History of Sorts

The T4 program AKA Aktion T4 was a postwar name for mass murder through involuntary euthanasia in Nazi Germany.The name T4 is an abbreviation of Tiergartenstraße 4, a street address of the Chancellery department set up in the spring of 1940, in the Berlin borough of Tiergarten, which recruited and paid personnel associated with T4. Certain German physicians were authorized to select patients “deemed incurably sick, after most critical medical examination” and then administer to them a “mercy death” (Gnadentod). In October 1939 Adolf Hitler signed a “euthanasia decree” backdated to 1 September 1939 that authorized his personal physician Karl Brandt and Reichsleiter Philipp Bouhler to implement the program.

The immediate occasion for the beginning of the organized euthanasia of children is considered in the literature to be the so-called case of “Child K”.

Beginning in October 1939, public health authorities began to encourage parents of children with disabilities to admit their young children to one of a number of specially designated pediatric clinics throughout…