disability.
Beginning
in October 1939, public health authorities began to encourage parents of
children with disabilities to admit their young children to one of a number of
specially designated pediatric clinics throughout Germany and Austria. In
reality, the clinics were children's killing wards. There, specially recruited
medical staff murdered their young charges by lethal overdoses of medication or
by starvation.
At first,
medical professionals and clinic administrators included only infants and
toddlers in the operation. As the scope of the measure widened, they included
youths up to 17 years of age. Conservative estimates suggest that at least
10,000 physically and mentally disabled German children perished as a result of
the child "euthanasia" program during the war years.
Aktion T4: Extending the Euthanasia Program
Photo
Adolf Hitler's authorization for the Euthanasia Program(Photo)
Adolf
Hitler's authorization for the Euthanasia Program (Operation T4), signed in October 1939
but dated September 1, 1939.
Credits:
·
National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, MD
·
View Archival Details(External website)
"Euthanasia"
planners quickly envisioned extending the killing program to adult disabled
patients living in institutional settings. In the autumn of 1939, Adolf Hitler
signed a secret authorization in order to protect participating physicians,
medical staff, and administrators from prosecution. This authorization was
backdated to September 1, 1939, to suggest that the effort was related to
wartime measures.
The
Führer Chancellery was compact and separate from state, government, or Nazi
Party apparatuses. For these reasons, Hitler chose it to serve as the engine
for the "euthanasia" campaign. The program's functionaries called
their secret enterprise "T4." This code-name came from the street
address of the program's coordinating office in Berlin: Tiergartenstrasse 4.
According
to Hitler's directive, Führer Chancellery director Phillip Bouhler and
physician Karl Brandt led the killing operation. Under their leadership, T4
operatives established six gassing installations for adults as part of the
"euthanasia" action. These were:
·
Brandenburg, on the Havel River near Berlin
·
Grafeneck, in southwestern Germany
·
Bernburg, in Saxony
·
Sonnenstein,
also in Saxony
·
Hartheim,
near Linz on the Danube in Austria
·
Hadamar, in Hessen
Media Essay
Euthanasia Program(Media Essay)
The
"euthanasia" program targeted, for systematic killing, patients with
mental and physical disabilities living in institutional settings in Germany
and German-annexed territories. Historians estimate that the program claimed
the lives of 250,000 men, women, and children.
Item 1 of
13 : Buses used to transport patients from the Eichberg hospital near Wiesbaden
to Hadamar
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Buses used to transport patients from the Eichberg hospital
near Wiesbaden to Hadamar
Buses
used to transport patients from the Eichberg hospital near Wiesbaden to Hadamar euthanasia center. The windows were painted to
prevent people from seeing those inside. Germany, between May and September
1941.
·
"Euthanasia" centers, Germany 1940-1945
In Nazi
usage, "euthanasia" referred to the systematic
killing of those Germans whom the Nazis deemed "unworthy of life"
because of alleged genetic diseases or defects. Beginning in the fall of 1939,
gassing installations were established at Bernburg, Brandenburg, Grafeneck, Hadamar, Hartheim, and Sonnenstein. Patients were selected by
doctors and transferred from clinics to one of these centralized gassing
installations and killed. After public outrage forced an end to centralized
killings, doctors instead administered lethal injections to those selected for
"euthanasia" in clinics and hospitals throughout Germany. In this
way, the "euthanasia" program continued and expanded until the end
of World War II.
Robert
and his family were Jehovah's Witnesses. The Nazis regarded Jehovah's Witnesses
as enemies of the state for their refusal to
take an oath of loyalty to Adolf Hitler, or to serve in the German army.
Robert's family continued its religious activities despite Nazi persecution.
Shortly before Robert's birth, his mother was imprisoned briefly for
distributing religious materials. Robert's hip was injured during delivery,
leaving him with a disability. When Robert was five years, he was ordered to
report for a physical in Schlierheim. His mother overheard staff comments about
putting Robert "to sleep." Fearing they intended to kill him,
Robert's mother grabbed him and ran from the clinic. Nazi physicians had
begun systematic killing of those they deemed
physically and mentally disabled in the fall of 1939.
·
Benno Müller-Hill, Antje Kosemund, Paul Eggert, and Elvira
Manthey describe the Euthanasia Program
Benno
Müller-Hill, professor of genetics at the University of Cologne and the author
of Murderous Science, describes the Nazi "Euthanasia" Program, with oral history excerpts
from Antje Kosemund, Paul Eggert, and Elvira Manthey. Antje Kosemund had a
disabled younger sister who was admitted to Alsterdorf Institute, Hamburg,
December 1933, at the age of three and was subsequently killed in 1944. Paul
Eggert was a resident of the orphanage section of the Dortmund-Applerbeck
institution from 1942-43 where he witnessed the euthanasia of fellow orphans.
Elvira Manthey was taken with her sister from a large, impoverished family and
placed in a children’s home, 1938.
