A week before American units liberated their first concentration camp the US 2nd Infantry Division uncovered one of the killing centers of the Nazi regime's so-called "euthanasia" program at Hadamar Top image: American sentry posted at Hadamar Courtesy of United States Holocaust Memorial Museum The WWII black and white footage contained in the documentary film Murder Mills: Hadamar and the location is a former asylum at Hadamar close to Wiesbaden and just over 50 miles northwest of Frankfurt am Main After the exhumation by German civilians of several bodies from recently dug mass graves wearing a white garment draped by a black apron a pathologist from the Brooklyn Cancer Institute takes his scalpel and performs on-the-spot autopsies of the deceased Bolker also found glass tubes of morphine hydrocholorate used to give lethal injections Bolker went on to examine emaciated patients at the facility The evidence quickly accumulated for him and for investigators from other US units pinpoints the Allied discovery of the workings of the Nazis’ so-called “euthanasia” program even before the liberation of the much better-known network of SS-run concentration camps and sub-camps (Ohrdruf to enter what Henry Friedlander much later categorized as a “killing center” at Hadamar The town and one-time mental health facility had been liberated in late March by the 2nd Infantry Division during its push through Hesse The 2nd Infantry, nicknamed the “Indianhead Division” for its insignia dating from World War I, was no stranger to extreme situations. Having landed on Omaha Beach on June 7, 1944, under the command of Major General Walter M. Robertson, the unit had fought first in Normandy, then in northern France, before seeing action in Belgium at the Battle of the Bulge.  the 2nd Division was instrumental in the seizure of Göttingen and Leipzig Robertson’s men had arrived in the present-day Czech Republic proudly represented by the slogan “Second to None,” suffered more than 3,500 killed in the conflict What the men of the 2nd Infantry Division uncovered in Hadamar was unlike anything they had confronted in the previous months of combat with the German Army like the concentration camps soon to be liberated soldiers from the 2nd Division secured the institute on March 29 freeing 550 patients from the control of administrators This action revealed a hideous site of medical mass murder A photograph of an American sentry posted in front of the asylum is one of the lasting images we have of that event One of six killing centers established as part of the secret Operation T-4 or T-4 Program (the "T" was an abbreviation for the Berlin address Hadamar had been converted from an asylum for individuals struggling with mental illness first into a military hospital then was transformed into an installation used for so-called “euthanasia.” Adolf Hitler himself sanctioned T-4 with a signed order from early October 1939 (but backdated to a month earlier) Conducted by Philipp Bouhler and Viktor Brack both employed in Hitler’s private chancellery (Hitler’s attending physician Karl Brandt was also involved) the program led to the murder of roughly 250,000 of the most vulnerable members of the German and Austrian populations most of them non-Jews put to death with carbon monoxide gas The Nazi dictatorship deemed them all “life unworthy to live,” racial and financial burdens on the German nation The so-called “operations” started in the site at Hadamar and assistants who undertook the daily tasks of deception and cremation of patients transported to the facility by bus from around Hesse and the Prussian province of Hanover as well as the south German states of Baden Through trickery and the selective use of force and sedatives They were then funneled into a gas chamber disguised as a shower room in Hadamar's cellar and asphyxiated T-4 staff ensured that the bodies were cremated Completely fabricated causes of death were dispatched to heartbroken family members after the German public learned about the disappearance of men and children with physical and mental disabilities The gas chamber at Hadamar was then dismantled some 10,000 people had already been murdered in the facility Many of the personnel with their deadly “expertise” were then transferred to a new genocidal project—the extermination of European Jews Baumhard was reassigned to naval service and died on a German submarine in June 1943 Bottles of Morphine Used to Administer Lethal Overdoses to Patients Heberer Rice emphasized how the killing not only continued after the war turned against the Nazi dictatorship but that the groups targeted actually expanded.  Swept up in the vortex of destruction were Mischlinge the Nazi term for the “mixed” children of Jewish and non-Jewish parents who had largely been left alone by the regime the administrators at Hadamar did not even bother to put up the façade that these were people with disabilities They murdered these individuals because their very existence violated Nazism’s perverse racial “norms.” The broader range of victims actually included members of the Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS who had suffered serious wounds, especially head injuries. T-4 staff at Hadamar also killed women traumatized during Operation Gomorrah, the devastating bombing of the north German city of Hamburg in July 1943. Foreign forced civilian laborers mainly Poles and Soviets ill with tuberculosis This second phase of the killing claimed more than 4,400 lives where victims of the T-4 Program were buried in mass graves When soldiers of the 2nd Infantry Division and Major Bolker stepped foot in the institute they of course could not be aware of the full extent of Operation T-4 some information had trickled in prior to Hitler’s order to temporarily stop the slaughter What the Americans gleaned from interrogations of T-4 personnel at Hadamar and the meticulous records they maintained of their murderous deeds added up to a terrifying portrait of systematic Hadamar Survivor says goodbye to Major Herman Bolker This was the Third Reich’s first genocidal program the United States conducted a trial of personnel from Hadamar that began in the fall of 1945 before the onset of the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg where Leon Jaworski (best known for his role in the Watergate case) served as chief prosecutor including death sentences for Klein and two male nurses American authorities executed the three in March 1946 Understanding the dynamics of Operation T-4 has preoccupied scholars for decades since 1945 Since the 1980s an enormous amount of research has been undertaken It remains a vital task to incorporate the results of this work on the history of the murder of the disabled into our narratives of World War II The Origins of Nazi Genocide: From Euthanasia to the Final Solution. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide is ASU WWII Studies Consultant in the Jenny Craig Institute for the Study of War and Democracy.  Copy MLA Citation Copy APA Citation Copy Chicago Style Citation the day after V-E Day was officially confirmed Eleanor Roosevelt reflects on the cautious mood The concept of genocide has fundamentally altered international law transforming the way we understand mass violence in the modern world.  