Holocaust
Aktion T4
Nazi programme for murdering mentally ill and disabled people, called 'euthanasia'; mass gassing ran in 1940–1941. The name came from its Berlin headquarters at Tiergartenstrasse 4.
In the autumn of 1939 Hitler signed an authorisation backdated to 1 September. Patients of psychiatric and care institutions, selected on the basis of questionnaires, were killed without their knowledge, mostly by gas in six centres in the Reich, among them Hartheim, Grafeneck and Hadamar. By August 1941 more than 70,000 people had been murdered there. In occupied Poland and Pomerania, SS and police units killed about 30,000 psychiatric patients by the autumn of 1941.
After protests, notably by Bishop Clemens August von Galen, Hitler halted the gassing in August 1941, but the killing went on in secret – by starvation, drugs and injections – until the end of the war; the total number of victims is estimated at about 250,000. T4's men and methods passed into the Holocaust: most of the staff of Bełżec, Sobibór and Treblinka came from the programme.
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(10)10 articles use this term.
1942