T4 project

Aktion T4
Hitler's order for Aktion T4
Also known as	T4 Program
Location	German-occupied Europe
Date	September 1939 – 1945
Incident type	Forced euthanasia
Perpetrators	SS
Participants	Psychiatric hospitals
Victims	275,000 to 300,000

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 note" backdated to 1 September 1939, that authorized his physician Karl Brandt and Reichsleiter Philipp Bouhler to implement the programme.

The killings took place from September 1939 until the end of the war in 1945, during which 275,000 to 300,000 people were killed at various extermination centres located at psychiatric hospitals in Germany and Austria, along with those in occupied Poland and the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia (now the Czech Republic). The number of victims recorded originally as the dauntingly exacting total of 70,273 people has been revised considerably upward by the discovery of additional victims listed in the archives of the former East Germany. 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."