Bernburg Euthanasia Centre

According to the organization chart they included: sick and disabled people from institutions in the provinces of Brandenburg, Saxony and Schleswig-Holstein, the states of Anhalt, Brunswick and Mecklenburg as well as the capital city Berlin and the city of Hamburg from where the victims were transported to Bernburg directly or via the intermediate centres which included: According to a surviving internal summary, the so-called Hartheim Statistics, 8,601 people were killed at Bernburg in 1941.

The organizers of the Nazi Euthanasia Programme, later known as Action T4, Viktor Brack and Karl Brandt, ordered that the killing of patients could only be carried out by clinicians, because the letter of authorization from Hitler dated 1 September 1939 only referred to doctors.

The following doctors carried out euthanasia in Bernburg: On 31 January 1941, Joseph Goebbels wrote in his diary: "Discussed with Bouhler the question of the silent liquidation of the mentally ill. 40,000 are gone, 60,000 must still go.

"[2] The planned figure of 100,000 victims mentioned here was not achieved according to the Hartheim Statistics and the diary entry is cited as evidence that the programme was prematurely halted.

The historian, Uwe Dietrich Adam, also posed the question early on as to whether the programme was halted because its euthanasia specialists were urgently needed in the extermination camps to where they were soon deployed.

These 300 victims (about 80 German Jewish prisoners and 220 detainees, who had either been arrested as so-called "asocials" or who were seriously ill and unable to work) are all named at the Neuengamme concentration camp memorial site.

Because of his experience in gassing, from summer 1942 Eberl was appointed commandant of the Treblinka extermination camp as part of the most deadly phase of the Holocaust in Poland known as Action Reinhardt.