Aktion T4 halted

In the second half of August 1941 Adolf Hitler ordered a halt to Aktion T4 – the mass murder, carried on for a year and a half, of patients from German psychiatric hospitals and care homes in six centres equipped with gas chambers. The programme, which its architects called “euthanasia”, had nothing to do with relieving suffering: the sick were killed without their knowledge or consent and without the knowledge of their families, on the strength of forms assessed by doctors who had never seen them, for ideological and economic reasons. By 1 September 1941, 70,273 people had been murdered in this way. Hitler stopped the operation when its secret had ceased to be a secret and when, from the pulpit in the cathedral city of Münster, Bishop Clemens August Graf von Galen had publicly called it murder.

Popular chronologies record under 18 August that Hitler “ordered a temporary halt” to euthanasia because of protests. Historians – among them the authors of German and American studies and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington – date the decision to 24 August 1941. On that day Hitler gave an oral instruction to end the gassing to his escort physician Karl Brandt, and through him to the head of the Chancellery of the Führer, Philipp Bouhler. No written order exists, just as no law had ever existed that permitted these people to be killed. The frequently repeated observation about what became of the T4 staff is, however, accurate: the men who had learned to murder in the T4 centres did not go home but were sent where their “experience” was needed – above all to the extermination camps in occupied Poland.

“Life unworthy of life”

In 1920 the lawyer Karl Binding and the psychiatrist Alfred Hoche published a pamphlet on “permitting the destruction of life unworthy of life”, which lent the idea of “eliminating” the incurably ill a veneer of scientific respectability. The National Socialists fused it with eugenics and the ideology of “racial hygiene”. The first step was the Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring of 14 July 1933, passed in the same month in which the NSDAP became the only party in Germany. Under it, between 300,000 and 400,000 people had been forcibly sterilised by 1945. The same categories of the “hereditarily tainted” and the “useless” that were used in the persecution of “asocials” opened the way to killing in 1939.

The immediate pretext was the case of an infant from Saxony, born in February 1939 with severe disabilities, whose parents asked Hitler for permission for a “mercy killing”. Hitler sent Brandt to Leipzig, and Brandt authorised the child’s death. According to research, the child was Gerhard Kretschmar. In the summer of 1939 the Chancellery of the Führer, Hitler’s private office, prepared a programme for killing disabled children, and on 18 August 1939 the Interior Ministry ordered doctors and midwives to report newborns and young children with developmental defects. Selected children were sent to special “paediatric wards”, where they were killed by injection or drug overdose.

The killing of adults was prepared at the same time. In October 1939 Hitler signed, on his private letterhead, a brief authorisation backdated to 1 September 1939, the day of the attack on Poland. In it he charged Bouhler and Brandt with extending the powers of designated doctors so that patients judged incurable “after a critical assessment of their condition” could be granted a “mercy death”. It was not a law and was never published in the official gazette; the Justice Minister, Franz Gürtner, was shown it only in 1940. A draft “euthanasia” law was shelved because announcing it publicly in wartime was considered too risky.

Tiergartenstraße 4

The organisation was entrusted to the head of one of the departments of the Chancellery of the Führer, Viktor Brack. From April 1940 the operation’s headquarters was housed in a Berlin villa at Tiergartenstraße 4, and it was from this address that the post-war name “T4” derived. It operated under the cover of several seemingly independent institutions, among them the transport company Gekrat, whose grey buses became the symbol of the whole operation. The medical director was the Würzburg psychiatrist Werner Heyde, succeeded at the end of 1941 by Paul Nitsche.

From October 1939 institutions throughout the Reich received forms asking about patients’ diagnoses, length of stay, capacity for work, citizenship and “race”. The criteria covered schizophrenia, epilepsy, dementia and mental disability, as well as anyone who had been in an institution for more than five years, did not hold German citizenship or was not “of German or kindred blood”. Directors were told the forms were for economic planning. They were assessed by expert doctors who never saw the patients: a red cross meant death. At a meeting on 9 October 1939 the number of victims was estimated at around 70,000.