Whether it played the role of the “Black Cat,” “Mad Cat,” or “Dumbo,” the PBY Catalina proved itself as one of the most instrumental amphibious planes as it struck fear in the Axis and provided hope for the Allies Regarded as the “most beautiful woman in the world,” Hedy Lamarr was not only a famous Hollywood actress who sold millions in war bonds during World War II Her creations included a frequency-hopping radio communications device for Allied torpedoes during the war including ghettos and other sites of incarceration from imprisoning "enemies of the state" to serving as way stations in larger deportation schemes to murdering people in gas chambers.  the remains of Private First Class John Henry Newstrom a US Marine killed during the Battle of Peleliu in 1944 have been identified and will be returned home thanks to a joint recovery effort by the US and Japanese governments In her first My Day column after Franklin D Eleanor Roosevelt reflects on the sorrow following his passing and urges the world to unite in building a lasting Controlling the Ryukyu Islands would allow the Americans to finally sever Japan from its South Asian empire.  View Campus Map a 400-year-old Renaissance fortress not far from Mauthausen concentration camp I found myself examining a skull-measuring device from 1940 The sinister metal calipers and two measuring scales are on loan from Vienna’s Museum of Natural History; across from the glass display case is a 1930 poster from the UK Eugenics Society featuring a strong It reads: “Only Healthy Seed Must Be Sown: Check the Seeds of Hereditary Disease and Fitness by Eugenics.” Nearby is a 1927 American movie poster: “Youth has its fling—and then comes the burning question—Are you fit to marry?” I visited one of eight former Nazi euthanasia centers—what Simon Wiesenthal called “regular schools of murder.” Five are in Germany: Brandenburg is just outside Berlin; Hadamar is between Cologne and Frankfurt; Sonnenstein is close to Dresden; Bernburg is in Saxony The remaining three are in Austria; Hartheim Castle is in the small village of Alkoven near Adolf Hitler’s childhood town of Linz How were people selected and trained to carry out the murder of 11 million people and how did they keep their secrets so well that they were not known for years after the end of the war who had to watch the deaths of tens of thousands of people day after day and week after week would have to be trained technically and psychologically otherwise they might collapse under the continuous stress Wiesenthal wanted to understand how people could become so hardened to the cries of victims that they had less chance of cracking than even a machine “Castle Hartheim and the other euthanasia centers were the answer,” he concluded “Hartheim was organized like a medical school—except that the ‘students’ were not taught to save human life but to destroy it as efficiently as possible,” Wiesenthal observed with a patina of medical authority; victims were “precisely photographed scientifically perfected.” Before the death camps were established euthanasia sites served as research facilities for what Nazis called Gnadentod or mercy killings; physicians with stopwatches observed dying “patients” through a peephole in Hartheim’s cellar door and measured the length of the death struggle to one-tenth of a second In a section of his memoir focused on his own visit to Hartheim Wiesenthal pieced together a set of seemingly unrelated facts the notorious leader of Operation Reinhard—the program to exterminate Polish Jewry—got his start supervising the Reich’s euthanasia program Wirth “troubleshot” extermination techniques at euthanasia centers He would lure mentally ill or disabled “patients” to so-called showers or changing rooms locking them in and exposing them to different fatal gas combinations in an attempt to observe which were most efficient Following his tenure as chief of staff of Hartheim Wirth went on to serve as commandant of the Belzec concentration camp which became fully operational in March 1942 Other SS officers followed suit; after a stint leading Hartheim Franz Stangl became commandant of Treblinka Gustav Wagner directed Hartheim before going on to lead Sobibor A great many SS men who did technical work manning gas chambers and crematoria in the camps first worked at one or another euthanasia clinic Wiesenthal recalled that “experts from Hartheim” were sent for to fix broken ovens or other machinery The questions that spurred me to visit were related to Wiesenthal’s: how are victims of Nazi euthanasia remembered How should we study and teach about their dehumanization which differed from how Jews were dehumanized Jews were formally banned from being “treated” at Nazi euthanasia sites it was understood that euthanasia was reserved not for Jewish enemies but for German citizens whose death would be a mercy It is only recently that museums have been established at Nazi euthanasia sites What follows is not a thorough history of Nazi euthanasia under the Aktion T4 and Aktion 14f13 programs driven by questions that continue to trouble me The euthanasia memorials do not receive nearly the volume of visitors that flock to the more notorious death camps; most people are unaware of the links between them But euthanasia victims often passed through multiple concentration camps before being deported and ultimately killed at euthanasia centers; and as noted many euthanasia employees were later assigned to high positions within the death camps How eugenics and euthanasia were both instrumental to and constitutive of the Nazis’ broader campaign of dehumanization deserves to be better understood I was struck by the juxtaposition of the bucolic setting and the site’s grim history a receptionist at the front desk was on hand She gave me a pamphlet explaining that chronically ill and disabled people—“useless eaters” in Nazi parlance—began arriving at Hartheim to be killed by the thousands in 1940 thousands more prisoners and forced laborers from Mauthausen I made my way upstairs to Hartheim’s permanent “Value of Life” exhibit A sign at the entrance told an ugly story: The murder of tens of thousands of people here during the National Socialist period formed the starting point for reflections on the value of life This was narrowed to focus on the questions of how those deemed “useless” have been dealt with: What are the criteria used to define people as “useless” What have been the consequences of this judgment for those affected The exhibit doesn’t definitively answer these questions but begins with an interesting yet cursory history of ideas ranging from Christianity—the viewpoint of which is succinctly summarized as “no one is useless”—to industrial rationality with panels explaining how each ideology contributed to the poor The next room in the Value of Life exhibit traces the rise of the modern eugenics movement Pioneered by men like nineteenth-century scientists Charles Darwin and his cousin Francis Galton eugenics quickly rose to prominence in highly developed countries including the U.S. These were designed by famed American sculptor Laura Gardin Fraser and were awarded at state fairs across the country to the most “scientific” babies with an eye toward improving infant mortality and overall health among children The national magazine Woman’s Home Companion explained the contests this way: “underneath the inviting charm of the idea is a serious scientific purpose—healthy babies Eventually, these gave rise to the 1920s “Fitter Family Contests,” which were