The first systematic mass killing programme of the Nazi state was directed not at Jews but at people with disabilities. Beginning in October 1939, the regime authorised what became known as the T4 programme, named for the address of its headquarters at Tiergartenstrasse 4 in Berlin. Approximately 70,000 patients in German psychiatric hospitals and care institutions were murdered between 1939 and 1941, when public protest forced the formal programme to be suspended. A larger “wild” killing of disabled patients continued in less organised form until the end of the war and is estimated to have killed approximately 250,000 people in total.
How the killing was done
Patients selected for killing were transferred from their home institutions to one of six designated killing centres: Hartheim, Sonnenstein, Grafeneck, Bernburg, Brandenburg, and Hadamar. They were murdered in purpose-built gas chambers, the first such installations in Nazi Germany. Their bodies were burned in attached crematoria. Families received standardised letters reporting that their relative had died of natural causes, with the cause of death often given as a contagious illness to discourage requests for the body.
The personnel pipeline
The T4 programme is historically significant beyond its immediate death toll because it produced the personnel and methods used in the later extermination camps. The doctors, nurses, and administrators who ran the gas chambers at Hartheim and Sonnenstein were transferred, after the formal suspension of T4, to the Operation Reinhard camps at Bełżec, Sobibor, and Treblinka. Christian Wirth, who had been the inspector of the T4 killing centres, became the first commandant of Bełżec and later the inspector of all three Reinhard camps. Franz Stangl, who had administered the killing at Hartheim, became commandant of Sobibor and then of Treblinka. The pipeline from killing the disabled to killing the Jews was direct.
The protest of Bishop von Galen
The formal T4 programme was suspended in August 1941 after Clemens August Graf von Galen, the Catholic bishop of Münster, denounced the killings from the pulpit of his cathedral. Galen’s sermon, which was copied and distributed widely, was the most public and consequential protest by any senior German cleric against any Nazi killing programme. The regime did not move against him: by 1941 Galen was too prominent and too well-loved to be arrested without political cost. The killing programme was not stopped, however. It was decentralised and continued, less visibly, in regional psychiatric institutions until the end of the war.
See also
- Franz Stangl
- Josef Mengele
- The Doctors Trial
- The Nuremberg Code
- Political Prisoners
- Other Nazi Medical Experiments
Sources
- Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews, 2 vols, HarperCollins, 1997 and 2007
- Christopher Browning, The Origins of the Final Solution, University of Nebraska Press and Yad Vashem, 2004
- Peter Longerich, Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews, Oxford University Press, 2010
- Yisrael Gutman, ed, The Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, 4 vols, Macmillan, 1995