The killing took place in six centres: Grafeneck Castle in Württemberg, a former prison in Brandenburg an der Havel, Hartheim Castle near Linz, the Sonnenstein institution in Pirna, Bernburg and Hadamar. Grafeneck and Brandenburg began operating in January 1940; Hadamar and Bernburg replaced them in 1940–1941. Patients were brought in by bus, often via transit institutions that covered the tracks. On arrival, after a cursory medical inspection, they were killed with carbon monoxide from cylinders in a room disguised as a shower room, with dummy shower heads. A doctor opened the gas valve. The bodies were burned in crematoria after gold teeth had been pulled out. Registry offices attached to the centres issued death certificates with an invented cause and date of death, and the centres exchanged paperwork so that families could not establish where their relative had really died. Families were sent urns containing random ashes.

The first victims: patients in occupied Poland

Before the first gas chamber was put into operation at Grafeneck, the Germans had already been murdering patients of Polish psychiatric hospitals for several months. In the territories annexed to the Reich the hospitals were emptied to make room for the army, military hospitals and German settlers, and the sick were treated as superfluous ballast. The killing was done by SS and police units, the Selbstschutz and the formations that were at the same time carrying out Operation Tannenberg against the Polish intelligentsia. Patients of the institution at Kocborowo near Starogard and of the hospital in Świecie were shot in the autumn of 1939 in the Szpęgawski Forest and at Mniszek: according to Polish findings, 1,692 patients died in the Szpęgawski Forest alone. At Fort VII in Poznań, in October 1939, gas was used to murder people for the first time in Europe: patients of the hospital at Owińska and of the psychiatric ward of a Poznań hospital were gassed with carbon monoxide in one of the bunkers. In December 1939 Heinrich Himmler watched a demonstration of such a gassing.

Later the sick were killed in vehicles converted into gas chambers, used by the SS unit of Herbert Lange. In January 1940 more than 500 patients of the hospital in Kościan were murdered in this way, in March 1940 some 1,500 patients from the Kochanówka institution near Łódź, and in April almost 500 from Warta. In the General Government, on 12 January 1940, an SS unit shot between 420 and 500 patients of the psychiatric hospital in Chełm, depending on the source. In the spring of 1940 patients from German institutions in Western Pomerania were also brought to the forests at Piaśnica to be killed. Polish researchers – above all Zdzisław Jaroszewski’s team in the 1993 study Zagłada psychicznie chorych w Polsce 1939–1945 (The Extermination of the Mentally Ill in Poland 1939–1945) – estimate the number of murdered patients of Polish hospitals at between ten and twenty thousand. In occupied Poland not even the pretence of a procedure was kept up.

A secret that ceased to be a secret

Aktion T4 could not be concealed. In the small towns where the centres operated, people saw the grey buses arrive and leave empty, and saw the smoke from the chimneys. In August 1941 the Bishop of Limburg, Antonius Hilfrich, wrote to the Justice Minister that children in Hadamar, on seeing the buses, would call out “here comes the murder box again”, and that the smoke from the centre’s chimney could be seen from afar. Families received notices of death from appendicitis for people whose appendix had long since been removed, or received two urns. Rumours spread across the whole of Germany, and in February 1941 in the Bavarian village of Absberg a crowd of Catholic residents, NSDAP members among them, openly protested against the removal of the residents of the local institution.

The first protests came from the Churches. Clergy ran a large proportion of the institutions from which patients were being taken. From the summer of 1940 Protestant churchmen wrote to the authorities: Pastor Paul-Gerhard Braune, one of the leaders of the Protestant Inner Mission, submitted a memorandum to the Reich Chancellery in July 1940 and was arrested by the Gestapo in August; Theophil Wurm, the regional bishop of Württemberg, wrote in the summer of 1940 to the Interior Minister, Wilhelm Frick; Friedrich von Bodelschwingh, head of the Bethel institutions near Bielefeld, refused to hand over patients and negotiated directly with Brandt. Lothar Kreyssig, a guardianship judge in Brandenburg, filed a murder complaint against Bouhler and forbade the removal of his wards; he was told that “the will of the Führer is the source of law” and was retired. In April 1941 the Justice Ministry instructed prosecutors and judges not to investigate such cases.