more explicitly aimed at improving America’s gene pool Also on display is a copy of Margaret Sanger’s 1929 work Motherhood in Bondage a collection of letters from poor urban and rural mothers meant to illustrate the “socio-economic rationale for birth control.” Around the corner was a large reproduction of a 1941 Nazi actuarial table detailing government savings should some number of people with disabilities be prevented from living ten years more Daily and annual costs of caring for these citizens were meticulously calculated in Reichsmarks making the case that the state would fare better if they did not exist This type of formalized dehumanization of those living with disabilities and mental illness under the guise of medical or actuarial science contributed to the widespread desensitization and moral degradation of the “educated class.” By degrees this emboldened people to dehumanize Jews under the pretext of racial hygiene The Value of Life exhibit underscores the “ordinariness” of the employees responsible for the sterilization and killing of those sent to Hartheim: kitchen and administrative staff they generally worked for the euthanasia programs willingly and without compulsion they were sworn to secrecy and could not easily leave and many were ideologically motivated to carry out their lethal work in the belief that it was beneficial It is also important to note that the Nazi euthanasia campaign involved multiple phases First came the killing of children with physical and intellectual disabilities then a wider range of patients with mental illnesses and the so-called “Special Treatment” murder of political prisoners Although Jews were initially kept away from the more “professional” environments of the euthanasia facilities they were eventually included among the victims of Nazi euthanasia Jewish psychiatric patients were systematically killed Some Jewish children were euthanized at Hadamar and Jews were also among the prisoners euthanized under the “Special Treatment” campaign The effort to distinguish medical euthanasia centers from the death camps became blurred a photographer responsible for taking pictures of patients’ “death struggles” and autopsies Bruckner candidly admitted that he enjoyed the food and abundant liquor at Hartheim and was glad to make “300 marks a month and a little money on the side.” He also noted that “there were lots of parties Everybody was sleeping with everybody else.” Bruckner’s attitude seems to have been more the norm than the exception Few in Germany or Austria resisted the Nazi euthanasia effort; as one plaque noted “it took a long time for this resistance to be acknowledged in society It was not until the 1990s when the history of Nazi euthanasia was researched in greater depth in Austria as well that it found more widespread recognition.” The main resistance figure recognized at Hartheim is Clemens von Galen the Catholic bishop of Münster during the Nazi years His resistance is also alluded to at Yad Vashem where one display notes that Churches were instrumental in shutting down an early iteration of the program: “When the Euthanasia institutions were closed their medical and operational personnel were sent to Poland where they engaged in establishing and commanding the extermination camps for Jews.” Another resistance figure commemorated at Hartheim is Franz Sitter a nurse who left Hartheim almost immediately after being hired He faced no repercussions for walking away and his example damns all those who made a different choice Sitter and a small handful of others are presented by the museum as ethical exemplars for visitors inviting them to probe their own character and conscience as they reflect on what happened here The Value of Life exhibit concludes with a display titled “Breaks and Continuities,” containing items or images related to abortion These are presented without much commentary; it is left to viewers to consider the extent to which any of them relate to the ideology of eugenics and what that might mean for medical practice today I returned to the ground floor and Hartheim’s foundational exhibit which includes the original “killing rooms.” I looked at photographs of victims and a selection of their belongings When I walked into the gas chamber and crematorium I felt the emptiness of a world in which so many innocents have been unjustly eliminated I started a conversation with a group of Austrian high school students during their lunch break I asked if they thought there are ever circumstances in which euthanasia is appropriate I have continued to reflect on this and other persistent freely agreed that no one is qualified to determine the value of anyone else’s life Clearly the Nazis had profoundly failed to recognize the value of the lives of their neighbors But do we run the risk of wrongly assessing the worth of our own lives or becoming convinced our lives are less worthy due to some perceived deficit along medicalized or other standardized lines If medical practitioners could err so profoundly in their judgments of life’s value Could “consent” merely corroborate an assessment of a life’s value that is fundamentally inaccurate or untrue And might others who support a faulty assessment wrongly encourage people to end their own lives and other staff at Hartheim Castle appear to have been driven by personal conviction; their views had become a matter of widespread professional consensus the judgment of assessors and providers of euthanasia were considered to be beyond reproach we recognize that their devaluation of human life was abhorrent and unjustifiable But on what basis can we scrutinize this assessment of the value of life and deem it false I often think about how an estimated 30,000 persons were euthanized inside that elegant European castle Many people participated out of a belief that this was for the good of the victims and for society at large Hartheim Castle is a reminder that the insidious ideology of Nazism included a specific form of dehumanization that made it easier for modern and prosperous countries to do horrifying things I made my way to a second Nazi euthanasia memorial located roughly between Cologne and Frankfurt public museums are built in city centers for ease of access; concentration camps and euthanasia sites Formerly an ordinary public psychiatric hospital, Hadamar was converted by the Nazis into their sixth euthanasia center as 1940 came to a close patients with disabilities and mental illness were regularly bused to Hadamar and then directed to the basement gas chamber they were then incinerated; smoke could be seen from afar and locals reported smelling it Some at Hadamar received lethal injections or were starved to death Relatives of the euthanized were sent “comfort letters,” which included false information about the circumstances and time of death and they were sent urns containing ashes—though not the ashes of their loved ones Beginning in 1942, a more diverse array of “patients” was sent to Hadamar: forced laborers with tuberculosis, former SS soldiers suffering from shell shock, half-Jewish “mixed children.” More than 15,000 people were euthanized at Hadamar from 1941 to 1945 and many more had been sterilized there over the years Hadamar physicians were apparently enthusiastic about their work; staff celebrated the death of the 10,000th victim with beer and revelry with one employee mockingly impersonating a priest