Aktion T4 is the conventional  name given to the Nazi program of eugenics , which plans the Killing of people with genetic incurable diseases or with one or more physical  malformations, “those lives which are defined unworthy living”, this done under the responsibility of same doctors. It is estimated that plan T4 killed from 60.000 to 200.000 people. T4 stands for ”Tiergartenstrasse 4”, the address of a district in Berlin where there was the head office of Gemeinnutzige Stiftung fur Heil-und Anstaltspflege, the public agency for the health and the social assistance. The word Aktion T4 does not appear in the documents of plat time, but Nazi people used that name written in code EU-Aktion or E-Aktion (E, Eu stands for euthanasia). Program of euthanasia is a word used in Nuremberg trial both by the judges and the attorneys. It is also said death for mercy.

The program T4 was put into effect in the field of eugenics and racial hygiene and aimed to decrease the State expenditure for the cures and for the maintenance of hospitals for disabled people in a period in which the economic priority was to buy new  weapons for the German army. Professor Robert Jay Lifton (an American psychotherapist), the author of “Nazi doctors” and remarkable scholar of Aktion T4, points out the differences between this plan and real euthanasia very clearly: he explains that the national-socialist concept of euthanasia is based on the mentioned  work written by Alfred Jost (“The right to die”) and comes to this conclusion: Jost thinks that the State, the social institution, has the right to decide on the individual’s death. This idea is contrary to the Anglo- American concept of euthanasia, which is based on the right of a single individual to die, to decide to die as a supreme human claiming. Instead Jost believed that « the State had got this right even if for mercy, for relieving the pain of incurable ill people, he was mainly interested in the heath of “Volk” and of the State. »

In reality, a form of eugenics was already used before the First World War: in that period there was a large number of chronic patients in German hospitals: 45.000 in Prussia, more than 7.000 in Saxsony. The shortage of food, caused by the war, might have led many doctors to speed up the dead of same of these so-called “useless mouths”. The eugenics project started gradually. The first step of this racial politics was the notorious law on the sterilization  of disabled people suffering from hereditary diseases such as congenital cretinism, down’s syndrome, schizophrenia , manic depressive psychosis, epilepsy, chorea, blindness, deafness, serious physical malformations and also those who suffer from a serious alcoholism had to be sterilized. This law, after being discussed in parliament on the 14 July 1933, was approved on the 25 July in the same year as a Law useful to prevent the new generations from catching hereditary illnesses. This law started on 1 January 1934 and the effect was immediate: a large number of  German citizens were sterilized.

Even if there are no exact figures at our disposal, it is thought that at least 375.000 people, the 5% of the total German population, were sterilized in Nazi regime. At the same time an effective campaign in order to convince German people that sterilization and euthanasia were right was launched: films, great exhibitions, magazines were spread everywhere. Few years later the law about marital health was approved; it forbade disabled people to get married and to have children, with this reason ”to preserve the purity of the race”.

The list of the diseases mentioned in the law:          1 congenic  mental deficiency      2 schizophrenic      3 circulaire folie      4 hereditary epilepsy      5 hereditary St Vitus’s dance      6 hereditary  blindness      7 serious hereditary physical malformation      8 serious alcoholism ( at discretion)

Gherard Wagner, the general doctor of the Reich, was appointed leader of the action as Hitler himself desired. He was replaced by his deputy Leonardo Conti, a pathologist of Italian origins and really convinced of the superiority of the race in the last months of 1938. Sterilizations was done in every hospital under control of a specific committee formed by doctors and Party Members , who took the decisions. But the eugenics programme did not only include sterilization. It involved also the physical elimination, the first ones to be eliminated were  the children who had some malformations. For this reason on the 18 August 1939 the Home Affairs Minister issued a bill called “The Obligation to declare all the disabled new-borns” which obliged all the doctors and midwives “to reveal the names of all the children born with those “particular medical conditions”

These children till the age of three were to be reported to the office of Public Health and later they  were transferred to the so-called institutions for the expert assistance of the children in hospitals or private clinics where they were given lethal medicines. The killing happened by means of lethal medicines (scopolamine, morphine and barbiturates)  or of lack of food. The historians who deepened their knowledge of this terrible page of Nazi history estimate that at last 8.000 children died in this way. On the basis of Hitler’s order in October 1939 this action also included the adults. This order was backdated on 1 September 1939, the day of the German military attack to Poland. The beginning of the Second World War distracted people’s attention from eugenics. The Nazi, in this way, felt free to kill all the “useless mouths” to save money and to have more free beds in hospitals.

The first place for killing was prepared from December 1939 to January 1940 in an ex prison near Brandeburg on the Haven. The place, an isolate castle, was chosen for being near Berlin and easily  cached to avoid possible public protests. As the general proof of gas-killing, after having prepared a suitable room, ready to contain 70 people, all the leaders of T4, among who Brack himself, Boulher, Conti and Linden were present. Immediately after getting this place ready in Brandeburg five more places for killing were prepared in all Germany.