[Photo
credits: Getty Images, New York City; Yad Vashem, Jerusalem;
Max-Planck-Institut für Psychiatrie (Deutsche Forschungsanstalt für
Psychiatrie), Historisches Archiv, Bildersammlung GDA, Munich; Bundesarchiv
Koblenz, Germany; Dokumentationsarchiv des österreichischen Widerstandes,
Vienna; Kriemhild Synder: Die Landesheilanstalt Uchtspringe und ihre
Verstrickung in nationalsozialistische Verbrechen; HHStAW Abt. 461, Nr.
32442/12; Privat Collection L. Orth, APG Bonn.]
·
The elder
of two daughters born to a Jewish father and a Catholic mother, Helene was
raised as a Catholic in Vienna. Her father died in action during World War I
when Helene was just 5 years old, and her mother remarried when Helene was 15.
Known affectionately as Helly, Helene loved to swim and go to the opera. After
finishing her secondary education she entered law school.
1933-39:
At 19 Helene first showed signs of mental illness. Her condition worsened
during 1934, and by 1935 she had to give up her law studies and her job as a
legal secretary. After losing her trusted fox terrier, Lydi, she suffered a
major breakdown. She was diagnosed as schizophrenic, and was placed in Vienna's
Steinhof Psychiatric Hospital. Two years later, in March 1938, the
Germans annexed Austria to Germany.
1940:
Helene was confined in Steinhof and was not allowed home even though her
condition had improved. Her parents were led to believe that she would soon be
released. Instead, Helene's mother was informed in August that Helene had been
transferred to a hospital in Niedernhart, just across the border in Bavaria. In
fact, Helene was transferred to a converted prison in Brandenburg, Germany,
where she was undressed, subjected to a physical examination, and then led into
a shower room.
Helene
was one of 9,772 persons gassed that year in the Brandenburg "euthanasia" center. She was officially listed as dying in
her room of "acute schizophrenic excitement."
·
Hartheim castle euthanasia killing center
Hartheim
castle, a euthanasia killing center where people with physical and mental
disabilities were killed by gassing and lethal injection. Hartheim, Austria,
date uncertain.
·
A victim of the Nazi Euthanasia Program
A victim
of the Nazi Euthanasia Program. Hospitalized in a psychiatric
ward for her nonconformist beliefs and writings, she was murdered on January
26, 1944. Germany, date uncertain.
·
Emmi G., a victim of the Euthanasia Program
Emmi G.,
a 16-year-old housemaid diagnosed as schizophrenic. She was sterilized and sent
to the Meseritz-Obrawalde euthanasia center where she was killed with an
overdose of tranquilizers on December 7, 1942. Place and date uncertain.
·
Kaufbeuren euthanasia facility
Kaufbeuren
euthanasia facility. Killings by lethal injection took place in Kaufbeuren.
Germany, 1945.
·
Head nurse of the children's ward at Kaufbeuren
Head
nurse of the children's ward at the Kaufbeuren-Irsee euthanasia facility.
Kaufbeuren, Germany, 1945.
·
Personnel
of T4, the agency created to administer the Nazi Euthanasia Program. Pictured
from left to right are: Erich Bauer (chauffeur), Dr. Rudolf Lonauer, Dr. Victor
Ratka, Dr. Friedrich Mennecke, Dr. Paul Nitsche,and Dr. Gerhard
Wischer. Berlin, Germany, 1939–45.
·
Friedrich Mennecke, a Euthanasia Program physician
Friedrich
Mennecke, a Euthanasia Program physician who was
responsible for sending many patients to be gassed. He was sentenced to death
in 1946. Germany, date uncertain.
·
Irmgard Huber, chief nurse at Hadamar euthanasia killing
center
Portrait
of Irmgard Huber, chief nurse at the Hadamar euthanasia killing center, in her office. The
photograph was taken by an American military photographer on April 7, 1945.
Using a
practice developed for the child "euthanasia" program, in the autumn
of 1939, T4 planners began to distribute carefully formulated questionnaires to
all public health officials, public and private hospitals, mental institutions,
and nursing homes for the chronically ill and aged. The limited space and
wording on the forms, as well as the instructions in the accompanying cover
letter, combined to give the impression that the survey was intended simply to
gather statistical data.
The
form's sinister purpose was suggested only by the emphasis placed upon the
patient's capacity to work and by the categories of patients which the inquiry
required health authorities to identify. The categories of patients were:
·
those
suffering from schizophrenia, epilepsy, dementia, encephalitis, and other chronic
psychiatric or neurological disorders
·
those not
of German or "related" blood
·
the
criminally insane or those committed on criminal grounds
·
those who
had been confined to the institution in question for more than five years
Secretly
recruited "medical experts," physicians—many of them of significant
reputation—worked in teams of three to evaluate the forms. On the basis of
their decisions beginning in January 1940, T4 functionaries began to remove
patients selected for the "euthanasia" program from their home
institutions. The patients were transported by bus or by rail to one of the
central gassing installations for killing.
Within
hours of their arrival at such centers, the victims perished in gas chambers.
The gas chambers, disguised as shower facilities, used pure, bottled carbon
monoxide gas. T4 functionaries burned the bodies in crematoria attached to the
gassing facilities. Other workers took the ashes of cremated victims from a
common pile and placed them in urns to send to the relatives of the victims.
