The Nizkor Project: Remembering the Holocaust (Shoah)

Shofar FTP Archive File: places//germany/euthanasia/hadamar.01


Newsgroups: alt.revisionism
From: Ken McVay 
Subject: Holocaust Almanac: Celebrate the Ten Thousandth Victim 
Summary: Nazi murderers have a party to celebrate their 10,000th
         'euthanasia' victim..
Followup-To: alt.revisionism
Organization: The Nizkor Project, Canada
Keywords: Hadamar,Wahlmann

Archive/File: places/euthanasia/hadamar.01
Last-modified: 1994/12/11

   "The year after the disassembling of the gas chamber (which had
   killed ten thousand patients in less than a year of operation),* a
   new physicial named Adolf Wahlmann became medical director at
   Hadamar, an institution he had headed before the First World War and
   again in the mid-1930s.  Wahlmann had joined the Nazi Party in 1933,
   but had been in some difficulty with the Party for what it perceived
   to be his greated commitment to a church choir he led.<17> Called out
   of retirement at the age of sixty-six to help with mental-hospital
   work before being transferred to Hadamar, he claimed at his later
   Frankfurt trial to have had no knowledge of the killing prior to his
   arrival.  Whatever the truth of that claim, when Wahlmann arrived the
   chief administrator was then in the process of implementing a killing
   procedure, in which the chief doctor was expected to give orders to
   the head male nurse to kill male patients, and the head female nurse
   to do the same to female patients.  When informed of that procedure
   by the administrator, Wahlmann refused to do so indiscriminately,
   insisting upon going about things more methodically -- that is,
   medically.  He developed his own `professional' system: he observed
   patients arriving on transports, made daily rounds, and studied
   medical records.  He then held morning conferences, where these
   observations were considered along with patients' records, and then
   would decide who was to be killed and what does of what drug was to
   be used.<18>"

<16> Klee, "Euthanasie" p. 336
<17> Ibid., p.170
<18> Hadamar Trial, especially pp. 162-63, 174-87

   * "The ten thousandth victim at Hadamar had been celebrated as a
   milestone, as reported by an employee.  Invited by a T4 doctor named
   Berner, the employees gathered that evening.  Each was given a bottle
   of beer, and they adjourned to the basement.  `There on a stretcher
   lay a naked male corpse with a huge hydrocepalic head....  I am
   certain that it was a real dead person and not a paper corpse.  The
   dead person was put by the cremation personnel on a sort of trough
   and shoved into the cremation oven.  Hereupon [the administrator]
   Maerkle, who had made himself look like a sort of minister, held a
   burial sermon.' Another witness reported that the celebration, which
   included music, degenerated further into a drunken procession through
   the institution grounds.<16>" (Lifton, 100)

   T4 - The camouflage organization created for the medical killing of
   adults was known as the Reich Work Group of Sanatoriums and Nursing
   Homes (Reichsarbeitsgemeinschaft Heil- und Pflegeanstalten, or RAG).
   It operated from the Berlin Chancellery, at Tiergarten 4, hence the
   "T4" code name.

                            Works Cited:

Lifton, Robert Jay. THE NAZI DOCTORS: Medical Killing and the Psychology 
of Genocide. London: Papermac, 1986 (Reprinted 1990)


Home ·  Site Map ·  What's New? ·  Search Nizkor

© The Nizkor Project, 1991-2012

This site is intended for educational purposes to teach about the Holocaust and to combat hatred. Any statements or excerpts found on this site are for educational purposes only.

As part of these educational purposes, Nizkor may include on this website materials, such as excerpts from the writings of racists and antisemites. Far from approving these writings, Nizkor condemns them and provides them so that its readers can learn the nature and extent of hate and antisemitic discourse. Nizkor urges the readers of these pages to condemn racist and hate speech in all of its forms and manifestations.