Bernburg Hospital has done an excellent job creating a memorial to the victims of the Aktion T4 for the victims who died at the location: Gedenkstätte für Opfer des NS-,,Euthanasie” Bernburg. Gedenkstätte Bernburg has restored the basement facility so students and interested public can walk through the actual killing site: including the gas chamber, the dissection room, and end up at the room where the cremation ovens stood. Instead of the massive cremation ovens, there is information about the victims that died there, including their names and pictures.
The memorial stone to the Victims of National Socialism on International Holocaust Remembrance Day, January 27, 2020, outside of the building where the gas chamber is located. Author’s photo.
Translation of the stone:
The Silence is Broken
We remember the
more than 14,000 men
women and children
who were murdered
in the Bernburg
Euthanasia
Center between
1940 and 1943.
Today, with permission of the author and her family, Ruth’s story is featured in educational material and helps educate the annual average of 15,000 German school children that visit Bernburg each year.
Educational Material containing Ruth’s story is currently used at Gedenkstätte Bernburg with permission of the author and family.
Ruth’s story puts a human face on the incalculable killing statistics at Bernburg. In this aspect, Ruth is a hero, defying the attempted eradication of the memory of “useless eaters”.
We are relieved that more commemoration of Aktion T4 victims has finally become more widespread. Prof. David Mitchell of George Washington University, along with his son, Cameron Mitchell, the film maker, are working on a movie about the topic, entitled, “Disposable Humanity” and will be featured in Gotham Week Expo Sept. 30-Oct. 4, 2024..
"The argument for commemoration can be stated in terms that medical and official agencies marked certain individuals out for destruction. The procedures involved isolating victims from relatives and concerned carers, the transfer to a holding, and then to a killing institution. The medical and official view denied individuality. It therefore seems appropriate that restoring their name to a victim would be a dignified act of humane commemoration, and recognition that they were a person in the fullest sense.”
Aktion T4 researcher and author Andreas Hechler in his article written about his great grandmother’s murder by the Nazis in Aktion T4 remarked about his grandmother, who had worked so many years and gone through so many roadblocks to document the life and death of her mother in the gas chamber at Hadamar on Feb. 21, 1941:
“It was a matter of restoring to those who were murdered their individual civil rights and their inalienable dignity as human beings and securing justice and human dignity for the forgotten groups of victims overall.”
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