Aktion T4

Aktion T4 was the Nazi programme of systematic killing of people with physical or mental disabilities and mental illness, whom the regime described as unworthy of life. It took its name from the address of its Berlin headquarters, Tiergartenstrasse 4. Doctors selected patients from hospitals and asylums on the basis of forms, and they were sent to killing centres in Germany and Austria, such as Hartheim and Hadamar, where they were murdered with carbon monoxide gas. About seventy thousand people had been killed when the programme was officially halted in 1941, after protests by church leaders, especially Bishop von Galen. Killings continued in a decentralised way by starvation and lethal injection. T4 staff later helped to run the extermination camps in occupied Poland.

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