T-4 Euthanasia Program

This poster reads: "This person suffering from hereditary defects costs the people 60,000 Reichmarks during his lifetime. People, that is your money. Read 'New People'."

T-4 Euthanasia Program was the official name of the extermination program under Nazi Germany's Eugenics Racial Policy. It was established by Adolf Hitler and operated under authority of Chief of the State Chancellery Philip Bouhler and Dr. Karl Brandt. The name T-4 comes from the address of the office, Tiergartenstraße 4 in Berlin.

The purpose of the the program was to maintain "purity" of the "Aryan race" by systematically killing citizens who were physically deformed, disabled, handicapped, or suffering from mental illness. "Defective" children were removed from their families and taken to "hospitals". The program was later expanded to include adults to prevent any "deficient" member of the German "Master race" from breeding so they could not pass on their "inferiority."

Extermination was carried out at Grafeneck, Hartheim, Hadamar, Bernburg, Brandenburg and Sonnenstein by way of gassing, suffocation, injection, poisoning, starvation, and overdose of medication. Much of this extermination was supervised by the psychiatrist Carl Hans Heinze Sennhenn and Werner Villinger. Sennhenn supplied hundreds of brains of the exterminated to Nazi researchers. Werner Villinger conducted experiments with humans before ordering them to their deaths. Even before the Holocaust, the first gas chambers were built at Hartheim where mostly adult victims were suffocated with carbon monoxide.

On August 18, 1941, Hitler ordered a temporary halt to the program, due to resistance from churches and relatives of the victims. 70,000 people had already been exterminated. The German public resistance led to a slowdown but did not stop the program. In fact, it was conducted with greater secrecy. Trained crews continued in their trade. Some graduates of the Aktion T4 program were then transferred to military concentration camps.

Most of the persons such as Josef Mengele responsible for carrying out the T-4 Euthanasia Program became active in the Holocaust as well, developing gas chamber technology and even helping to build death camps at Belzec, Treblinka or Sobibór in Operation Reinhard. Aside from the well-known Auschwitz-Birkenau these were the main centers of extermination by gas for millions of people.

By the end of 1941, every third inmate of a psychiatric institution in Germany had already died, either by being directly killed or by starvation, leading to about 93,000 "free beds." An estimated 200,000 people died under the auspices of the T-4 program. 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 was conducted in such a way 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 were reported and recorded.

Doctors and nursing personnel involved with the euthanasia were not always brought to justice. Long after the creation of the new German states in 1949 high-ranking officials involved with the euthanasia had escaped prosecution and were still involved with 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 Fredrick Wertheim. MacMillan Company, New York, 1967, ISBN 0–8488–1657–9
Was sie taten. Was sie wurden by Ernst Klee. ISBN 3596243645, in German

T-4 Euthanasia Program

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