Hadamar killing centre

The Hadamar killing centre (German: NS-Tötungsanstalt Hadamar) was a killing facility involved in the Nazi involuntary euthanasia programme known as Aktion T4. It was housed within a psychiatric hospital located in the German town of Hadamar, near Limburg in Hessen.

Beginning in 1939, the Nazis used Hadamar and five other sites as killing facilities for Aktion T4, which performed mass sterilizations and mass murder of "undesirable" members of German society, specifically those with physical and mental disabilities. In total, an estimated 200,000 people were murdered at these facilities, including thousands of children. These actions were in keeping with Nazi ideas about eugenics. While officially ended in 1941, the programme lasted until the German surrender in 1945. Nearly 15,000 German citizens were transported to the hospital and murdered there, most by gas chamber and the rest by lethal injection and starvation. In addition, hundreds of forced labourers from Poland and other countries occupied by the Nazis were murdered there.

Hadamar and its hospital fell within the American occupation zone after the war. During 8–15 October 1945, United States forces conducted the Hadamar Trial, the first mass atrocity trial in the years following World War II. They prosecuted doctors and staff on charges of murdering citizens of allied countries, namely, forced labourers from Poland and other countries. The US had jurisdiction for these crimes under international law. Several people were convicted and executed for these crimes. After the German courts were reconstructed under the occupation, in 1946 a doctor and nurse were prosecuted by Germans for the murders of nearly 15,000 German citizens at the hospital. Both were convicted.

The hospital continues to operate. It holds a memorial to the euthanasia murders as well as an exhibit about the Nazi programme.

Since the late 19th century, doctors and scientists had been developing theories of racial purity based on eugenics, a concept popular at the time that developed from several disciplines including social history, biology, anthropology and genetics. As Weindling (1989) explained, there had been several movements in Germany since the end of World War I concerned with the 'degeneration' of German racial purity that culminated with the founding in 1927 of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics. Although there had been demands since the early 1920s for legislation on sterilization and euthanasia, these were rejected because it was believed that positive eugenics was more representative of the Weimar political structures and the nation's social needs. This approach ended in 1933 after the ascent of the Nazis in Germany, who implemented a eugenics programme based on their pseudoscientific racial theories.

In July 1933, the Nazis passed the "Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring", which prescribed compulsory sterilisation for people with medical conditions thought to be hereditary, such as schizophrenia and "imbecility". It is estimated that 360,000 people were sterilised under this law between 1933 and 1939.

Beginning in late 1939, Hitler personally issued an order on his private stationery authorizing Philipp Bouhler and Karl Brandt to initiate a "euthanasia" programme to give the "incurably sick" a "mercy death". Developed by Viktor Brack, it began with mass sterilizations of children deemed "unfit" to reproduce. After that, the hospital staff exterminated children determined to be unfit and the programme was later expanded to adults. By January 1940, the Nazis had set up their first killing facilities. The clinic in Hadamar, which housed a psychiatric facility, was the last of six facilities set up to implement the programme, with murders commencing in January 1941. The staff cremated their 10,000th patient in the summer of 1941, celebrating with beer and wine. During the first phase of operations (January to August 1941), 10,072 men, women and children were murdered with carbon monoxide in a gas chamber as part of the Nazi "euthanasia" programme. The gas was obtained in standard cylinders supplied by the chemicals company IG Farben.

The skies around Hadamar were often thick with smoke from the hospital crematorium. Up to 100 victims arrived in post-buses every day. They were told to disrobe for a "medical examination". Sent before a physician, each was recorded as having one of 60 fatal diseases, as "incurables" were to be given a "mercy death". The doctor identified each person with different-coloured sticking plasters for one of three categories: murder; murder & remove brain for research; murder & extract gold teeth.