Hadamar killing centre
[5] As Weindling (1989) explained, there had been several movements in Germany since the end of World War I concerned with the 'degeneration' of German racial purity that culminated with the founding in 1927 of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics.
[6] Although there had been demands since the early 1920s for legislation on sterilization and euthanasia, these were rejected because it was believed that positive eugenics was more representative of the Weimar political structures and the nation's social needs.
[6][7]: 26 In July 1933, the Nazis passed the "Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring", which prescribed compulsory sterilisation for people with medical conditions thought to be hereditary, such as schizophrenia and "imbecility".
[8] Beginning in late 1939, Hitler personally issued an order on his private stationery authorizing Philipp Bouhler and Karl Brandt to initiate a "euthanasia" programme to give the "incurably sick" a "mercy death".
[7]: 28 During the first phase of operations (January to August 1941), 10,072 men, women and children were murdered with carbon monoxide in a gas chamber as part of the Nazi "euthanasia" programme.
According to a letter sent by Bishop Antonius Hilfrich of the Diocese of Limburg to the Reich Justice Minister in August 1941, local children taunted each other with the words "You're not very clever; you will go to Hadamar and into the ovens".
[18] Resident physicians and staff, headed by nurse Irmgard Huber, directly murdered the majority of these victims, among whom were German patients with disabilities, mentally-disoriented elderly persons from bombed-out areas, "half Jewish" children from welfare institutions, psychologically- and physically-disabled forced labourers and their children, German soldiers, and Waffen SS soldiers deemed psychologically incurable.
Because the gas chamber had been deconstructed,[15] the medical personnel and staff at Hadamar murdered almost all of these people by lethal drug overdoses or deliberate neglect and malnutrition.
The discovery in late March 1945 of the "euthanasia" facility Hadamar near Limburg an der Lahn in west central Germany riveted attention in the United States, with many local newspapers describing it as a "murder factory".
[22] U.S. military authorities decided to undertake their first prosecution to adjudicate crimes associated with the systematic racial and social persecution and extermination committed under Nazi Germany policies.
Initially, American authorities intended to try Hadamar physicians, nurses, and administrative staff in their custody for the murders of nearly 15,000 German patients at the institution.
International law restricted them to prosecute crimes committed against their own service personnel and civilian nationals, and those of their allies, in the territories that they held.
As these civilian forced laborers were citizens of countries allied to the United States, American prosecutors were able to open proceedings against seven Hadamar defendants associated with the murders of the "Eastern workers".
[23] The six-man U.S. military tribunal sentenced the Hadamar chief administrator Alfons Klein, and two male nurses, Heinrich Ruoff and Karl Willig, to death by hanging.
10, which allowed the elastic charge of "crimes against humanity" to cover the massive scale of extermination the Germans had carried out against Jews, Poles, Gypsies and other populations.