Hadamar staff received perks similar to those of Hartheim’s workers: excursions it was the employees of Hadamar who went on to build the extermination camp The photos of victims especially drew me in and faced the camera with a slight smile and her right arm folded over her left and she was raised in a Jewish girls’ home was judged to be “destitute.” Despite an order banning Hadamar from receiving Jewish patients Selma was sent there in 1936 and subjected to a sterilization order prior to Hadamar’s becoming a euthanasia center After Selma was sterilized on the grounds of “not being able to satisfy expectations in life,” her father fought to no avail to get her released Selma was later deported to Ravensbrück concentration camp There was also Minna Heinze an elegant-looking middle-aged mother of two who had helped a Jewish family flee the country after Kristallnacht Subjected to interrogation concerning her involvement with the Jewish refugees Minna began to experience anxiety attacks and insomnia and was institutionalized She was ultimately sent to Hadamar in 1943 and died in March 1944 either from severe deprivation or lethal injection Her family was prevented from visiting and received no news of her until her reported death from “influenza.” I thought about the Jewish family that fled and may have descendants living today because of Minna’s courage Despite Jews’ being occasionally banned from admission to Hadamar It was also at Hadamar that the Nazis designated “an Educational Home for Jewish half-breeds of minority age.” Children who had one Jewish parent were sent to Hadamar under the pretense of receiving social welfare education Among them were brothers Wolfgang and Günther they were deemed “incapable of being educated,” “inclined toward criminality,” and “morally neglected.” The boys had been growing up without their father; the Nazis had tortured and killed him for being half Jewish and alleged that he was communist The brothers were admitted as “Jewish half-breeds” to Hadamar’s “educational institution.” They were both killed in the summer of 1943 and given false causes of death can be used for domestic work and light gardening he disturbs the sleeping hall at night and tells the most cock-and-bull stories.” There is a photo on display of Wolfgang and Günther with their mother whose protective expression reveals she knows something dreadful awaits her children the doctor at Hadamar invented fictitious causes of death But Helene also reported that the doctor told her directly: “Mrs You have to accept that you will not see your children again since Jewishness has to be eliminated.” Of the forty-three children enrolled in the “educational home,” thirty-eight were killed I descended to Hadamar’s former gas chamber with the somber realization that these walls were the last thing seen by the victims whose stories I had been learning upstairs The Hadamar memorial opened to the public in 1983 and the languages in which the material is offered are increasing The main visitors seem to be German students “The Hadamar Memorial Museum is a place of remembrance and political education and is aimed at children Its task is to provide visitors with information about the Nazi euthanasia crimes and to discuss current issues and political education.” Though the causes of death were often fabricated my visit made me realize the extent to which ostensibly scientific criteria and an air of medical authority had been wielded to rationalize ending the lives of “inconvenient” innocents The unspoken logic of the criteria is that it qualified patients to be killed The medical records of the euthanasia victims list such things as: “congenital feeble-mindedness,” “social nonconformity,” “anxious relational psychosis,” “unable to work,” “incurable,” “danger to the public,” “unstable and dishonest,” “sullen and unapproachable,” “senile dementia,” etc. as conditions that obviously warranted death they were used to reduce people to conditions that disqualified them from belonging in the world The person with a name became the mere instance of a type Doctors would refer to patients by their illness or inner struggle as a kind of shorthand that eclipsed the person This is a particularly insidious form of dehumanization when a person’s entire identity is reduced to a diagnosis a consensus arose around a social valuation of life The rationale for killing people became entrenched under the guise of general agreement If the general presumption becomes that the rationale is logical if there is a sense that fungible criteria are legitimate then people are susceptible to being classified within them regardless of whether they would have put themselves in that category Today we might instinctively look at Nazi criteria for death as utterly baseless but at the time seasoned medical professionals regarded them as reasonable To have a sense of history is to grasp the arbitrariness of such criteria there is no way to get the criteria just right because the stamp of medical approval sends a social message that there is a category of persons who should not exist I visited a third Nazi euthanasia center: Sonnenstein not far from Dresden in a little town called Pirna I had taken a stroll nearby to the former home of Victor Klemperer who stored his diary at a home at Maxim Gorki Street No The Sonnenstein is no longer the state mental asylum Disagreeable people are brought here in a kind of police car Here it is generally called the “whisper carriage.” The relatives then receive the urn Recently a family received two urns at once The euthanasia center at Pirna was located on the grounds of the Sonnenstein Castle the site had been an ordinary psychiatric hospital since 1811 an estimated 13,720 persons living with disabilities and mental illness were euthanized under Aktion T4 more than a thousand concentration camp prisoners from Auschwitz Among the more recent locations to become a memorial site Sonnenstein was inaugurated as such in 2000 The site documents the ways in which the eugenics movement distorted the founding aims of the Sonnenstein Asylum which once served as a model for the care and treatment of patients there is a first-edition copy of a 1920 book by the German professors and eugenicists Karl Binding and Alfred Hoche; a record of the Nazi-enacted Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring from 1933; and a copy of the private letter signed by Hitler to his physician triggering Aktion T4—the initial phase of the Nazi euthanasia project authorizing the killing of those with disabilities The Sonnenstein memorial team put together a series called “Giving Victims Back their Names,” biographical portrait booklets commemorating some of those killed Among these is a profile of the rabbi and academic Arnold Grünfeld who was born in 1887 and killed at Sonnenstein in 1941 A concentration camp prisoner deported to Pirna to be euthanized Arnold was one of eighty-five Jews from Buchenwald murdered on either July 14 or 15 in 1941 Born in a Moravian town that had had a significant Jewish community since the fourteenth century Arnold had lost both his parents by the age of fifteen He is presumed to have lived with other family members until he finished school; there’s a record of a school trip he took to Vienna to meet Theodor Herzl during which students gave Herzl donations they had collected Arnold served his community as a rabbi and wrote his