For a long time the Catholic episcopate protested quietly. The chairman of the bishops’ conference, Cardinal Adolf Bertram, and Cardinal Michael von Faulhaber wrote letters to ministers, and an envoy of the bishops held talks with T4 officials in an attempt to negotiate at least some exceptions. On 2 December 1940 the Congregation of the Holy Office (PL) ruled that the direct killing of an innocent person because of mental or physical defects was not permitted and was contrary to natural and divine law. The ruling did not mention Germany, and the German bishops did not follow it publicly. Only one of them did so – and at a moment when the Reich was at the height of its success and the Wehrmacht was driving deep into the Soviet Union.

The three sermons of the Bishop of Münster

Clemens August Graf von Galen, Bishop of Münster since 1933, a Westphalian aristocrat of conservative and nationalist views, had known about the killing of the sick since at least the summer of 1940. What moved him to speak out was a series of blows against his own diocese. In July 1941, while Münster was being bombed by the RAF, the Gestapo began seizing monasteries and religious houses, evicting Jesuits and nuns. On 13 July, in St Lambert’s Church, Galen preached the first sermon: he accused the Gestapo of lawlessness, of arrests without trial and of locking people up in concentration camps. “Justice is the foundation of states,” he said, and he cried: “We demand justice!” A week later, on 20 July, in the Church of Our Lady (the Überwasserkirche), he repeated the accusations and told the faithful that Christians do not make revolutions but must hold firm like the anvil under the blows of the hammer.

At the end of July patients began to be removed from the Marienthal institution near Münster. On 28 July the bishop lodged a complaint of intended murder with the public prosecutor at the Münster regional court and with the police president, citing the provision of the penal code that required the authorities to be notified of a planned killing. He received no reply. On 3 August 1941, again in St Lambert’s Church, he preached his third sermon, devoted to the killing of the sick. He described how patients were being taken away from institutions in Westphalia and how, a short time later, families received notice of their death and cremation. He said there was a “suspicion bordering on certainty” that this was the implementation of the doctrine of destroying “life unworthy of life”, and he called it plainly murder. He reminded his listeners that a human being is not an old machine or a lame horse to be got rid of once it is no longer useful: “These are people, our neighbours, our brothers and sisters. Poor sick people, unproductive if you like. But does that mean they have forfeited the right to live?” He warned that if it was permitted to kill the “unproductive”, no one would be safe: not the old, not those disabled at work, not the soldiers who would return from the front gravely maimed. No one would be able to trust a doctor.

The sermons appeared in no newspaper, but typed out and duplicated they circulated throughout Germany, from presbyteries to air-raid shelters, and reached soldiers at the front. The reference to wounded soldiers made a particular impression; many listeners took it as a statement of fact, although the bishop had presented it as a possible consequence. The BBC quoted the text, and the RAF dropped it in leaflets over the Reich. Alfred Meyer, Gauleiter of Westphalia-North, and people around Martin Bormann demanded the bishop’s arrest, and one party official proposed hanging him. Joseph Goebbels argued that imprisoning Galen would mean losing the Münsterland, and perhaps the whole of Westphalia, for the duration of the war, and advised settling accounts with him “after the victory”. Hitler agreed. Many people were arrested for copying and distributing the sermons, including priests of the Münster diocese, some of whom were sent to concentration camps. The bishop himself was left untouched.

The order of 24 August

Hitler was then at the Wolf’s Lair in East Prussia, absorbed in a dispute with his generals over the direction of the offensive in the east. On 24 August 1941 he gave Brandt an oral instruction to stop the operation. Brandt passed it on to Bouhler, and Bouhler to the headquarters at Tiergartenstraße. The gassing of patients in the six centres ceased within a few days. The instruction, however, applied only to the centrally run “operation”, with its forms, transports and gas chambers, and no one announced it. The T4 leadership never for a moment accepted that the killing had been wrong.

The internal T4 statistics, found after the war at Hartheim Castle, record that by 1 September 1941 70,273 people had been “disinfected”, as the documents put it: 35,224 in 1940 and 35,049 in 1941. The largest number, 18,269, died at Hartheim, 13,720 at Sonnenstein, 10,072 at Hadamar, 9,839 at Grafeneck, 9,772 at Brandenburg and 8,601 at Bernburg. The same statistics calculated with an accountant’s precision how many Reichsmarks and how much bread, margarine and eggs the Reich would save over ten years thanks to the deaths of these people.

