Nazi ‘Euthanasia’ Victims Commemorated With New Berlin Memorial

Image by Getty Images
Some 300,000 people with physical or mental disabilities who were killed under Nazi Germany’s “euthanasia” program because their lives were deemed unworthy were commemorated on Tuesday with the opening of a memorial in Berlin.
Relatives of the victims joined Mayor Klaus Wowereit and members of the public to lay wreaths and white roses in front of the 30-meter-(100-foot)-long, blue glass wall of the open-air memorial and permanent exhibition.
“The Nazi murders of disabled people are among the most inhumane acts of history,” said Wowereit. “It is high time that these victims of Nazi inhumanity finally receive their own memorial.”
The Nazis killed an estimated 300,000 people with disabilities and psychological ailments, mostly by gas and lethal injection. The scheme was coordinated from offices next to Berlin’s Tiergarten, where information about the forced sterilizations and murders is now presented on plaques.
In the euthanasia program’s headquarters, doctors and administrators listed physically and mentally disabled patients to be killed, decided how it should be done, and devised ways to keep the murders secret.
“We must denounce the inhumane distinction between a worthy and an unworthy life,” said Monika Gruetters, Germany’s state minister for culture and media. “Every human life is valuable – that’s the message of this memorial.”
Hartmut Traub read from the biography of his uncle, Benjamin Traub, who was diagnosed with schizophrenia and gassed on March 13, 1941 at the Hadamar extermination site, where Traub said 10,113 patients were asphyxiated with carbon monoxide.
Just over 60 patients were gassed daily in Hadamar, Traub said. They would be examined, told to undress, and sent to a chamber in the cellar, supposedly to shower.
“They wouldn’t have had much time to react,” Hartmut Traub said. “Soon Benjamin and his 63 fellow sufferers were choking on gas.”
The memorial is located near other commemorative sites honoring groups targeted by the Nazi Holocaust – the 6 million murdered Jews, the persecuted homosexuals, and the Roma gypsy victims of Hitler’s regime.
It is specifically designed to be accessible for disabled people and those with learning difficulties.
The Forward is free to read, but it isn’t free to produce

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward.
Now more than ever, American Jews need independent news they can trust, with reporting driven by truth, not ideology. We serve you, not any ideological agenda.
At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse.
This is a great time to support independent Jewish journalism you rely on. Make a gift today!
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
Support our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.
Most Popular
- 1
News Student protesters being deported are not ‘martyrs and heroes,’ says former antisemitism envoy
- 2
News Who is Alan Garber, the Jewish Harvard president who stood up to Trump over antisemitism?
- 3
Opinion What Jewish university presidents say: Trump is exploiting campus antisemitism, not fighting it
- 4
Opinion The dangerous Nazi legend behind Trump’s ruthless grab for power
In Case You Missed It
-
Yiddish פֿילאַנטראָפּ אלי הירשפֿעלד שענקט פֿאָרווערטס די אינטערנעץ־אַדרעסן Yiddish.com און Yiddish.orgPhilanthropist Eli Hirschfeld donates domains Yiddish.com and Yiddish.org to the Forward
די מתּנה וועט דערמעגלעכן מער אָנהענגערס פֿון ייִדיש צו געפֿינען די ייִדישע ווידעאָס, אַרטיקלען און שפּילן פֿונעם פֿאָרווערטס.
-
Fast Forward Antisemitic incidents on college campuses rose over 80 percent last year, says the ADL
-
Fast Forward As the last generation of Holocaust survivors ages, advocates call for their testimonies to be heard
-
Fast Forward Jewish Federations CEO privately opposed a Jewish open letter criticizing Trump’s campus arrests
-
Shop the Forward Store
100% of profits support our journalism
Republish This Story
Please read before republishing
We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines.
You must comply with the following:
- Credit the Forward
- Retain our pixel
- Preserve our canonical link in Google search
- Add a noindex tag in Google search
See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.
To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.