These are the psychiatric hospitals prepared for euthanasia:

Brandenburg near Berlino (January 1940 - September 1940), Grafeneck  near Stoccarda (January 1940 - December 1940), Hartheim  near Linz in Austria (January 1940 - December 1944), Sonnenstein/Pirna near Dresda (April 1940 - August 1943), Bernburg near Magdeburgo (September 1940 - April 1943), Hadamar near Coblenza (January 1941 - August 1941).

As regard their inside organization every place had its own medical staff very often without a clear knowledge of anatomy and recruited random even among university student, nurses  and so called firemen were in charge of the gas and cremation of the dead at the crematory. Everything happened like in an assembly line. Those patients were taken from an institution were the staff left a regular receipt with the exact number of the people taken away.  Once they arrived at the place of killing, the disables were put in waiting-rooms which were very often above the gas-chambers. After taking off their clothes and their personal  belongings,  which were carefully collected by the nurses and made the fund of T4 bigger and bigger, these people were visited  by doctors  very superficially, just to check if there was some gold in their teeth, in this case, they got same sticking plaster as a sign; they were invited to take a shower and taken to the gas-chamber which  was hermetically sealed,  opening from pipes put near the ceiling by a mechanism put in a near room.

They died ten minutes later, the staff heaped all the dead bodies, took them to the crematory  and perfunctorily all the ashes  were put into a mass grave. When the killing-plan worked at full capacity, rather than 70 people as in the beginning, 300 or 400 were put in the room each time. On the 24 August 1941 when the project was temporally held up, it is thought teat  T4 killed more them 70.000 people. But the historians  in Nuremberg thought that this figure was really inferior to the real one as, considering the evidence documents, the count was referred only  to the place of killing without counting the large number of people killed by lethal injections, before and after the mass-slaughter.

Objecting to the plan Hitler and his staff were aware that this plan could be unpopular  in Germany because of the radicalism of this biomedical politics, so they avoided writing orders about politics which in the future could be considered  “crimes against mankind”, so this plan of killing was done in secret to avoid the negative reaction of the public opinion. In reality when T4 started, it was impossible to keep it secret because of the hundreds of doctors, nurses, coordinators  involved; on the other hand the majority of the patients doomed to die had relatives really interested in their welfare/health. In spite of the strict orders of secrecy given at all levels, someone, who was working in those places, spoke about what was going on inside them.  In same cases the families realized what is happening had reading the clearly fake death certificates, an  example appendicitis was written as a cause of death in a patient who had it removed in a previous operation.

In other cases all the families in the same village received their relative’s death certificate at the same time. In the towns near the places of killing everyone was able to see the buses arrive, the chimneys  of the crematory give off smoke and of course they made their deductions. In the 1940 people started to  realise what was going on and many German families discharged  their relatives from psychiatric hospitals and sanatorium  to take care of them at home, very often paying large sums of money and making a lot sacrifices. Doctors and psychiatrists some time cooperated with the families to discharge patients from hospitals or in case of wealthy families, doctors moved patients to private clinics where the plan T4 did not have any reasons to exist, as it involved only state institutions.  So we have to realise how the T4 plan involved mainly workers’ families as the wealthy ones could afford to hospitalize their relatives in private clinics.

The Catholic Church, which had avoided any direct contacts with the Party since 1933, hoping to keep its main institutions became more and more hostile in front of the murders of disabled patients in hospitals. On June 26 1941 the Church started to criticize with a letter signed by all the bishops which was read in all the churches on July 6 1941 and which encouraged the catholic people to increase their protest against the T4 plan. In August 1941 the protest against the T4 plan spread in Bavaria. For these reasons on August 24 1941 Hitler ordered to stop it.  

The staff employed in this plan, because of their experience gained in killing by gas, was only in part used to reach the final solution in the Jewish matter.   But Action T4 was not completely stopped; in spite of the official suspension, the killing of disabled people (children and adults) went on, even if not in a regular way, till the end of the war. The killing continued because of the decisions of single doctors or local authorities by means of lethal injections or by hunger or thirst.

…at Nuremberg trial

The charges showed that in the national-socialist Germany German doctors  had planned and put an eugenics program into effect (Aktion T4), that was the regular killing of people considered unworthy  living (mental disabled, disabled people, internees) and that during the Second World War the same doctors had carried out pseudo-scientific experiment on prisoners in concentration camps without their consent. The trial started on December 9 1946; the accusations were listed on October 25 1946 and ended on August 20 1947. Eighty-five witnesses were listened to and 1471 documents were analysed. The count of indictment against the doctors involved in Aktion T4: “ From September 1939 to April 1945 Karl Brandt, Blome, Brack and Hoven, willingly, on purpose and  illegally took part in war crimes, being involved and promoting the eugenics program for killing thousands of people considered unhealthy, incurable, deformed or mentally ill, using gas, lethal injections or other means”. 

The hangings took place in the prison in Landsberg am Lech, in Bavaria on June 2, 1948.

Sentences:

INSIGHTS