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“T-4” is the code name for the mass murder of institutionalized mentally and physically disabled German and Austrian adults and children labeled “life unworthy of life” by Hitler and the Nazis. The program was established in spring of 1939, when Hitler gave Philip Bouhler, chief of his private chancellery, and Karl Brandt, his attending physician, the task of organizing a secret killing operation targeting disabled children.
That August, physicians, nurses and midwives were ordered to report any severely mentally or physically disabled children under the age of three. In October, public health authorities began urging parents of such children to place them in specially designated pediatric clinics where – unknown to the families – they would be killed by overdoses of medication, lethal injections or starvation.
Soon, the program was widened to include children up to 17 years of age and then it was extended to adults. From their Berlin headquarters at Tiergartenstrasse 4 – a villa taken from a Jewish family (and the source of the code name) – Bouhler and Brandt oversaw the establishment of six killing facilities, five in Germany and one in Austria. There, victims were killed in carbon-monoxide gas chambers disguised as shower baths. Their bodies were burned in crematoria.
T-4 was served by the public health services and by specially recruited doctors and nurses. T-4 officials distributed questionnaires to public health officials, public and private hospitals, mental institutions and nursing homes for the chronically ill and aged. Teams of physicians evaluated the information, assessing the victims’ “ability to work” and identifying those with chronic psychiatric or neurological disorders (such as schizophrenia, epilepsy, dementia and encephalitis), those without “German” or "related" blood, the criminally insane, and those who had been institutionalized for more than five years.
Beginning in January 1940, based on these assessments, patients were transported by bus or train from their home institutions to the killing facilities. Afterward, their families were sent urns containing ashes from a common pile and death certificates with falsified causes and dates of death.
T-4 could not, however, be kept secret. In August 1941, in response to public and private protests, Hitler stopped it. That is, he stopped T-4, but the “euthanasia” killings continued into the last months of the war – more clandestine and decentralized and with less emphasis on gassing. They were also extended to the occupied eastern areas – Bohemia and Moravia, Poland, the Baltic States and the Soviet Union. Altogether, by 1945, the program claimed some 200,000 lives. It also provided the operational model for Hitler’s other genocidal policies – namely, the murder of the Roma and Sinti (Gypsies) and the Jews.
Click on the following links for USHMM materials:
Deadly Medicine: Creating the Master Race Online Exhibition
The Euthanasia Program
Nazi Persecution of the "Disabled"
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