Euthanasia in Nazi Germany

Aktion T4
Hitler's order for Aktion T4
Also known as	T4 Program
Location	German-occupied Europe
Date	September 1939 – August 1941
Incident type	Forced euthanasia
Perpetrators	SS
Participants	Psychiatric hospitals
Victims	70,273

Aktion T4 (German, pronounced [akˈtsi̯oːn teː fiːɐ]) was a postwar name for 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. 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). In October 1939 Adolf Hitler signed a "euthanasia decree" backdated to 1 September 1939 that authorized his personal physician Karl Brandt and Reichsleiter Philipp Bouhler to implement the programme.

The killings took place from September 1939 to August 1941, during which 70,273 people were recorded as being killed at various extermination centres located at psychiatric hospitals in Germany and Austria, along with those in occupied Poland. About half of those killed were taken from church-run asylums, often with the approval of the Protestant or Catholic authorities of the institutions. Despite the Holy See announcing on 2 December 1940 that the policy was contrary to the natural and positive Divine law and that "The direct killing of an innocent person because of mental or physical defects is not allowed", the declaration was not upheld by some Catholic authorities in Germany. On the other hand, in the summer of 1941, protests were led in Germany by Bishop von Galen, whose intervention, according to Richard J. Evans, led to "the strongest, most explicit and most widespread protest movement against any policy since the beginning of the Third Reich."

Several reasons for the programme have been offered, including eugenics, compassion, reducing suffering, racial hygiene, cost effectiveness and pressure on the welfare budget. After the nominal end of the programme, physicians in German and Austrian facilities continued many of the practices of Aktion T4, until the defeat of Germany in 1945. The unofficial continuation of the policy led to additional deaths by medicine and similar means, resulting in 93,521 beds "emptied" by the end of 1941. Technology that was developed under Aktion T4, particularly the use of lethal gas to commit mass murder, was taken over by the medical division of the Reich Interior Ministry, along with personnel who had participated in the development of the technology and later participated in Operation Reinhard. The technology, personnel and techniques developed were instrumental in the implementation of Nazi genocides.