On 13th of March 1940, the Germans began murdering patients of the psychiatric hospital in Łódź. About 500 people died then. The murder was committed as part of Operation T4. The name comes from the address of the office in Berlin at Tiergartenstraße 4 - this is where the crazy idea of people` group murdering was born.
German propaganda poster from around 1938: This person suffering from genetic diseases costs society 60,000 reichsmark during his life. Volksgenosse, it's your money too!, photo: Wikipedia
T4 is a program implemented by the Germans in 1939–1944. It assumed the physical "elimination of life unworthy to live." As part of the action, people struggling with various types of psychiatric ailments and patients who had been in care for over 5 years, as well as people with certain congenital developmental disorders, were murdered.
The number of people murdered during this action is difficult to determine. However, historians estimate that in the years 1940–1941 (the largest number of executions under T4) 70,273 sick and disabled people were killed, including residents of psychiatric hospitals in the occupied territories.
It is also believed that in total, approximately 200,000 handicapped and disabled people were killed (shot, gassed or poisoned) in the years 1939–1945.
From April 1941, this program was expanded to include "Action 14f13", which included people with mental disabilities and disabled non-German concentration camp prisoners. Then 20,000 people lost their lives.
Aktion T4 was the first mass murder of people carried out by Germany, then the so-called "technology" of mass killing - which was later implemented in German death camps.
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