T-4 Euthanasia Program

Action T4 (, ) was the postwar designation for a programme of forced euthanasia in wartime Nazi Germany. The name T4 is an abbreviation of Tiergartenstraße 4, a street address of the Chancellery department set up in spring 1940 in the Berlin borough of Tiergarten, which recruited and paid personnel associated with T4. Under the programme German physicians were directed to sign off patients "incurably sick, by critical medical examination" and then administer to them a "mercy death" (German: Gnadentod). In October 1939 Adolf Hitler signed a "euthanasia decree" backdated to 1 September 1939 that authorized Reichsleiter Philipp Bouhler, the chief of his Chancellery, and Dr. Karl Brandt, Hitler's personal physician, to carry out the programme of involuntary euthanasia (translated as follows):

The programme ran officially from September 1939 to August 1941, during which the recorded 70,273 people were killed at various extermination centres located at psychiatric hospitals in Germany and Austria.