Aktion T4

Aktion T4 was a Nazi German program that organized the systematic murder of people with disabilities and psychiatric patients, chiefly from 1939 to 1941. Its methods and personnel later contributed to mass murder in the Holocaust.

T4 questionnaire: A form used by German authorities to record patients’ diagnoses, capacity for work, and length of institutionalization. Medical and administrative staff used its answers to select patients for deportation and murder.
Nazi eugenics: Nazi policies that sought to control reproduction and population health according to racist and ableist ideas of heredity. Its language of hereditary worth helped legitimize the murder of disabled people.
Philipp Bouhler: A Nazi official who headed Hitler’s Chancellery and oversaw the central administration of Aktion T4. He helped direct the program’s bureaucracy under Hitler’s secret authorization.
Decentralized euthanasia: The continuation of Nazi patient killings through overdoses, starvation, and neglect after the centralized Aktion T4 phase ended. Ending the gas-chamber phase in 1941 left hospital-based murders ongoing.
Memorial to the Victims of the Nazi Euthanasia Murders: A Berlin memorial commemorating people murdered in Nazi patient-killing programs, including Aktion T4. It marks a central site of remembrance for victims and the program’s history.
T4 killing centers: Six institutions in Germany and Austria where Aktion T4 victims were killed, chiefly in gas chambers. These sites carried out the program’s centralized killing operations.
Eugenics: A movement that sought to improve inherited human traits through policies influencing reproduction. Aktion T4 arose within a wider history of eugenic thought and state policy.
Karl Brandt: A physician and Nazi official who served as Hitler’s personal doctor and a senior organizer of Aktion T4. He shared responsibility for authorizing and administering the killings.
Holocaust: The genocide of six million Jews by Nazi Germany and its collaborators during the Second World War. T4 personnel and killing techniques contributed to later Nazi mass murder, including the Holocaust.
Hadamar Memorial Museum: A memorial and museum at the former Nazi killing institution in Hadamar, Germany. Its exhibitions document the murders carried out at one of the T4 killing centers.

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