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, Tiergartenstrasse 4, from where the program was administered), Hadamar had been converted from an asylum for individuals struggling with mental illness first into a military hospital then, in 1940, 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, lethal injection, or starvation. About 10,000 of them were children. 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, sitting atop a hill in town, in mid-January 1941. Hadamar’s director, Dr. Ernst Baumhard, supervised a staff of 100 physicians, nurses, and assistants who undertook the daily tasks of deception, killing, 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, Württemberg, and Bavaria. Through trickery and the selective use of force and sedatives, victims entered the facility, were told to undress, and had all their belongings processed. 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, along with the victim's ashes.

The murder process halted on August 24, 1941, on Hitler’s direct order, after the German public learned about the disappearance of men, women, and children with physical and mental disabilities. The gas chamber at Hadamar was then dismantled. At that point, 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.

In the summer of 1942, the killing resumed at Hadamar, with Alfons Klein now chief administrator, and elsewhere (the murder of disabled children never ceased). The outstanding research of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Patricia Heberer Rice has thrown light on this less familiar second phase. Overdoses of medication or starvation became the new preferred means of physical elimination. In a webinar with The National WWII Museum, 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. In those cases, 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, perished there as well. This second phase of the killing claimed more than 4,400 lives.

When soldiers of the 2nd Infantry Division and, a short time later, Major Bolker stepped foot in the institute, they of course could not be aware of the full extent of Operation T-4. In 1941, 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, like Head Nurse Irmgard Huber, and the meticulous records they maintained of their murderous deeds, from former inmates, from townspeople, and from the autopsies, added up to a terrifying portrait of systematic, clandestine, state-directed annihilation.

This was the Third Reich’s first genocidal program. Often forgotten, 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. The Hadamar Trial of October 1945, where Leon Jaworski (best known for his role in the Watergate case) served as chief prosecutor, culminated in several convictions, including death sentences for Klein and two male nurses, Heinrich Ruoff and Karl Wittig. American authorities executed the three in March 1946. Others, however, received disgracefully mild sentences.

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.

Recommended Reading:

Burleigh, Michael. Death and Deliverance: ‘Euthanasia’ in Germany 1900-1945.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.

Friedlander, Henry. The Origins of Nazi Genocide: From Euthanasia to the Final Solution. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995.

Lifton, Robert Jay. The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide. New York: Basic Books, 1986.