doctorate on the divine will His daughter Edith managed to flee Europe in a youth Aliyah Arnold was deported first to Dachau and then to Buchenwald before being brought before a medical commission and deported to Sonnenstein and his wife in Prague was told she could receive his urn for a fee Whether his ashes were actually in the urn is unknown but the urn was buried in the Jewish cemetery in Prague families were provided with ashes that could have belonged to anyone and had no means of knowing whether they had been those of their loved ones the only differentiation the Nazis made was the amount of ash put into an urn of a child versus that of an adult my guide informed me that relatives began to be suspicious upon receiving a death certificate listing the cause of death as appendicitis for a “patient” whose appendix had already been removed years before I read that about “one-third of those employed at the Sonnenstein killing center were later assigned Those camps were responsible for the murder of about 1.75 million Jews.” The booklet also includes a photograph of two employees of the Sonnenstein killing center having a beer at the Belzec concentration camp It is related as a historical fact that the ethical callousness of the euthanasia killings and the corresponding radical desensitization contributed to the mass murders in the concentration camps But it was also noted that there were between sixty and seventy people on site at all times and that not all of them were ideological National Socialists Other motivations for their participation included career aspirations and protection from being called up for frontline military service I asked her about the reactions of the students who visit “What is it that really hits them?” I asked My guide explained that what really gets to students is when they realize they could be selectively discarded I could have been one of those ones who got killed I think it is a realization that makes a healthy presumption: that the world would be at a loss without you because the world is better with you in it it unwittingly damages our own sense of self-worth because we will have made ourselves more precarious by their dismissal was sometimes referred to by the Nazis as “mercy killings.” However Mercy is to be patient with ourselves and others in our weakness Euthanasia ends a person’s life prematurely; it is an expression of impatience Callousness can be shown quickly; expressing mercy takes time I am grateful that it is now possible to pay tribute to these lesser-known victims of Nazi euthanasia and eugenics These sites are worth visiting; these victims deserve our remembrance and commemoration Exploring these memorial sites revealed to me the ways in which the euthanasia centers existed in a bizarre liminal space: sometimes they were regarded as healthcare facilities but sometimes they got sent to them; many doctors and nurses were true believers in “mercy killing” but they also operated in top secrecy falsifying death certificates and deceiving patients’ relatives; death was sometimes rationalized as being in the patient’s interest other times it was a wartime necessity in the interest of the state; propaganda films and posters suggested that the public needed to be convinced but the prevailing helplessness and fear experienced amid the war naturally limited pushback This fog of motivations and perceptions obscures the study of Nazi euthanasia and eugenics And this is why this history is so crucial to confront: the Nazis surely hoped we would forget it but the victims of Nazi euthanasia are not just a footnote; the dehumanization against which we need to be on guard is any instance in which a person is deemed “unworthy of life.” To study or visit these sites my travel to these sites showed me that historical facts alone cannot teach us morality these facts must be reckoned with and interpreted through a sincere wrestling with our own fears Image by starmaro and licensed via Adobe Stock Applying new governance methods to medicine will undermine physician autonomy and make doctors more liable… It seems particularly disturbing to imagine legalizing euthanasia in this moment the Supreme Court of Canada should maintain the country’s… the world commemorates the anniversary of the “Night of broken glass” attacked Jewish persons and property in a coordinated wave of antisemitic violence The Museum is one of the main memorials that commemorate the victims of National Socialism in Hesse it serves as a reminder of the Nazi “euthanasia” crimes.  Vatican News’ spoke to historian and director of the Hadamar Memorial Museum who shared his reflections on the importance of remembering the past.  The Hadamar Memorial Museum is an International place of remembrance It commemorates all those persecuted in the course of the Nazi “euthanasia” crimes Please tell us a little more about what happened in Hadamar in these years.. Schulte: Hadamar was one of the killing centers of Nazi euthanasia the killing of people with disabilities and those with mental illness And during the time of the Nazi dictatorship there were various programs for the killing of people with mental illnesses and other diseases there was one of these killing centers where between 1941 and 1945 they were killed because they didn't get their medication or they got poisonous medication or they simply did not get any food major killing centers of euthanasia in Germany at the time Hadamar today is an international place of remembrance Where are they from and why are they coming Hadamar is an international place of remembrance because of two reasons because people from various countries were killed in Hadamar actually The major part of those killed here were people from the German Reich and also people from Italy were killed here in this place they were forced laborers which were sent to Hadamar but usually people do not know  - that this is a place where people from various countries were killed Hadamar is an international place of remembrance we have people from various countries who visit us and sometimes it's relatives who come from the United States who visit the place where their forefathers died But we have also people who are in the broader sense we had quite a few people from Spain who were traveling through Germany and also visiting our place here from Israel visiting usually as part of a commemoration tour or an educational tour And we had quite a few people from Japan coming here because there was a time when there was a discussion about how Japan dealt with people with disabilities we have various groups of people who come here They come to Hadamar because they are interested in the topic or also they are simply in the region and decide that is something important they want to visit how important is it to have a place like the Hadamar Memorial Museum a place that reminds us of the crimes of the former times and during former wars do not forget those people who were murdered during the Nazi dictatorship that also today we remember what happened to them I think that is the basis for our understanding of how dictatorships work and what is the ultimate goal of dictatorships: that is killing,  mass killing and these are crimes I also think that when we study the mechanisms of how people were set outside society we see - that is my strong belief - also what happens today which goes in this same direction: that we say that some people are not worthy to live in our midst who says some people are different from other people and therefore they do not have the same rights But I think that is very important for our societies where we live in where we all see that this situation happens I think it's also very important for the wider society which is happening right now in Europe and not far away from us it is very important to understand how this war happened and what the rhetoric is And we see right now that there is a nation which is being degraded by another state that says that they do not have a right simply to exist This place hopes to establish awareness of what happened in the past and what can happen in the present and in the future and disabled people - topics that are still important today.  