T-4 Euthanasia Program

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 involuntary euthanasia in Nazi Germany. The name T4 is an abbreviation of Tiergartenstraße 4, a street address of the Chancellery department set up in spring 1940 in the Berlin borough of Tiergarten, which recruited and paid personnel associated with T4. Under the programme certain German physicians were authorized to sign off patients "deemed incurably sick, after most critical medical examination" and then administer to them a "mercy death" (German: Gnadentod). In October 1939 Adolf Hitler signed an "euthanasia decree" backdated to 1 September 1939 that authorized Reichsleiter Philipp Bouhler, the chief of his Chancellery, and Karl Brandt, Hitler's personal physician, to carry out the programme of involuntary euthanasia:

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]. — Adolf Hitler

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 rationales for the programme have been offered, including eugenics, compassion, reducing suffering, racial hygiene, cost effectiveness and pressure on the welfare budget. After the formal end date of the programme, physicians in German and Austrian facilities continued many of the practices that had been instituted under 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. Historians estimate that twice the official number of T4 victims may have perished before the end of the war. In addition, technology that was developed under Aktion T4, particularly the use of lethal gas to commit mass murder, was subsequently taken over by the medical division of the Reich Interior Ministry, along with the transferring of personnel who had participated in the development of the technology and later participated in Operation Reinhard. This technology, the personnel and the techniques developed were instrumental in the implementation of the Holocaust.