Brandenburg Euthanasia Centre
The Brandenburg Euthanasia Centre, officially known as the Brandenburg an der Havel State Welfare Institute, was a killing centre established in 1939 as part of the Nazi euthanasia programme, known after the war as "Aktion T4". Nearly 10,000 people were murdered there during its operation, primarily those with mental and physical disabilities.
Newly erected main gaol in 1931
Karl Brandt, Hitler's personal physician and organizer of Action T4
Philipp Bouhler, Head of the T4 programme
Aktion T4 was a campaign of mass murder by involuntary euthanasia in Nazi Germany. The term was first used in post-war trials against doctors who had been involved in the killings. The name T4 is an abbreviation of Tiergartenstraße 4, a street address of the Chancellery department set up in early 1940, in the Berlin borough of Tiergarten, which recruited and paid personnel associated with Aktion T4. Certain German physicians were authorised to select patients "deemed incurably sick, after most critical medical examination" and then administer to them a "mercy death". In October 1939, Adolf Hitler signed a "euthanasia note", backdated to 1 September 1939, which authorised his physician Karl Brandt and Reichsleiter Philipp Bouhler to begin the killing.
Hitler's order for Aktion T4
NSDAP Reichsleiter Philipp Bouhler, head of the T4 programme
Karl Brandt, Hitler's personal doctor and organiser of Aktion T4
Schönbrunn Psychiatric Hospital, 1934 (Photo by SS photographer Friedrich Franz Bauer)