The families or guardians of the victims received such an urn, along with a
death certificate and other documentation, listing a fictive cause and date of
death.
Photo
Two pages
of the death registry at Hadamar listing false causes of death. Thousands of
the physically and mentally disabled were killed there as part of the Euthanasia Program. Germany, April 5, 1945.
Credits:
·
National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, MD
·
View Archival Details(External website)
Because
the program was secret, T-4 planners and functionaries took elaborate measures
to conceal its deadly designs. Even though physicians and institutional
administrators falsified official records in every case to indicate that the
victims died of natural causes, the "euthanasia" program quickly
became an open secret. There was widespread public knowledge of the measure.
Private and public protests concerning the killings took place, especially from
members of the German clergy. Among these clergy was the bishop of Münster,
Clemens August Count von Galen. He protested the T-4 killings in a sermon
August 3, 1941. In light of the widespread public knowledge and the public and
private protests, Hitler ordered a halt to the Euthanasia Program in late
August 1941.
According
to T4's own internal calculations, the "euthanasia" effort claimed
the lives of 70,273 institutionalized mentally and physically disabled persons
at the six gassing facilities between January 1940 and August 1941.
Second Phase
Hitler's
call for a halt to the T4 action did not mean an end to the "euthanasia"
killing operation. Child "euthanasia" continued as before. Moreover,
in August 1942, German medical professionals and healthcare workers resumed the
killings, although in a more carefully concealed manner than before. More
decentralized than the initial gassing phase, the renewed effort relied closely
upon regional exigencies, with local authorities determining the pace of the
killing.
Using
drug overdose and lethal injection—already successfully used in child
"euthanasia"—in this second phase as a more covert means of killing,
the "euthanasia" campaign resumed at a broad range of institutions
throughout the Reich. Many of these institutions also systematically starved
adult and child victims.
The Euthanasia
Program continued until the last days of World War II, expanding to include an ever wider range of
victims, including geriatric patients, bombing victims, and foreign forced
laborers. Historians estimate that the Euthanasia Program, in all its phases,
claimed the lives of 250,000 individuals.
People with Disabilities in the German-Occupied
East
Persons
with disabilities also fell victim to German violence in the German-occupied
east. The Germans confined the Euthanasia Program, which began as a racial
hygiene measure, to the Reich proper—that is, to Germany and to the annexed
territories of Austria, Alsace-Lorraine, the Protectorate
of Bohemia and Moravia, and to German-annexed parts
of Poland. However, the Nazi ideological conviction which labeled these persons
"life unworthy of life" also made institutionalized patients the
targets of shooting actions in Poland and the Soviet Union. There, the killings
of disabled patients were the work of SS and police forces, not of the
physicians, caretakers, and T4 administrators who implemented the Euthanasia
Program itself.
In areas
of Pomerania, West Prussia, and occupied Poland, SS and police units murdered
some 30,000 patients by the autumn of 1941 in order to accommodate ethnic
German settlers (Volksdeutsche) transferred there from the Baltic
countries and other areas.
SS and
police units also murdered disabled patients in mass shootings and gas vans in
occupied Soviet territories. Thousands more died, murdered in their beds and
wards by SS and auxiliary police units in Poland and the Soviet Union. These
murders lacked the ideological component attributed to the centralized
Euthanasia Program. The SS was apparently motivated primarily by economic and
material concerns in killing institutionalized patients in occupied Poland and
the Soviet Union.
The SS
and the Wehrmacht quickly made use of the hospitals emptied in these killing
operations as barracks, reserve hospitals, and munitions storage depots. In
rare cases, the SS used the empty facilities as a formal T4 killing site. An
example is the "euthanasia" facility Tiegenhof, near Gnesen (today
Gniezno, in west-central Poland).
The Significance of the Euthanasia Program
The
Euthanasia Program represented in many ways a rehearsal for Nazi Germany's
subsequent genocidal policies. The Nazi leadership extended the ideological
justification conceived by medical perpetrators for the destruction of the
"unfit" to other categories of perceived biological enemies, most
notably to Jews and Roma (Gypsies).
Planners
of the "Final Solution" View this
term in the glossary later
borrowed the gas chamber and accompanying crematoria, specifically designed for
the T4 campaign, to murder Jews in German-occupied Europe. T4 personnel who had
shown themselves reliable in this first mass murder program figured prominently
among the German staff stationed at the Operation Reinhard killing centers of Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka.
Like
those who planned the physical annihilation of the European Jews, the planners
of the Euthanasia Program imagined a racially pure and productive society. They
embraced radical strategies to eliminate those who did not fit within their
vision.
Media Essay
Propaganda for the Euthanasia Program(Media Essay)
Item 1 of
5 : Scene from a film produced by the Reich Propaganda Ministry.
·
Scene from a film produced by the Reich Propaganda Ministry.
This
photo originates from a film produced by the Reich Propaganda Ministry. It shows two doctors in a
ward in an unidentified asylum. The existence of the patients in the ward is
described as "life only as a burden." Such propaganda images
were intended to develop public sympathy for the Euthanasia Program.
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