Hadamar Memorial

Gedenkstätte Hadamar

Doctors, medical staff and nurses killed about 15,000 people between 1941 and 1945 in the psychiatric hospital at Hadamar - which is east of Koblenz - in the course of the »Action T4«. There has been a memorial at the historic site since 1983.

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.
The Hadamar psychiatric hospital, which had been built in 1906, was converted to a »T4« killing centre at the end of 1940. Beginning January 13, 1941, doctors and nurses killed thousands of physically handicapped and mentally ill patients in a gas chamber, which had been installed in the hospital's basement. Their bodies were then incinerated at the crematory. The victims had come from so-called transit institutions in the region. From there they were picked up by grey buses and brought to Hadamar. Many of the Hadamar staff members had worked at the Grafeneck psychiatric hospital in the previous year. Thousands of patients had been killed by poison gas as part of the »euthanasia« campaign in 1940 in Grafeneck. The first phase of the »euthanasia« campaign in Hadamar came to an end in August 1941. A year later, the mass killings were continued. This time the victims came from all over the German Reich. The killing method also changed: they were no longer asphyxiated by poison gas, instead they were killed by an overdose of tranquillizers. The bodies of the murdered women, men and children were buried in mass graves on the hospital premises by the medical personnel.

Hadamar, 1941, Covertly taken photo of the smoking crematorium chimney at the killing centre, Diözesanarchiv Limburg

Hadamar, 2009, Children's cemetery, Gedenkstätte Hadamar

Victims

Between January and August 1941, over 10,000 mentally ill and physically handicapped people were killed by poison gas at the Hadamar psychiatric hospital. Between August 1942 and March 1945, a further 4,400 perished at Hadamar. Among them were not only patients from various hospitals but also prisoners of war, Polish and Soviet forced labourers, old and senile people as well as people classified as »Mischlinge in the first degree« (with one Jewish parent).

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

Already in 1953, a relief at the former main entrance to the Hadamar psychiatric hospital was dedicated to the victims of »euthanasia« - this was the first »euthanasia« memorial in Germany. In 1964, the former hospital cemetery was remodelled as an honorary cemetery. In 1983, the Hadamar Memorial was opened. It is administered by the State Welfare Association of Hesse. Since 1991, a permanent exhibition has been on display on the ground floor of the former hospital, dealing with the topic of »euthanasia« in Hadamar. Visitors can also see the preserved »T4« bus depot as well as the cellar rooms, in which the gas chamber, the crematoriums and the dissecting room were located. In 1998, the Hadamar Memorial Support Association was founded. Its employees have compiled the names and data of all those who were murdered at Hadamar between 1941 and 1945 in a database. Since 2006, the database has been open to the public.

Hadamar, undated, Cemetery with graves of those murdered, Landeswohlfahrtsverband Hessen

Hadamar, 2009, Bus depot at which the victims arrived in grey buses, Gedenkstätte Hadamar

Possibilities

Educational offer for school groups, special exhibitions, training for teachers and memorial educators, workshops, guided tours

Open

Tuesday to Thursday 9 a.m. to 4 p.m., Friday 9 a.m. to 1 p.m., every first and third Sunday of the month 2 a.m. to 5 p.m.

Contact

http://www.gedenkstaette-hadamar.de

gedenkstaette-hadamar@lwv-hessen.de

+49 (0)6433 917 172

Mönchberg 8
65589 Hadamar

Hadamar, 2009, Memorial stele at the cemetery, Gedenkstätte Hadamar

Hadamar, about 1993, Building of the former psychiatric hospital, Archiv des Landeswohlfahrtsverbandes Hessen

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