The National Socialist Euthanasia Program in Austria: Aktion T4*

Abstract

National Socialism as a political and social system was ultimately grounded in a central utopia: the creation of a biologically defined Volksgemeinschaft, a racial community that was to consist of racially pure and genetically healthy individuals. With regard to the issue of euthanasia, the National Socialists had at their disposal the results of a sociopolitical debate that had been gaining in intensity since World War One and that had the concept of mercy death for the incurably ill and for the handicapped at its core. In the course of Aktion T4, forty psychiatrists were recruited as expert witnesses, who selected the patients to be killed on the basis of the incoming registration forms. Concrete planning of the measures that came to be known as Aktion T4 after 1945 were set in place a few months before the beginning of the war.