The action of mass killing of mentally and physically disable and considered incurable children and adults as well as of patients of psychiatric hospitals and concentration camps prisoners who were ill or unable to work organized in the III Reich. The action was euphemistically described as “euthanasia” (from Greek: painless death, “Mercy Death”).
The codename T4 refers to an abbreviation of “Tiergartenstraße 4”, the address of a villa in Berlin which was since 1940 till 1945 the headquarters of the organization responsible for the action.A monument by Richard Serry established in 1986 commemorating victims of T4 action located in place of a building at Tiergartenstraße 4 in Berlin.Between October 1939 and August 1941 more than 70,000 persons were killed in gas chambers of killing centres arranged in Bernburg, Brandenburg, Grafeneck, Hadamar, Hartheim/Linz i Sonnenstein/Pirna. After 1941 another 200,000 persons were killed in a decentralized way by lethal injections, starvation, and shooting including prisoners of concentration camps, Jewish patients and patients from Poland and Soviet Union.
