Nazi Euthanasia: Aktion T4

The T4 program - Aktion T4 - was named after the street address of a former Berlin villa - 4 Tiergartenstrasse - which became the headquarters of the Nazi “euthanasia” program. The organizing principle of T4 was racial purity and the national health of the German community, which required the removal and ultimate elimination of people thought unfit to live, and who would be referred to as “life unworthy of life” (“Lebensunwertes Leben” or “useless eaters”). Individuals with neurological, psychiatric, or physical disabilities who were deemed “incurable” by selected physicians would be subject to involuntary “euthanasia.” The doctors most often never saw the patient; rather, hospital or nursing staff would respond to questionnaires about patient health and capacity to work, and the doctors would rate the person as to whether or not death was warranted. If the answers indicated the patient’s inability to be a productive member of the Reich, he or she would be sent on to one of six “hospitals” where he or she would be granted an involuntary “mercy death.” Patients were murdered by lethal injection, starvation, or carbon monoxide gassing. Carbon monoxide would ultimately prevail as the preferred means of murder. Philipp Bouhler, director of Hitler’s private chancellery and Karl Brandt, Hitler’s attending physician, led the program. Implementing the killing operations themselves would fall to Victor Brack and Werner Blankenburg.

Aktion T4 essentially expanded the compulsory sterilization of those deemed “unfit” provided by the Nuremberg laws, which had been in operation since the early days of the Reich. In the six-year period between 1933 and 1939, approximately 360,000 people were sterilized. Aktion T4 itself would ultimately be extended to adults.

The methods and technologies employed in the T4 program to murder the handicapped would become a precursor to the atrocities committed in the death camps, from the Reinhard camps to the more sophisticated industrial scale murder of Auschwitz-Birkenau. Indeed, some of the same personnel who performed well in the AktionT4 program went on to great glory at the extermination centers.

Given Hitler’s overarching concern for racial purity, it would be but a short step to extend the ideological justification for murdering the unfit to other categories of perceived biological enemies of the state: Jews and Roma and Sinti, homosexuals, criminals, alcoholics, and malcontents.

--Michael D. Bulmash, K1966

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Envelope Addressed to Philipp Bouhler

2014.1.63

Back: White envelope with official German seal sticker.Front: Handwritten address in black cursive and black hand stamp.

Information Provided by Michael D. Bulmash: Philipp Bouhler (1899-1945) was a Nazi leader who was both a Reichsleiter and Chief of the Chancellery of the Fuhrer of the Nazi Party. He was also the SS officer responsible for the Aktion T4 euthanasia program, developed with Karl Brandt, that murdered more than 70,000 disabled German adults and children. Arrested with his wife in 1945, he committed suicide. The knowledge gained from Aktion T4 was eventually applied to the industrialized murder of other groups of people.
Third Reich Racial Purity Real Photo Postcard of Women with Disabilities

2019.2.194

Photo of three women standing outside in dresses, back marked with “Schwachsinn Rasse Krankes Volk 14” and 2 Nazi party stamps in blue ink.

Information Provided by Michael D. Bulmash:

These cards were sent from the German Leadership Office for Officials (police, etc.) perhaps for educational purposes. Handstamps of the organization - Hauptamt fuer Beamte, Reichsleitung - are verso, along with a title “Race-Sick People.” Schwachsinn refers to their mental disability. In the Third Reich, these women would be considered Lebensunwertes Leben (“life unworthy of life”), a blight on the Reich notion of racial purity and an economic burden on the state. Consequently, they would be subject to “mercy killing.” Patients selected for death would be transported to euthanasia centers - six in all - in Germany or Austria.
Letter to Karl Wolff Signed by Viktor Brack

2015.2.170

White Reich chancellery letterhead with typewritten message. Includes some writing in green, and a signature from Viktor Brack in black, as well as green and purple hand stamps.

Information Provided by Michael D. Bulmash:

Document on Reich chancellery letterhead, 1937 to Karl Wolff, signed by Viktor Brack, concerning assisting one Oberleutenant Behrens. Brack was a Nazi SS officer, a war criminal who organized the T4 Euthanasia program and developed mass sterilization techniques. He was a chief planner of the organization and implementation of mass gassings. Initially the doctors in the T4 program sterilized those deemed "Life Unworthy of Life"; later at least 15,000 were murdered at facilities such as Hadamar Hospital. He was convicted in the Doctors’ Trial in Nuremberg in 1947 and subsequently executed at Landsberg Prison. He proposed to Himmler that three million Jews be selected for castration by high-dose x-ray to work as slaves for the Reich. Himmler approved the idea and ordered testing to commence at Auschwitz. The T4 program evolved into Aktion T14f13, or Sonderbehandlung ("special treatment"), the murder of concentration camp inmates deemed unfit to work.
Copy of Letter from Adolf Hitler to Reichsleiter Bouhler and Dr. Med. Brandt (copy from USHMM)