Pope Francis and the church speak about this as well…  I think from the basic beliefs of the church a moral authority to talk especially about the things which happened here in Hadamar - the killing of mentally ill people And I think it is very important that the churches talk about what happened today but also with regard to the broader society that the discussion is about us and others And I think that is the basic problem of community And I think the churches have moral authority they have still moral authority to talk about this and to point the finger right at the problem we have there And I think it's very important for all institutions to talk about this And I think it's very important that we all understand that all humankind is the same And I think that is a basic belief of the churches With regard to the time period of the Nazi dictatorship the churches - both churches when euthanasia started in the so-called 3rd Reich they sent letters to authorities to discuss this - what happened this was only on the level of correspondence and there was no public statement by the churches to condemn these crimes He publicly condemned this and said that all people should resist being part of this And it's also important because this helped that at least the euthanasia action T4 stopped by the end of August 1941 And we also know from the bishop here in this region the Bishop of Limburg at the time,  that he also wrote a letter by the end of August 1941 to the Reichsminister of Justice talking about what especially happened in Hadamar This is from the letter from Bishop Helfrich to the Reichs Minister of Justice from August 13 I'm quoting:“ About eight kilometres from Limburg in the small town of Hadamar an asylum which had formerly served for various purposes most recently as a sanatorium and nursing home has been built or set up as a place where it is generally believed that euthanasia has been carried out according to plan for months since about February 1941 Buses with a large number of such victims arrive in Hadamar more often during the week Schoolchildren in the surrounding area know this car and talk: Here comes the murder box again.` After the arrival of such cars the citizens of Hadamar watch the smoke rising from the chimney and are shaken by the constant thought of the poor victims.” So I think this is a very important document to show what happened It also shows that there was some resistance - but as I said before but it was tried as a part of an administrative procedure And that's not something the Nazis reacted to Thank you for reading our article. 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Just click here This conversation with Patricia Heberer-Rice focuses on the Nazi T-4 program for the murder of the disabled and the 1945 trial connected to Hadamar Allied troops liberated not only the Third Reich's concentration and extermination camps but also the killing centers the Nazis set up to murder people with mental and physical disabilities Join The National WWII Museum's Educational Travel Team and Historian William I Hitchcock as they explore the highlights of this upcoming journey through Normandy and into the heart of Paris Watch as The National WWII Museum's Educational Travel Team and Historian Alexandra Richie discuss the Museum's newest tour Watch as The National WWII Museum's Educational Travel Team and Historian Alexandra Richie discuss the Megastructures: Forced Labor and Massive Works in the Third Reich tour Learn about Kristallnacht or the “Night of Broken Glass” and how the history of European antisemitism helped lead to this event Join us for a webinar concluding our Women’s History Month programming discussing a pioneer in American aviation World War II was a watershed moment for Mexican Americans and their quest for equality—during the war Mexican Americans served in the military and worked on the Home Front to support their country were no longer willing to accept second-class citizenship This lecture rethinks the attack on Pearl Harbor from the perspective of Native Hawaiian history 2021 marks the centennial of the creation of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at Arlington National Cemetery Willy Zimmerer’s Stolperstein surrounded by flowers   #          #          # Stockton University 101 Vera King Farris Drive Galloway, NJ 08205-9441 (609) 652-1776 Maps, Directions & Parking Accessibility Statement Additional Locations The noose is tightened around the hooded neck of Karl Willig, nurse at the Hadamar Medical Institute, Germany, before the trap is sprung in the courtyard of the Bruchsal Prison, March 14, 1946. Willig and two others had been found guilty of murdering some 300 Polish and Russian prisoners of war by means of lethal injection. The other two were hung the same morning. Copyright © 2025 Ogden Publications of Pennsylvania, LLC | https://www.lockhaven.com | 9-11 W. Main Street, Lock Haven, PA 17745 | 570-748-6791 by Jeffrey Parkin The painting behind Archdeacon Laurence is by Earl Haig and depicts Christopher’s father distributing holy communion to fellow prisoners-of-war in the POW camp in Hadamar The painting behind Archdeacon Laurence is by Earl Haig and depicts Christopher’s father distributing holy communion to fellow prisoners-of-war .. Christopher Laurence had a great gift for affirming the ministries of others he was born in the Canadian Prairies and never lost his love for the outdoors and his childhood was spent in the countryside among farmers and horse-lovers Christopher took up his National Service commission with the Royal Lincolnshire Regiment The experience persuaded him to offer himself for ordination his three preceding generations of Lincolnshire clergymen then a junior night sister at Addenbrooke’s Hospital He continued his training at Westcott House led to a 15-year incumbency at St George’s He is still remembered for his pastoral care and developing a church community characterised by kindness and support he was appointed St Hugh’s Missioner in the diocese and a Canon of Lincoln Cathedral In reference to their shared love of shooting His experience as a missioner convinced him that much work was needed with the clergy whose confidence was falling as their traditional place in society was being lost as the Bishops’ Director of Clergy Training he introduced a system of reflection to help clergy to evaluate their work and develop their ministries as Archdeacon of Lindsey and a Residentiary Canon the Edward King Institute for Ministry Development was founded with Norman Todd Based on the work of the Alban Institute in Washington it aimed to extend the principles of