Action T4
Overview
Action T4 was a postwar name for the mass murder through involuntary euthanasia in Nazi Germany. The name T4 is an abbreviation of Tiergartenstraße 4, a street address of the Chancellery department set up in the spring of 1940, in the Berlin borough of Tiergarten, which recruited and paid personnel associated with T4.[1] Certain German physicians were authorized to select patients "deemed incurably sick, after most critical medical examination" and then administer to them a "mercy death" (Gnadentod).[2]
Background
The euthanasia programme was part of the evolution of the policy of "racial hygiene" which culminated in the Holocaust. It was a precursor to the genocide of the Holocaust and was designed to exterminate the physically and mentally disabled, whom the Nazis deemed "life unworthy of life" (Lebensunwertes Leben), a concept borrowed from the eugenics movement popular in the early 20th century.[3]
Implementation
The programme officially began in 1939, and during the next four years, physicians killed 70,273 people at various euthanasia centres in Germany and Austria, along with those in occupied Poland.[4] The number of people murdered was originally recorded meticulously by the Nazis, but most of these records were destroyed in 1945.[4]
Aftermath
Action T4 was officially discontinued by Adolf Hitler in 1941 in response to public opposition, but the killings secretly continued until the end of the war in 1945.[1] The programme was one of many concurrent eugenics programmes in Nazi Germany to maintain the purity of the Aryan race. Today, it is seen as a major chapter in medical history.[3]
See Also
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 Burleigh, Michael (1994). Death and Deliverance: 'Euthanasia' in Germany, c. 1900–1945. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 190–191. ISBN 0-521-41613-6.
- ↑ Lifton, Robert Jay (1986). The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide. New York: Basic Books. pp. 46–47. ISBN 0-465-04904-4.
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 Proctor, Robert (1988). Racial Hygiene: Medicine Under the Nazis. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. pp. 108–113. ISBN 0-674-74578-7.
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 Friedlander, Henry (1995). The Origins of Nazi Genocide: From Euthanasia to the Final Solution. Chapel Hill, North Carolina: University of North Carolina Press. pp. 46–52. ISBN 0-8078-2208-6.