It is a fact that Adolf Hitler was booed by Germans at the Hofbräuhaus, by people enraged by what they’d learned from German bishops, such as von Preysing and von Galen. According to Gitta Sereny in Into That Darkness, it was the only time Hitler was ever booed. He ostensibly shut the Aktion T4 program down soon after the incident, but it continued in secret, with doctors using starvation and overdoses of medicine instead of gas chambers to kill children. The last of the children were killed in a hospital in Bavaria, three weeks after the Germans had surrendered, in an area already occupied by U.S. forces.
According to evidence presented at the Nuremberg Trials, 275,000 people died because of the Aktion T4 program. It began with killing young children, then expanded to include older children, then the elderly. It also included Mischlinge—mixed Jewish and Aryan children.
Hitler gave his approval to the Aktion T4 program in 1939, signing a “euthanasia decree” backdated to September 1, 1939 (the official outbreak of war), which authorized Drs. Philipp Bouhler and Karl Brandt to carry out a program of “euthanasia.” The letter states: Reich Leader Bouhler and Dr. med. Brandt are charged with the responsibility of enlarging the competence of certain physicians, designated by name, so that patients who, on the basis of human judgment are considered incurable, can be granted mercy death after a discerning diagnosis.
In the United States, I am grateful to the traveling exhibition from the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, “Deadly Medicine: Creating the Master Race,” which I was able to see in Philadelphia. Curated by Dr. Susan Bachrach, the exhibition shows how the Nazi regime aimed to change the genetic makeup of the population through measures known as “racial hygiene.” I was also able to visit the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., and was particularly moved by the exhibition “State of Deception: The Power of Nazi Propaganda.”
In Berlin, I was privileged to visit the House of the Wannsee Conference Memorial and Educational Site, the Liebermann-Villa at Wannsee, the Käthe Kollwitz Museum, the German Historical Museum, the Holocaust Memorial, and the Topography of Terror museum.
Tiergartenstrasse 4 still exists, but the building that housed the T4 offices was bombed during the war. However, there is a plaque on the sidewalk at the address, reading:
Tiergartenstraße 4—In honour of the forgotten victims. The first mass-murder by the Nazis was organized from 1940 onwards on this spot, the Tiergartenstraße 4 and named “Aktion T4” after this address.
From 1939 to 1945 almost 200,000 helpless people were killed. Their lives were termed “unworthy of living,” their murder called “euthanasia.” They died in the gas chambers of Grafeneck, Brandenburg, Hartheim, Pirna, Bernburg, and Hadamar; they died by execution squad, by planned hunger and poisoning.
The perpetrators were scholars, doctors, nurses, justice officials, the police, and the health and workers’ administration. The victims were poor, desperate, rebellious, or in need of help. They came from psychiatric clinics and children’s hospitals, from old age homes and welfare institutions, from military hospitals and internment camps. The number of victims is huge, the number of offenders who were sentenced, small.
A link between Aktion T4 and the Holocaust has been found by historians. Gerald Reitlinger, in his Early History of the Final Solution, notes the direct connection between the personnel and gas chamber technology of the T4 killing centers and the Final Solution, officially put into words at the Wannsee conference in January 1942.
The historian Raul Hilberg, in The Destruction of the European Jews, 1985 edition, also noted the connection between the Aktion T4 program and the subsequent annihilation of Jews: Euthanasia was a conceptual as well as a technological and administrative prefiguration of the final solution in the death camps.
In addition, Michael Burleigh, Wolfganger Wippermann, and Henry Friedlander, in The Racial State: Germany 1933–45, posit that the connection between the Aktion T4 program and the Final Solution goes well beyond personnel, technology, and procedure, and that they were two campaigns in the same crusade. They state that the killing of the handicapped and of the Jews were two essential elements of the Nazis’ attempted creation of a racial utopia—the former to clear Germany of “degenerate and defective elements” and then the latter to “destroy the ultimate enemy.”
After the war, Dr. Karl Brandt was tried along with twenty-two others at the Palace of Justice in Nuremberg, Germany, in a trial officially designated The United States of America v. Karl Brandt et al. but more often called the Doctors’ Trial, one of the Nuremberg Trials. Brandt was found guilty and, with six other doctors, was sentenced to death by hanging.