a ministerial-review process across the country with 17 years of valued reflective activity Christopher’s time as a residentiary canon included an unhappy episode at the cathedral the Bishop had called upon the Dean and Residentiary Canons to resign Christopher later wrote an account of it in a small book He claimed that the work of an archdeacon was not congenial to his temperament as he made full use of his consultancy and pastoral gifts make frequent complaint about the more than 20 committees whose meetings he was expected to attend and highly respected member of the cathedral community after retirement in 1994 “It was a pleasure to be able to do some good.” an internationally renowned church embroideress It was a happy union which endured to the end of his life John Harvard Christopher Laurence died on 21 February Read reports from issues stretching back to 1863 search for your parish or see if any of the clergy you know get a mention Explore the archive We are a partnership of six diverse and welcoming congregations in the northern districts of Milton Keynes offering a rich tapestry of worshipping traditions – Anglican We are eager to find our new Vicar who will… The Bishop of Gloucester seeks to appoint a prayerful and collaborative priest to lead these vibrant and active sister benefices on the southwestern edge of the diocese friendly village situated beside the famous Pilgrims’ Way in West Kent surrounded by beautiful countryside yet within easy access of London We are seeking a compassionate priest with the necessary experience and enthusiasm to effectively communicate the gospel of God’s love to everyone run jointly by Sarum College and The Church Times tickets available This online seminar, run jointly by Modern Church and The Church Times discusses the theology underpinning the drive for growth tickets available Nicholas Reed Langen examines the Supreme Court ruling on gender Non-subscribers can read four articles for free each month Research has shown that a shocking number of women filled other and carried out Hitler's vision in ways other than just multiplying and reinforcing his racial ideals The following article includes depictions of mass violence and hate crimes The Russian-born but anti-Communist Pauline Kneissler felt that calling from the time she was very young but she also felt fiercely devoted to her ancestral home: Germany When the Nazi Party promised a return to the nation's glory days According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Kneissler took on a leadership role among women's organizations within the party she got the attention of Berlin officials looking for someone to head up the T-4 program The program began with the killing of infants who were deemed mentally or physically disabled and expanded from there (Pictured is a poster advertising the cost of supporting a single developmentally disabled individual.) Those who died under the program included the mentally ill and her initial role in the operation was to admit patients While doctors were initially tasked with the killing it wasn't long before Kneissler was transferred to a mental health facility she killed countless patients by overdosing them on drugs like morphine She was put on trial for hundreds of deaths and went on to work as a nurse in a West German mental health facility before retiring with a full pension The Nazi war machine wasn't just made up of tanks and soldiers. According to historian Wendy Lower's book, "Hitler's Furies: German Women in the Nazi Killing Fields," there were around half a million women who served in various military positions as auxiliary personnel who opted for a secretarial job with the new regime Meier caught the eye of a man named Hermann Hanweg and when Hanweg was assigned to the city of Lida (pictured) with orders to exterminate the Jewish presence there What followed was a bizarre scene of mass executions organized even as Meier handed out orders to Jewish artisans for special projects Meier became such a trusted confidante that she was given full authority to sign and issue orders on Hanweg's behalf That included giving overseers permission to execute Jewish workers who showed up late for work but it wasn't all work: She would later admit to taking part in hunting trips where Jewish men were sent into the brush to flush out prey .. she would only testify: "I cannot say if the people who were shot were even Jews." As the conflict dragged on, more and more men of the Third Reich's SS elite were shipped to the front lines, leaving Germany with massive personnel shortages. The answer was — in part — to replace guards in camps like Auschwitz with women who signed on to not only fill critical roles in the vast communications network but to act as guards According to the BBC the Third Reich recruited women to work as guards with advertisements luring applicants with "Good wages and free board accommodation and clothing." Those accommodations were cottages a stone's throw away from the camps they sent their dogs after prisoners during the day One unnamed guard described it as "the most beautiful time of my life," and in a 1999 interview The mistake was that it was a concentration camp records suggest that if recruits decided that the beatings and the executions that were a daily part of camp life weren't for them Many — like Bothe — didn't leave: She later acted as an escort on a death march to Bergen-Belsen Bothe was tasked with helping bury the dead at Belsen and complained about it to Allied liberators: Carrying the bodies caused her back to hurt Not all women who ended up serving the Third Reich found their way there after chasing a fanatical dream According to research done by Wendy Lower for "Hitler's Furies," some women — like Johanna Altvater — found their niche in the local Hitler Youth movement It did: Aided by the fact that she fit the profile of the Third Reich's perfect woman she was welcomed with open arms and sent to Ukraine as a secretary of the Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories The Jewish ghetto (pictured) had already been established by the time Altvater arrived there with a boss who had a pastime — shooting workers carrying barrels of fuel — that set the tone of the place and discovered she had a horrible talent: killing children She appears to have gotten a taste for it after picking up a toddler Every story that follows is just as terrible: She was known to pluck children from their hospital beds and hurl them from third-floor windows and shoot others in the face when they asked for food In the World War II aftermath proclaimed that she had only been a lowly secretary and was ultimately acquitted in spite of the testimony of dozens of people who described the brutal murders they'd see her commit It's heartbreaking stuff: According to Feder Mandl relished her role in overseeing the arrivals of new prisoners deciding who was going to the camps and who was going straight to the crematorium .. and estimates suggest about 90% of arrivals were executed immediately Feder described what happened to one woman who arrived with her in graphic detail After Mandl dragged her 2-year-old toddler from her arms and tossed the baby aside she turned on the mother: "Mandl kicked and beat her so cruelly that she didn't get up any more because she didn't give any signs of life and was thus thrown onto a car and taken to the crematorium." Feder continued