2015.2.26

Front: Copy on printed paper of letter. Nazi insignia in upper left corner of the letter with Hitler's name printed. Date in upper righthand corner. Message typewritten with Hitler's signature beneath it. Writing below in black ink. The letter states that "Reichsleiter Bougler [sic] and Dr. med. Brandt are charged with the responsibility to broaden the authority of certain doctors to the extend that (persons) suffering from illnesses judged to be incurable may, after a humane, most careful assessment of their condition to be granted a mercy death. Adolf Hitler."

Information Provided by Michael D. Bulmash:

The letter states that “Reichsleiter Bouhler and Dr. med. Brandt are charged with the responsibility to broaden the authority of certain doctors to the extent that (persons) suffering from illnesses judged to be incurable may, after a humane, most careful assessment of their condition, be granted a mercy death. Adolf Hitler.”

Philipp Bouhler (1899-1945) was an SS-Obergruppenfuehrer who served as chief of Hitler's chancellery and head of the T4 “euthanasia” program. Bouhler, along with Karl Brandt, was tasked by Hitler to develop the T4 program. Karl Brandt (1904-1948) was an SS-Gruppenfuehrer, personal physician of Adolf Hitler, co-director of the T4 program and Reich Commissioner for Health and Sanitation. After the war, Brandt was placed on trial as one of the main defendants at the Doctors' Trial in Nuremberg. In addition to his membership in the SS, he was charged with special responsibility for the numerous medical experiments to which thousands of concentration camp inmates were subjected, as well as with the planning and execution of the euthanasia program. Brandt was sentenced to death and hanged in 1948.
Official Document to Philip Bouhler from Dr. Viktor Brack on the Aktion T4 Euthanasia Program

2021.1.10

Hole punched half page official document from Berlin.

Information Provided by Michael D. Bulmash:

This document is addressed to Philipp Bouhler from Victor Brack and is marked Secret (Geheim) as it pertains to the Aktion T4 Nazi “euthanasia” program. Brack states: “Due to multiple inquiries from relatives of the deceased, it is urgently necessary to take credible measures to calm the relatives.”

The context of this document is the growing concern over the rising tide of citizens, physicians, and churchmen over what was happening to family members who fell into the clutches of the T4 euthanasia apparatus. While every effort was made to conceal the program from the public (for example, the nondescript name of the central administrative apparatus of Hitler’s euthanasia program on Brack’s letterhead was Gemeinnützige Stiftung für Anstaltspflege, “Charitable Foundation for Institutional Care,” clearly camouflaging its true purpose), Hitler felt obligated to suspend the euthanasia program in late August 1941. However, Hitler never fully intended to stop the program; it would continue under the fog of war.

Hitler’s belief in a racially pure aryan nation required purging the threat of “worthless” individuals, the so-called “life unworthy of life” (“lebensunwertes Leben”), whose mental, emotional, or physical limitations could jeopardize Germany’s much vaunted racial superiority or create a financial burden for the state. Politicizing and implementing “racial hygiene” began early in Hitler’s administration with the Law for the Prevention of Offspring with Hereditary Diseases, which led to the sterilization of the disabled. The category of disability and hence the potential targets for sterilization would soon prove to be quite elastic and ensnare manic-depressives and schizophrenics, epileptics, the blind, those with physical deformities, the developmentally disabled, and alcoholics. Hitler’s success in calibrating his policies around public reception and a lack of resistance on the part of the medical community led to further policy drift and Nazis soon began embracing the murder of the disabled. Hitler had appointed Reich Leader Philipp Bouhler as well as his personal physician Karl Brandt to oversee the T4 program, to ensure that it ran smoothly and in accordance with a plan to “enlarge the authority” of selected physicians to declare patients incurable based on certain criteria and thus grant them what he referred to as a “mercy death.” The daily implementation of this program would fall to Viktor Brack and his deputy Walter Blankenberg. Medical personnel would “certify” whether a child was incapable of working due to mental, emotional, or physical illness. If so, the child would be marked for death. These criteria would be in time extended to both Jewish children in mental hospitals and to adults. The outcome of this certification process was never in doubt: the patients selected to die were transported to one of six euthanasia centers in Germany and Austria: the doctors, nurses, and other specialists who worked at these centers employed different methods of murder. Starvation and lethal injection were used at first, but eventually the method of choice became gassing with carbon monoxide in chambers simulating showers.

