Grafeneck Castle

The Grafeneck Euthanasia Centre (German: NS-Tötungsanstalt Grafeneck) housed in Grafeneck Castle was one of Nazi Germany's killing centres as part of their forced euthanasia programme. Today, it is a memorial site dedicated to the victims of the state-authorised programme also referred to since as Action T4. At least 10,500 mentally and physically disabled people, predominantly from Bavaria and Baden-Württemberg, were systematically killed during 1940. It was one of the first places in Nazi Germany where people were killed in large numbers in a gas chamber using carbon monoxide. This was actually the beginning of the Euthanasia Programme. Here was also settled the central office of "Charitable Ambulance Transport GmbH" (Gekrat), which was responsible for the transport of T4 and was headed by Reinhold Vorberg.

Grafeneck is a castle-like property in Grafeneck, a part of the municipality of Gomadingen in Baden-Württemberg.

Built around 1560, the Grafeneck Castle served as a hunting lodge for the Dukes of Württemberg. In the 19th century, it was used by the Forest Service. The Samaritan Foundation acquired it in 1928, setting up a handicapped home. In 1929, the charitable non-profit organisation Samariterstiftung established an asylum for disabled people. On 13. October 1939 Richard Alber, from 1938 to 1944 Landrat of district Münsingen, ordered that Schloss Grafeneck had to be cleared the next day. Four buses brought around 100 disabled men and few women from Grafeneck (together with 12 employees) to the monastery St. Elizabeth in Reute. All patients who were accommodated there survived Aktion T 4.

From October 1939 to January 1940 former samaritanian pin was rebuilt to a killing area. In the castle were installed living and administration rooms, also a registry office and a police office. On the castle grounds was built a wooden hut with about 100 beds, a parking space for the gray buses, a crematory oven and a gasification shed. Moreover, staff was recruited from Stuttgart and Berlin: doctors, police officers, clerks, maintenance and transport personnel, economic and domestic staff, guards and funeral torch. Between October and December 1939, only 10 to 20 people were in the castle, there were already about 100 men and women during the year 1940. The systematic murder under the T4 action started on 18 January 1940 in Grafeneck in a gas chamber camouflaged as a shower room, which was in a "garage": The prison doctor let flow by operating a manometer valve carbon monoxide into the gasification chamber. The steel cylinders required were supplied by Mannesmann, the filling was made by IG Farben in Ludwigshafen (BASF). The first murdered patients were from the mental hospital Eglfing-Haar in Bavaria. The victims came from 48 institutions for handicapped and mentally ill: 40 from almost all districts of Baden-Württemberg, six from Bavaria and one each from Hesse and North Rhine-Westphalia.

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