that when it was her turn Mandl dragged her 4-year-old away from her and beat her as well Others reached out to help: "I was taken aside and advised to summon all my strength because otherwise Mandl would send me to the crematorium." In a bizarre contrast, Mandl was also a huge fan of orchestral music — so much so that according to the Jewish Federation of Cleveland she petitioned for and received permission to assemble a camp orchestra Outfitted with instruments seized from prisoners the orchestra was ordered to play during not only morning roll call Wartime shortages are well-known but less well-known are some of the ways Nazi Germany tried to combat those shortages authorities established a facility in Velpke The idea was that Polish children would be removed from their parents' care and raised in the baby home which would free up parents to labor in the fields The facility and the children moved there were put under the care of a former schoolteacher named Valentina Billien and over the course of the next six months Some shocking details unfolded during her 1946 trial. According to documentation recorded in the United Nations War Crimes Commission's "Law-Reports of Trials of War Criminals," Bilien tended to treat the facility as the kind of job where she could just sort of leave for the night testified that she had been short-staffed and underfunded and when she raised concerns about having enough to feed the children The building chosen by Heinrich Gerike to house the baby home was described as "a corrugated iron hut, without running water, light, telephone, or facilities for dealing with sickness," which makes it perhaps less surprising that he was ultimately found guilty, sentenced to death, and executed in 1946. For her part in the Velpke home, Billien was sentenced to 15 years (via the Jewish Virtual Library) [Featured image by German Federal Archives via Wikimedia Commons | Cropped and scaled | CC BY-SA 3.0] some of the Third Reich's killer women were simply given a platform for their violence Liesel Willhaus was married to Gustav Willhaus the commandant of the Janowska concentration camp (pictured) According to "Hitler's Furies," the once working-class Willhauses relished their new-found status and at the same time Gustav ruled the camp with an iron fist When renovations were carried out on their villa she insisted on a balcony so she could look down on the Jewish slaves working on their property and shoot whoever she wanted to Liesel became widely known for treating those guests to a show that ended with the deaths of any number of the seemingly limitless slaves sourced from the camps She was also said to be fond of shooting camp prisoners as they stood in line for roll call and of executing those who were sick She was far from the only woman who rejoiced in this grisly target shooting: Gertrude Segel a Gestapo secretary and beloved of SS Commander Felix Landau was fond of executing slave laborers who worked in her garden as Landau once wrote that he was in charge of so many mass executions that "I hardly got any sleep.. It's often debated just how much the ordinary German citizen — and even the ordinary soldier — knew about the extent of Hitler's Final Solution but the story of Erna Petri is an eerie one: Not only was she totally on board with the extermination of the world's Jews According to "Hitler's Furies," Erna married Horst Petri an SS soldier who also happened to have a degree in agriculture Embodying Hitler's idea of the noble farmer fighting for his race and country Horst and Erna were assigned to live in and work on a plantation in Poland (pictured) They quickly established their own regime on their new estate hunting down escaped prisoners who fled through their land and making regular forays into surrounding villages to find anyone who might be hiding out A few months after Horst captured and executed four Jewish prisoners escaping from a train — after telling his dutiful wife that executions were men's work not women's — Erna was returning from a shopping trip when she came across six children she determined that they had escaped from the nearby train station and when her husband didn't return from his own outing So she did: She lined them up alongside the estate's mass grave and killed each with a single shot [Featured image by Aeou via Wikimedia Commons | Cropped and scaled | CC BY-SA 4.0] The numbers of people killed during World War II and in the events leading up to it are nothing short of staggering That includes the 15,000 people executed in just one of the six killing centers operated under the umbrella of the T-4 euthanasia program: When Allied troops moved into Hadamar in 1945 they found a mental health facility outfitted with gas chambers disguised as shower rooms the Allied tribunals had a bit of trouble charging her with anything most of the people who died at Hadamar were German which meant it was a German matter — not an international one It wasn't until the names of 476 Polish and Soviet victims were discovered that Huber and her accomplices were put on trial Eric Brown was one of the British soldiers at the liberation of Bergen-Belsen, and when he spoke with ITV at age 96 he said it was a scene that had haunted him his entire life "The first thing that struck me as you walked in were these mounds of bodies — I'm not exaggerating when I say they were as high as the ceiling." He could still remember the fanatical devotion of the notorious Irma Grese Brown was one of the men who interviewed her: "I asked her four times [whether she had any regrets over her actions] when she suddenly leaped to her feet and with a salute called out at the top of her voice Eerily, before Grese was trained as a concentration camp guard, she lived a perfectly ordinary life as an employee on a dairy farm (via HistoryToday) the evidence presented at Nuremberg famously revealed the lampshades she had made from the skins of the dead while witnesses gave testimony about her random cruelty and the boots she wore to stomp on the dead Grese wasn't the only woman renowned for her cruelty Around 10% of the 37,000 concentration camp guards were women and although there are stories of kindness — with some witnesses naming guards who would share their food and supplies — those stories are few and far between "Hitler's Furies" says that her name change came with her marriage to an SS officer named Hans Block she joined her husband at his post in Drohobych (pictured) where she acted as an extension of her husband perfectly comfortable brandishing whips and shouting orders to soldiers Witnesses recalled her being front and center in ordering the deaths of around 200 people in their town center and demanding the execution of four Jewish girls who had been worked to exhaustion at their local market She became so well-known for her violent acts that complaints were actually filed with her husband Witnesses recalled her running over and killing a child with her own baby carriage and another incident in which she was approached by a 7-year-old girl begging for help Block was observed beating her and killing her by stomping on her head Block denied the charges that she had ever killed or beaten the workers that she claimed her husband had simply allowed her to oversee she claimed that she was being framed by the witness who had testified against her a Jewish woman who Block said was trying to cover up her own crimes