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The Florida Holocaust Museum: History, Heritage and Hope Permanent Exhibition

Race Science

Race Science & Eugenics

The Third Reich established a racial policy based on the belief that fair-skinned "Aryans" were "superior" to all other ethnic or racial groups. Inspired by the social philosophy of eugenics, the Nazi regime regarded individuals with hereditary or acquired diseases, birth defects, mental illnesses, or other health challenges as additional biological threats to the purity of the "master race."

Although Nazi ideology singled out the Jews as the most serious threat to the Aryan race, other groups of "inferior" people faced persecution, and in many cases, death.

Operation T-4

According to Nazi ideology, physically or mentally challenged individuals posed a biological danger to the Aryan gene pool. The Third Reich legalized forced sterilization of these individuals as early as January, 1934. Most of the estimated 300,000 to 400,000 people sterilized were diagnosed as "feeble-minded," schizophrenic, or epileptic.

In the fall of 1939, a secret "euthanasia" program codenamed "Operation T-4" initiated the systematic killing of patients in nursing homes and other medical facilities. At first, victims were killed by lethal injection, but by 1940, victims were murdered in experimental gas chambers using pure carbon monoxide.

The corpses were cremated together in large numbers. The victims' relatives received an urn of random ashes and a falsified death certificate. The secrecy of the program broke down quickly, and in response to public protest, Hitler halted the program in August, 1941. Discreetly encouraged by the Nazi regime, individual physicians throughout the Reich continued the euthanasia program by lethal injection or starvation.

Approximately 200,000 to 250,000 mentally and physically challenged persons were murdered from 1939 to 1945 under Operation T-4 and other "euthanasia" programs.

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Smoke billows from the crematoria at The Hadamar Institute. Code-named "Operation T4" for the Berlin street address (Tiergarten 4) of its head-quarters, the euthanasia program targeted mentally and physically disabled patients, a population that the Nazis considered "life unworthy of living" (lebensunwertes Leben). The euthanasia killing began in August 1939 with the murder of disabled infants and toddlers. This program was later expanded to include older children. The next phase of the euthanasia program involved the killing of disabled adults residing in institutional settings in the Reich. To accommodate this much larger population, T4 technicians created killing centers where the disabled were murdered in gas chambers and their bodies burned in crematoria. Six killings facilities were established in 1940. Public protests from the church and the judiciary ultimately forced Hitler to halt the gassing in August 1941. However, this did not end the euthanasia program. The killing of disabled children continued unabated, and the murder of disabled adults was restarted in August 1942. In all, "Operation T4 " claimed at least 200,000 lives.
Close-up of a female survivor at the Hadamar Institute. She had been committed to the euthanasia facility five years before after being judged insane for having a Jewish boyfriend. The photograph was taken by an American military photographer soon after The Hadamar Institute, near Wiesbaden in Hessen-Nassau, was one of six hospitals and sanatoria in Germany and Austria at which the Nazi euthanasia program was carried out. Hadamar first operated as a killing center in mid-January 1941 under the direction of Dr. Ernest Baumhard. For the next eight months, busloads of patients arrived daily at the facility. Between January and August 1941, more than 10,000 disabled adults were gassed and cremated at Hadamar. The gassings stopped abruptly on August 24 following an order by Hitler. A year later, the facility was reactivated as a euthanasia-killing center. For purposes of concealment, it also operated as a normal sanatorium. During this phase of euthanasia program, death was inflicted b lethal overdose of medication or by starvation. The staff of Hadamar Institute continued to put patients to death until shortly before liberation by American troops on March 26, 1945.
Audio File 109 - The T-4 Program