Operations
As the 2nd Infantry Division marched across Germany, it uncovered several sites of Nazi crimes. In early April 1945, the unit captured the German town of Hadamar, which housed a psychiatric clinic where 10,072 men, women, and children victims were asphyxiated with carbon monoxide in a gas chamber in the first phase of the killing operations (January to August 1941) in the Nazi "euthanasia" programme. Another 4,000 then died through starvation and by lethal injection until March 1945.
Thick smoke billowed over Hadamar in the summer of 1941 while the staff celebrated the cremation of their 10,000th patient with beer and wine served in the crematorium. Despite precautions to cover up the T-4 programme, the local population knew of the operation. The people killed in the Hadamar hospital would arrive by train or bus and ostensibly vanish behind the site's fence. Furthermore, since the crematorium ovens were usually fed with two corpses instead of one, the cremation process was faulty. This often resulted in a cloud of stinking smoke hanging over the town. In the local schools, students would often taunt each other by saying "You'll end up in the Hadamar ovens!"
Up to 100 victims arrived in post buses every day. They were falsely told to disrobe for a "medical examination". Sent before a physician, instead of examining them he assigned one of a list of 60 fatal diseases to every victim, then marked them with different-colored band-aids for one of three categories: Kill; kill and remove brain for research; kill and break out gold teeth.
Following a groundswell of opposition, Hitler announced an official stoppage of "euthanasia" activities. However, after a short hiatus the killing went on, the difference being that victims were no longer gassed.
Resident physicians and staff headed by nurse Irmgard Huber directly killed the majority of these victims, among whom were German patients with disabilities, mentally disoriented elderly persons from bombed-out areas, "half Jewish" children from welfare institutions, psychologically and physically disabled forced laborers and their children, German soldiers and foreign Waffen-SS soldiers deemed psychologically incurable. The medical personnel and staff at Hadamar killed almost all of these people by lethal drug overdoses and deliberate neglect.
The Hadamar psychiatric hospital is still in operation today and houses both a memorial and an exhibition about the mass murder of the T-4 Euthanasia Programme.
Though the war ended in Germany on 8 May 1945, the Nazi extermination institutes continued to kill disabled patients or simply allowed them to die of starvation. The last known patient to die at Hadamar was a four-year-old mentally handicapped boy, who was killed on 29 May 1945.
Read more about this topic: Hadamar Euthanasia Centre
Famous quotes containing the word operations:
“A sociosphere of contact, control, persuasion and dissuasion, of exhibitions of inhibitions in massive or homeopathic doses...: this is obscenity. All structures turned inside out and exhibited, all operations rendered visible. In America this goes all the way from the bewildering network of aerial telephone and electric wires ... to the concrete multiplication of all the bodily functions in the home, the litany of ingredients on the tiniest can of food, the exhibition of income or IQ.”
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