Hadamar euthanasia centre

Hadamar "euthanasia" centre - darkometer rating : 7 - One of the six T4 “euthanasia” centres in Germany in which the Nazis murdered disabled and mentally ill patients between 1940 and 1945. Today, the basement in which the killings took place serves as a memorial, augmented by an informative exhibition and the only surviving original bus garage at which the victims had arrived, plus a memorial garden at the site of the victims' mass graves. Overall, Hadamar is one of the best memorials of its rather special type. > More background info > What there is to see > Location > Access and costs > Time required > Combinations with other dark destinations > Combinations with non-dark destinations > Photos More background info: Hadamar is a small town in a quiet, rural part of Hesse, central Germany . That alone wouldn't put it on the dark tourism map, of course. What does is the fact that its psychiatric hospital held a very sinister secret during the Third Reich . It was the sixth and thus the last one of the Nazis ' "euthanasia" killing centres to become operational under the programme code-named " Aktion T4 ". From January to August 1941, when Operation T4 was officially ended, ca. 10,000 people, mostly disabled/mentally ill patients from psychiatric institutions across the region, were brought to Hadamar and were murdered in a purpose-built gas chamber in the cellar of one of the hospital's main buildings. Even after that, i.e. following the official end of the “euthanasia programme”, killings continued, only now even more secretively. This carried on right up to the end of WWII . During these years 5000 more people were murdered here, though no longer in a gas chamber but mostly by means of lethal injection and/or starvation and neglect. These victims also included a significant number of children of "mixed heredity", namely "half-Jews".