Beginning in 1939 with the killing of disabled infants and young children in special paediatric wards, the Nazi state extended medical killing to institutionalised adults under an operation run from Tiergartenstrasse 4 in Berlin and authorised by a backdated note from Hitler. Physicians selected patients from questionnaires returned by asylums; those chosen were transported to six centres - Brandenburg, Grafeneck, Bernburg, Sonnenstein, Hartheim and Hadamar - and killed with carbon monoxide in gas chambers disguised as showers, their families receiving falsified causes of death. Public protest, notably the sermon of Bishop Clemens August von Galen in August 1941, led Hitler to halt the centralised gassing after 70,273 deaths, but killing continued in institutions by starvation and lethal medication until 1945. The programme supplied the personnel and the technique for the extermination camps of Operation Reinhard, where T4 staff including Christian Wirth and Franz Stangl were deployed. Postwar West German trials convicted a number of the doctors and administrators involved.
German physicians and the Chancellery of the Fuehrer killed institutionalised disabled children and adults under a centrally organised programme
Reich health statistics and the reconstructions by Friedlander and the USHMM put roughly 300,000 patients in German institutions in 1939. The 70,273 figure is the T4 organisation's own internal tally of people gassed at the six killing centres to August 1941; killing by starvation and lethal medication continued to 1945, bringing the total usually given for the whole euthanasia programme to 250,000-300,000 across Germany and the occupied territories.
The figure of 70,273 for January 1940 to August 1941 comes from the programme's own statistics. Totals of 250,000 to 300,000 for all phases, given by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, add the child killings, the deaths from deliberate starvation diets and overdoses after 1941, and the killing of patients in occupied Poland and the Soviet Union. Records for the later decentralised phase are incomplete, which is what drives the range.
Selection by questionnaire, transport to gassing centres, falsified death certificates and the later use of starvation diets and lethal medication are documented in the T4 administrative files, the Hartheim statistics and the records of the postwar euthanasia trials.
Germany, Austria