Historians still argue about why Hitler stopped the operation. Some, such as Götz Aly and Richard J. Evans, regard Galen’s sermon as the decisive impulse: a regime that did not want open conflict in wartime with the Churches and the Catholic regions of the Reich preferred to withdraw from an operation whose secret could no longer be kept anyway. Others, such as Henry Friedlander, stress that the cause was the loss of secrecy and general public unease rather than criticism from the Church as such, and Michael Burleigh called the belief that the sermon stopped the operation “wishful thinking”. It has also been pointed out that the figure of around 70,000 victims planned in October 1939 had just been reached, and that some of the T4 staff were already needed elsewhere. What is certain is that Hitler did not abandon the idea itself. In his table talk he promised that after the war he would settle accounts with the bishop “to the last penny”.

The killing goes on

The halt to Aktion T4 did not end the killing of the sick. The programme for murdering children, carried out in several dozen “paediatric wards”, continued without interruption until the end of the war and claimed at least 5,000 victims. From April 1941 T4 medical commissions also toured the concentration camps, selecting prisoners who were sick or unfit for work, as well as Jews and political prisoners. Under the so-called Aktion 14f13, named after a file reference of the Inspectorate of Concentration Camps, some 20,000 of them were gassed at Hartheim, Sonnenstein and Bernburg. Among them were Polish priests from Dachau, sent to Hartheim in “invalid transports”.

In the psychiatric institutions a phase began that after the war was called “wild euthanasia”: doctors and nurses killed patients with overdoses of Luminal and morphine or with a starvation diet, introduced in Bavaria by a special decree in November 1942. At Hadamar more than 4,400 people were murdered in this way between August 1942 and March 1945, and at Obrzyce near Międzyrzecz (Meseritz-Obrawalde) many thousands. According to estimates by the German Federal Archives, all phases of Nazi “euthanasia” in Germany and Austria claimed some 200,000 victims, with roughly another 100,000 in occupied Europe. The last documented killing took place at Kaufbeuren on 29 May 1945, three weeks after Germany’s surrender: four-year-old Richard Jenne was killed by injection.

Place in the war

Aktion T4 was the first mass murder organised by the German state in which people were killed with gas in chambers disguised as shower rooms, bodies were burned in crematoria and the victims were deceived to the very last moment. This knowledge, and these men, were soon turned against the Jews. In the autumn of 1941, a few weeks after the authorisation Göring gave Heydrich, Bouhler and Brack agreed with Odilo Globocnik – who since July had been building up an SS base for the east in Lublin – to lend him T4 personnel. More than a hundred men from the “euthanasia” centres became the cadre of Operation Reinhard. Christian Wirth, office manager at several T4 centres, was the first commandant of the Bełżec extermination camp and later inspector of all three of the operation’s camps. Franz Stangl of Hartheim commanded the camps at Sobibór and Treblinka, and the first commandant of Treblinka was the doctor Irmfried Eberl, formerly head of the Brandenburg and Bernburg centres. The bricklayer Erwin Lambert, who had built the gas chambers in the T4 centres, went on to build them at Sobibór and Treblinka. In the camps and shootings of Operation Reinhard, historians estimate, some 1.5–1.8 million Jews were murdered in 1942–1943. That is why it is often said that the “graduates” of Aktion T4 carried on their trade – though they went not so much to concentration camps as to the extermination camps in occupied Poland.

The sermon of 3 August 1941 remained one of the few cases in which public protest in the Third Reich forced the authorities to change policy, if only in form. No similar voice was raised in defence of the Jews deported from Germany from October 1941 onwards. After the war, at the Doctors’ Trial before an American tribunal in Nuremberg, Karl Brandt and Viktor Brack were sentenced to death and hanged in 1948. Philipp Bouhler committed suicide in May 1945. Werner Heyde, who hid for years after the war under a false name, took his own life in 1964 before his trial. Most of the doctors and nurses who killed the sick were never punished.