T-4 Euthanasia Program

This poster reads: "60,000 Reichsmark is what this person suffering from hereditary defects costs the community during his lifetime. Fellow German, that is your money, too. Read 'New People', the monthly magazine of the Bureau for Race Politics of the NSDAP."

T-4 Euthanasia Program (Tiergartenstraße 4 or Aktion Tiergartenstrasse 4) was the official name of the Nazi Germany eugenics program which forcefully conducted mass sterilizations and killing of Germans who were institutionalized or suffering from birth defects. In total, an estimated 200,000 people were killed as a result of the program.

Establishment and purpose

The program was established by Adolf Hitler, operated under the authority of Chief of the Führer's Chancellery Philip Bouhler and SS-Doctor Karl Brandt, and was headed by Werner Heyde and Paul Nitsche. The name T-4 derived from the address of the program's offices in Berlin at No 4 Tiergartenstrasse.

The purpose of the program was to both lower expenses by systematically killing the institutionalized as well as preserving the genetic quality of the German population by sterilizing people with physical deformities, handicaps, or mental illnesses. The Nazis referred to such people as "lebensunwertes Leben", popularized by Alfred Hoche and Karl Binding and literally translates as "life unworthy of life." Opposition put forth by Ewald Meltzer and others did not turn the tide of opinion. Disabled children were removed from their families and taken to special hospitals. The program was later expanded to include adults, although most disabled adults were already subject to compulsory sterilization as a result of the "Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring".

The Nazis characterized the killing of those deemed "useless eaters" as "euthanasia" or "mercy killings", though the wide scope, lack of consent from either the targeted or their relatives, and the eugenic motives of the program led some contemporaries and later observers to label the deaths as simply a form of medicalized mass murder.

History of the program

Extermination was carried out at Grafeneck (beginning January 1940), Hartheim (beginning May 1940), Hadamar (beginning January 1941), Bernburg (beginning November 1940), Brandenburg (beginning February 1940) and Sonnenstein (beginning June 1940) using gas, suffocation, lethal injections, poisoning, starvation, and overdose of medication. The first experiments with mobile gas vans were performed in March 1940 in the hospital in Kochanowka near Łódź. The Nazis also experimented with piping carbon monoxide from truck engines into sealed chambers. Much of this extermination was supervised by the psychiatrists Carl "Hans Heinze" Sennhenn and Werner Villinger. Sennhenn provided Nazi researchers with the brains of hundreds of victims, while Villinger conducted experiments upon victims before ordering their deaths. Gas chambers were built at Hartheim to suffocate mostly adult victims with carbon monoxide even before the widespread use of such methods during The Holocaust.

Hitler ordered a halt to the program on August 18 1941 following a public sermon attacking the regime by the Roman Catholic Bishop of Münster, Clemens August Graf von Galen, and private protests by other Church figures and relatives of the victims. By this time 70,273 people had already been executed. However such public resistance merely slowed the program, and the killings continued under greater secrecy. Some of the personnel trained under the program later continued their trade in Nazi extermination camps.

Many of the key figures responsible for conducting the program, such as Christian Wirth and Franz Stangl, were also actively involved in developing gas chamber technology for the Holocaust and assisted in the construction of the camps at Belzec, Treblinka and Sobibór in Operation Reinhard. Aside from the well-known camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau these were the main centers of extermination by gas for millions of people.

By the end of 1941, every third inmate of psychiatric institutions in Germany had been killed under the program, whether by direct means or by starvation, resulting in about 93,000 additional deaths.

Legacy

A plaque set in the pavement at No 4 Tiergartenstrasse commemorates the victims of the Nazi "euthanasia" programme.

Germany's practice of euthanasia did not end in 1941. Doctors and nurses continued the practice at hospitals around Germany and Austria. Killings and intentional neglect were conducted in such a way as to minimize the suspicion of the German population; however, no such precautions were taken when exterminating people of the occupied territories. Acts of cruelty and violence there were reported and recorded.

Doctors and nursing personnel involved in the euthanasia program were not always brought to justice. Long after the creation of the new German states in 1949, high-ranking officials involved in euthanasia had reportedly escaped prosecution and were still involved in the German health system.

References

* "Nazi 'Euthanasia' Programs" in Dieter Kuntz, ed. Deadly Medicine: Creating the Master Race by Michael Burleigh. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum/University of North Carolina Press, 2004. ISBN 0-8078-2916-1
* Dokumente zur Euthanasie. by Ernst Klee. ISBN 3-5962-4327-0, in German
* Euthanasie im NS-Staat. Die Vernichtung lebensunwerten Lebens by Ernst Klee. Frankfurt am Main 1983, ISBN 3-5962-4326-2, in German
* The Origins of Nazi Genocide. From Euthanasia to the Final Solution by Henry Friedlander. University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill & London, 1995, ISBN 0-8078-2208-6.
* A Sign for Cain by Fredric Wertham. MacMillan Company, New York, 1967, ISBN 0-8488-1657-9
* Was sie taten. Was sie wurden by Ernst Klee. ISBN 3596243645, in German
* Thompson, D.: The Nazi Euthanasia Program, Axis History Forum, March 14, 2004. URL last accessed April 24, 2006.

External links

* Information on the T4 program
* Useless Eaters: Disability as Genocidal Marker in Nazi Germany.
* Online inventory of archives dealing with euthanasia under the Nazi regime (in German)
* Cardinal Galen's speech against Nazi euthanasia
* Statistics of T4 victims in German-occupied Poland

T-4 Euthanasia Program: Encyclopedia BETA

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