Nazi Euthanasia Programme

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 the postwar designation for a programme of 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. Under the programme 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 Reichsleiter Philipp Bouhler, the chief of his Chancellery, (not the Reich Chancellery Reichskanzlei) and Karl Brandt, Hitler's personal physician, to carry out the killing,

Reich Leader Bouhler and Dr. Brandt are entrusted with the responsibility of extending the authority of physicians, to be designated by name, so that patients who, after a most critical diagnosis, on the basis of human judgment [menschlichem Ermessen], are considered incurable, can be granted mercy death [Gnadentod].

The programme ran officially from September 1939 to August 1941, during which the recorded 70,273 people were killed at various extermination centres located at psychiatric hospitals in Germany and Austria, along with those in occupied Poland. About half of the victims were from church-run asylums.

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.