»Euthanasia« Memorial Brandenburg

»Euthanasie«-Gedenkstätte Brandenburg

Several steles in Brandenburg an der Havel have commemorated since 1997 the »euthanasia« murders which took place in 1940. Thousands of mentally and physically handicapped people were murdered here within a few weeks in a building disguised as a mental hospital in the course of the »Action T4«. A new memorial site with an exhibition was opened in 2012.

History

Under the National Socialist regime the term »euthanasia« stood for the murder of thousands of mentally and physically handicapped people. The murder was planned and organised by a central office which directly reported to Adolf Hitler. The office was code named »T4« in reference to its postal address in Berlin's Tiergartenstraße. At first, toddlers up to the age of three fell victim to »euthanasia«, later older children and youths were affected. Beginning 1940, handicapped adults and ill people were included in the scheme under the new code »Action T4«. During the initial phase, people were killed by malnourishment, poison or medications. From January 1940, more and more »T4« killing centres began operating gas chambers.
At the time, »trial gasifications« were already taking place in Brandenburg as part of the »T4« campaign. During the trials one group of patients was killed by poison injections, while the other group was asphyxiated with gas. The doctors responsible for »annihilating life unworthy of living« decided to choose the latter killing method after observing that patients died more quickly than by poison injection. A few days after the trials had been conducted, the doctors and medical personnel began the killings. The premises of the old prison in Brandenburg were equipped with a gas chamber and mobile crematoria for this purpose. Most of the victims came from the region of Berlin, Brandenburg and Saxony. After a short medical examination, the patients were asphyxiated in a gas chamber disguised as a shower room, after which their bodies were burned. The smoke produced during the burnings made many of the town's residents suspicious. The »T4« authorities shut the killing centre down in October 1940.

Brandenburg an der Havel, 2015, View of the permanent exhibition, Christof Beyer

Brandenburg an der Havel, 2009, View of the memorial site, Stadtmuseum Brandenburg an der Havel

Victims

Doctors and medical personnel in Brandenburg killed over 9,700 people by poison gas in the course of the »Action T4« between January and October 1940. Among the mentally and physically ill men, women and children who were murdered in Brandenburg were also about 400 Jewish patients. The last victims of »euthanasia« were children from the state hospital at Görden. After the »euthanasia« killings in Brandenburg had come to an end, the »T4« authorities had the remaining patients from the region transferred to the mental hospital in Bernburg, which had been remodelled as a »T4« killing centre by October 1940.

The entry to power of the National Socialists in 1933 heralded the state persecution of opponents of the regime, Jews, Roma – who were classed as »gypsies« -, the sick and many other groups. For the first time, anti-semitism became part of the government policy of a modern state and the persecution of all groups was progressively heightened. The process was characterised by the interplay between state regulation, violence from supporters of the regime and rabble-rousing propaganda from the press. The acts of terror against the Jews in November 1938 (»The Night of the Broken Glass«), culminating in around one hundred deaths, marked the prelude to the complete exclusion and murder of the Jewish minority. With the outbreak of the Second World War in September 1939, large parts of Europe fell under German control. In Eastern Europe in particular a multi-tiered system of camps and extermination sites was established, in which the SS murdered up to six million Jews, among them around 165,000 German Jews. It is estimated that around seven million Germans lost their lives in the war, including almost 3.5 million civilians. Around 28 million residents of the occupied Soviet Union (both soldiers and civilians) and three million non-Jewish Poles met a violent death. These groups are still barely commemorated in Germany. Germany came under Allied occupation in 1945 and 1949 saw the foundation of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) and the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG), who had very different cultures of remembrance. The GDR profiled itself as an »antifascist« state. The former concentration camps at Buchenwald, Ravensbrück and Sachsenhausen became »National Memorials« and primarily documented the communist resistance during the war. In the Federal Republic, the dominant memory was initially of the victims of Allied bombing raids and those who had fled or been expelled from their homes in the former territory of the Third Reich. It was left to specific groups to remember Nazi persecution, the Holocaust or the resistance. With the exception of the war crimes trials, there was no public discussion of perpetrators or involvement in crimes. However, the situation was to change in the mid-1960s, when the statute of limitations for murder was lifted following a lengthy debate. Also during this period, memorial sites were established at former concentration camps (1965: Dachau and Neuengamme; 1966: Bergen-Belsen) and the German Resistance Memorial Centre was opened in 1968 in West Berlin. However, it was not until the 1980s that a diverse and often small-scale landscape of memory developed as the result of local initiatives. Following German unification in 1990, a national memorial site concept was developed and there was a major review of German sites of memory. The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin was inaugurated in 2005. The Topography of Terror, a comprehensive documentation of National Socialist crimes and perpetrators, has opened with a new centre in May 2010; the documentation centre »Flight, Expulsion, Reconciliation« followed suit in 2021. In the meantime, central memorials in Berlin have been erected to commemorate further groups of Nazi victims as well: the murdered Sinti and Roma, the patients murdered in the context of the Nazi’s »Euthanasia« killings and the persecuted homosexuals. The German victims of National Socialist terror in the former Eastern territories of the Third Reich were forgotten by both German states after the end of the war. For decades, memory of these victims was only preserved by West German associations for Germans born in these territories and it mainly excluded the period from 1933 to 1945.

Remembrance

In January 1997, the memorial site consisting of several steles on the premises of the old prison was inaugurated. Information boards present details about the »T4« campaign and its victims in Brandenburg. The memorial site was set up with the support of the city of Brandenburg, the Brandenburg Memorials Foundations, the Central Council of Jews in Germany and the Association of »Euthanasia« and Forced Sterilisation Victims. In 2003, the content of the information boards was edited and updated. The memorial site is administered by the staff of the museum of local history in Brandenburg. The building – which in the 19th century was home to a prison, from 1933 housed an early concentration camp and in 1940 was a »T4« killing centre – was handed over to the Brandenburg Memorials Foundation by the city of Brandenburg on October 1, 2009. Additionally, a memorial plaque was set up in the township of Paterdamm, about 5 kilometres from the city centre, at the site where the bodies of the »euthanasia« victims had been burned.
After years of planning, the Brandenburg Memorials Foundation opened a new memorial site with a permanent exhibition in the old prison building in 2012. Brandenburg was the last town to establish such a documentation centre among the six sites in Germany in which »T4« killing centres existed.

Brandenburg an der Havel, 2015, Information boards at the memorial, Christof Beyer

Possibilities

Guided tours, workshops in German, English and Easy Language

Open

Thursday and Friday 1 p.m. to 5 p.m., Saturday and Sunday 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.
The information boards are accessible at all times

Contact

https://www.brandenburg-euthanasie-sbg.de/

brandenburg@stiftung-bg.de

+49(0)3381 793 511 2

Nicolaiplatz 28
14770 Brandenburg an der Havel

Brandenburg an der Havel, 2016, Exterior view of the memorial, Stiftung Brandenburgische Gedenkstätten

Brandenburg an der Havel, undated, Old prison on Nicolaiplatz, Stadtarchiv der Stadt Brandenburg an der Havel

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