Hitler’s Aktion T4 euthanasia program would be a proving ground as the Nazis lurched toward genocide and the Final Solution. Indeed, Nazi racial ideology - undergirded by a popular if controversial eugenics movement - created theoretical justification for purging the nation of elements that could threaten it. But for theory to be converted into practice two essential ingredients were necessary. The first was the enhanced authority granted to physicians and their active participation - along with other medical personnel - in the administrative apparatus of state-sponsored murder in direct contravention to their oath to save lives and do no purposeful harm.

The second related to control of information and its sources. Aktion T4 was immersed in an Orwellian totalitarian universe of deceit and obfuscation, dissembling and euphemism, in which euthanasia no longer referred to end-of-life decisions made to relieve unendurable suffering, decisions made either voluntarily or with family assistance; rather, it was reshaped - in Hitler’s parlance - as “granting a mercy death.” This would presumably give some measure of credibility to the “data collection” and certification protocols of the medical personnel. The ensuing harvesting of body parts (e.g., gold teeth), and the use of crematoria for disposing of bodies - also an integral part of the program - would eventually be institutionalized in the genocide against the Jews.
Medical Statement from Dr. Marianne Tuerk

2015.2.144

Front: White paper with black printed text in German and typewritten information on dotted lines. Includes a purple hand stamp on the left with a black signature beneath.Back: Additional printed text and typewritten information on dotted lines. Includes a purple hand stamp on the left with a black signature beneath. A block of black printed text beneath.

Information Provided by Michael D. Bulmash:

Marianne Tuerk was a medical doctor who had been imprisoned for murdering children at Kinderspital Am Spiegelgrund, the children's clinic in Vienna, as part of the Nazi “euthanasia” program known as Aktion T4, headed by Philipp Bouhler. Along with Margarethe Heubsche and Ernst Illing, the head of the "clinic," she claimed that the murders were ordered from Berlin to "purify and improve the physical standards of the German race." These children were designated as "Lebensunwertes Leben"- Life Unworthy of Life - and were thus targeted for "euthanasia." Overdoses of Luminol, Veronal and Morphine were administered to children with mental and physical diseases and disabilities or were considered "inferior" according to Nazi racial policy. Over seven hundred children perished at Spiegelgrund, one of six Nazi institutes where physically and mentally handicapped people were killed as part of the T4 program. In most cases the cause of death was cited as pneumonia, or muscle problems. Brains and other body parts were collected and placed in jars of formaldehyde. Dr. Tuerk was imprisoned for ten years after the war. Illing was hanged. This document is the Rosenegger sterilization document signed by Tuerk and forwarded to Dr. Jekelius. The document states that Annemarie Rosenegger, currently in the children's hospital (Spiegelgrund) suffers from "hereditary physical deformity" and is informed about sterilization and its consequences in accordance with Reich law. Compulsory, or forced, sterilization was an integral part of the Nazi eugenics program, over and above euthanasia. Over 400,000 individuals were sterilized under Nazi law.
Letter from Werner Blankenburg

2012.1.386

Typewritten letter on "Kanzlei des Führers der NSDAP" letterhead with embossed eagle. Includes signature in black.

Information Provided by Michael D. Bulmash:

Werner Blankenburg (1905-1957) was the head of section 2A in Hitler's chancellery (Kanzlei des Fuhrers) In Nazi Germany. He was one of the main persons responsible for the National Socialist "euthanasia" program - Aktion T4, the program for killing the physically and mentally disabled which involved Hitler's physician Karl Brandt, Philipp Bouhler, and Viktor Brack as administrators. Blankenburg was Brack's deputy. Blankenburg also participated in the annihilation of the Polish Jews in the Aktion Reinhard, and experiments with castration utilizing x-radiation in Auschwitz-Birkenau.
Envelope Addressed to Philipp Bouhler

2014.1.62

Back: White envelope with typewritten address and black stamp.Front: Typewritten address with four Spanish postage stamps and several hand stamps.

Information Provided by Michael D. Bulmash:

Philipp Bouhler (1899-1945) was a Nazi leader who was both a Reichsleiter and Chief of the Chancellery of the Fuhrer of the Nazi Party. He was also the SS officer responsible for the Aktion T4 euthanasia program, developed with Karl Brandt, that murdered more than 70,000 disabled German adults and children. Arrested with his wife in 1945, he committed suicide. The knowledge gained from Aktion T4 was eventually applied to the industrialized murder of other groups of people.
Envelope Addressed to Philipp Bouhler

2014.1.64

Back: Tan envelope with red and black hand stamps and several pieces of white tape.Front: Typewritten address with four postage stamps of Hitler, as well as several other hand stamps.

