Hadamar
When Grafeneck dismantled its T-4 program in November 1940 it was replaced by Hadamar mental hospital. In Januray 1941 Grafeneck’s personal were transferred to Hadamar and set up a killing center in the basement. The killing process was the same in Hadamar as in the other five euthanasia centers. The victims were killed by carbon monoxide poisoning which was let into the gas chamber through pipes from a adjacent room. The gas chamber was camouflaged as a shower room. Between January and August 1941, people with mentally and physically disabilities were sent to Hadamar and killed in its gas chamber. Some corpses were after they been killed dissected for medical purposes and cremated at a later time.
When the T-4 program officially ended in August 1941, all technical equipment at Hadamar was dismantled. All rooms used by T-4 were returned to the mental hospital. Officially, more than 10,000 people were murdered between January and August 1941. Hadamar resumed his murder activities in 1942 under the so-called wild euthanasia. The people were then killed mainly by poison injections. In 1943, a ward was opened for children from mixed marriages. These were children with one parent of Jewish origin. However, it is difficult to clarify exactly how many children from Jewish mixed marriages arrived in Hadamar between 1943 and 1944. There is no evidence that these children are carriers of any physical or mental illness. The reason for their detention was because of their Jewish predicament and therefore they were murdered.
Current status: Preserved with museum (2000).
Address: Mönchberg 8, 65589 Hadamar.
Get there: Car.
Follow up in books: Friedlander, Henry: The Origins of Nazi Genocide – From euthanasia to the final solution (1995).
In 1979, a TV-serie called the Holocaust was broadcast on television. One scene shows a group of people entering what is supposed to be the gas chamber in Hadamar. From outside it is shown how the staff has connected pipes between the exhaust pipe of a car and the wall to the gas chamber. This is historically incorrect because people were murdered in the hospital basement with bottled carbon monoxide and not through engine exhaust. The scene is almost a copy of a film sequence that the Nazis filmed in Mogilev, Belarus. There one can see how engine exhausts are led through pipes into a building (gas chamber) with mentally ill patients. That film sequence probably inspired the Holocaust producers to copy it and use it in their own serie. This may be the reason that Hadamar is perhaps the most famous euthanasia center of the six official.