Action T4 ( abbreviation of Tiergartenstraße 4, a street address of the Chancellery department) was used as a trial before the mass killings in the extermination camps. It was in this small facility in Brandenburg, that the decision was made that gas chambers were a "more effective" way of killing than lethal injections.
There is no doubt that the murder of 6 million Jews was by far the largest crime committed by Nazi Germany. But this memorial is a sad reminder, that those deemed "unworthy of living" also included many other groups like Gypsies, gays, alcoholics and the mentally ill.
The German Holocaust Memorial Foundation lists the location as a Holocaust site because among the people murdered here were also about 400 Jews.
A first memorial at this site was inaugurated in 1997; the new memorial, now including the building in which the Action T4 killings took place, opened on August 20, 2012.
|