Information Provided by Michael D. Bulmash:

Philipp Bouhler (1899-1945) was a Nazi leader who was both a Reichsleiter and Chief of the Chancellery of the Fuhrer of the Nazi Party. He was also the SS officer responsible for the Aktion T4 euthanasia program, developed with Karl Brandt, that murdered more than 70,000 disabled German adults and children. Arrested with his wife in 1945, he committed suicide. The knowledge gained from Aktion T4 was eventually applied to the industrialized murder of other groups of people.
Envelope Addressed to Philipp Bouhler

2014.1.61

Back: White envelope with a typewritten address, five wax seals, and one black stamp.Front: Includes a typewritten address and four stamps of Hitler.

Information Provided by Michael D. Bulmash:

Philipp Bouhler (1899-1945) was a Nazi leader who was both a Reichsleiter and Chief of the Chancellery of the Fuhrer of the Nazi Party. He was also the SS officer responsible for the Aktion T4 euthanasia program, developed with Karl Brandt, that murdered more than 70,000 disabled German adults and children. Arrested with his wife in 1945, he committed suicide. The knowledge gained from Aktion T4 was eventually applied to the industrialized murder of other groups of people.
Rudolf Emil Herman Brandt Testimony

2012.1.529a-c

Torn, thin paper with typewritten information

Information Provided by Michael D. Bulmash:

Torn, thin paper with typewritten information regarding Rudolf Emil Herman Brandt's testimony at the Doctors’ Trial in Nuremberg against physicians and/or administrators accused of “crimes against humanity” for organizing and/or participating in medical procedures and experiments on prisoners and civilians. Brandt would be executed in 1948.
Niederschrift [Oath of Office] Signed by Marianne Tuerk

2015.2.145

Tan paper with two hole punches on the left side and printed text in German. Includes printed Nazi seal on top, as well as several pencil signatures and purple hand stamps.

Information Provided by Michael D. Bulmash:

Marianne Tuerk was a medical doctor who had been imprisoned for murdering children at Kinderspital Am Spiegelgrund, the children's clinic in Vienna, as part of the Nazi “euthanasia” program known as Action T4, headed by Philipp Bouhler. Along with neurologist Margarethe Heubsche and Ernst Illing, the head of the "clinic," she claimed that the murders were ordered from Berlin to "purify and improve the physical standards of the German race." These children were designated as Lebensunwertes Leben (Life Unworthy of Life) and were thus targeted for so-called euthanasia. Overdoses of Luminol, Veronal and Morphine were administered to children with mental and physical diseases and disabilities and considered "inferior" according to Nazi racial policy. Over seven hundred children perished at Spiegelgrund, one of six Nazi institutes where physically and mentally handicapped people were killed as part of the T4 program. In most cases the cause of death was cited as pneumonia or muscle problems. Brains and other body parts were collected and placed in jars of formaldehyde.

Dr. Tuerk was imprisoned for ten years after the war. Illing was hanged. This document is An Oath of Office (Niederschrift) signed by Tuerk, in which she pledges her fidelity and obedience to Hitler and the German empire, and to fulfill her duties conscientiously.
Sterilization Procedure Leaflet

2015.2.146

Front: White paper with a graphic black, white, and red illustration of the body being opened with medical instruments performing a sterilization procedure. Includes dotted lines pointing to certain parts of the body with descriptions at the end of them. Includes red and purple hand stamps, black printed text, and Tuerk's signature in black at the bottom.Back: Another graphic black, white, and red illustration of the body being opened with medical instruments performing a sterilization procedure. Includes dotted lines pointing to certain parts of the body with descriptions at the end of them. Includes printed text at the bottom.

Information Provided by Michael D. Bulmash:

Marianne Tuerk was a medical doctor who had been imprisoned for murdering children at Kinderspital Am Spiegelgrund, the children's clinic in Vienna, as part of the Nazi “euthanasia” program known as Action T4, headed by Philipp Bouhler. Along with neurologist Margarethe Heubsche and Ernst Illing, the medical director of Spiegelgrund, Tuerk claimed that the murders were ordered from Berlin to "purify and improve the physical standards of the German race." These children had been designated as Lebensunwertes Leben (Life Unworthy of Life) and were thus targeted for so-called euthanasia. Overdoses of Luminol, Veronal and Morphine were administered to children deemed disabled and considered "inferior" according to Nazi racial policy. Over seven hundred children perished at Spiegelgrund, one of six Nazi institutes where physically and mentally handicapped people were killed as part of the T4 program. In most cases the cause of death was cited as pneumonia or muscle problems. Brains and other body parts were collected and placed in jars of formaldehyde.

Dr. Tuerk was imprisoned for ten years after the war. Illing was hanged. This document is a sterilization procedure leaflet explaining the procedure to potential victims or family members.