Zur bürokratischen abwicklung eines massenmords. Die "Euthanasie"-aktion im spiegel neuer dokumente

Our knowledge about how the National Socialists planned and carried out the murder of thousands of sick people in 1940/41 - "T 4", as the action was codenamed - are founded essentially on the evidence of witnesses and on the statements of the people responsible that were given in the course of criminal investigations after the war. Since more than 30000 medical records of the 70000 psychiatric patients killed by gas were discovered in a special archive of the former Ministry for State Security of the GDR, new source material for reconstructing the crimes of euthanasia has been available. Apparently, the intern "T4"-documents now discovered were forgotten when the GDR purged its files in 1989. They yield new insights into the bureaucratic process of the murders, and they document, in very plain language, the administrative steps that were necessary to record the patients, to keep the murders a secret, and to exploit them economically. The documents found show that the term of "administrative murder" that was coined by Hannah Arendt does not only apply to the extermination of the European Jews, but also to the murder of psychiatric patients and mentally disabled people. It was no less systematic.