L’Aktion T4

Résumé 0

The murder of one-fifth of German mental health asylum residents in gas chambers built on the Reich’s territory was planned and carried out between January 1940 and August 1941. It was consistent with the ideas behind eugenics, one of the central tenets of Nazi ideology. This program to purify the German race began with the forced mass sterilisation carried out between 1934 and 1939 on people who supposedly had hereditary mentally illnesses. Then, on Hitler’s personal initiative, the Führer’s chancellery decided which people would be murdered, using arbitrary criteria under the pretext of carrying out mercy killings. This process was intended to combat the “degeneration” of the German people, reduce the cost of asylum hospitalisations and free up beds for wounded soldiers. In April 1941, prisoners from the Reich’s concentration camps begun to be murdered under Operation 14f13 as well. After the end of Aktion T4, the SS handed over the supervision of the murderers to Odilo Globocnic who, as part of the Polish General Government, oversaw the murder of 1,750,000 Jews in three Operation Reinhard extermination centres. What had been a selection process became an extermination process that no longer had a role for doctors to play.