Hadamar Killing Centre

The path climbs gently up the hill above the town. Gravel shifts under your feet. Ahead stand plain hospital buildings, pale walls and rows of ordinary windows. Nothing about them looks dangerous. That ordinariness is the first thing to hold in your mind here. What happened on this hill was carried out by doctors, nurses and clerks, inside a place built to care for people.

You are on the Mönchberg, the Monks' Hill, above the small town of Hadamar in the German state of Hesse. In the early twentieth century this became a state psychiatric hospital. People with mental illnesses and disabilities lived and worked here. Families visited them. Then, in 1941, the Nazi regime turned one part of this hospital into a killing centre. Today it is a memorial and a place of learning, and this guide will walk you through it gently and honestly.

To understand Hadamar, you need to know one word: euthanasia. The Nazis used it as a cover. It means a gentle death, but there was nothing gentle or voluntary here. Under a secret programme later called Aktion T4, named after its Berlin office address, the state decided that sick and disabled people were "life unworthy of life". Patients were selected on paper by doctors who never met them. A mark on a form was enough to end a life.

Hadamar was one of six killing centres in this programme. From January to August 1941, more than ten thousand people were brought here and murdered. They came from asylums and care homes across the region. Most of them died on the day they arrived. Staff then falsified death certificates with invented illnesses, and families received letters with false dates and false causes of death.

The victims arrived in grey buses. Their windows were painted over or covered, so no one could look in. Near the buildings you can still see a wooden garage. The buses drove inside it, and the doors closed behind them. Patients stepped out without being seen from the street. Then they were led along a covered walkway into the main building and down to the basement.

In that basement, staff built a gas chamber disguised as a shower room. Next to it stood the crematorium ovens. Visitors can go down into these rooms today. They are small, low and very quiet. Many people find that the size is what stays with them. It looks like an ordinary cellar. Take your time here, and do not feel you must linger longer than you are able.

The secrecy did not hold. Smoke rose from the chimney above the hospital, and people in Hadamar noticed the smell. Children in the town reportedly taunted each other with threats of being sent to the ovens. In August 1941, the Catholic bishop of nearby Limburg wrote a letter of protest to the Reich Minister of Justice. He described what local people already knew. Around the same time, Bishop Clemens von Galen of Münster condemned the killings in a famous public sermon.

Here is a detail that shocks many visitors. In the summer of 1941, staff marked the cremation of their ten thousandth victim with a gathering. According to post-war testimony, there was beer, and someone gave a mock speech. It is one of the clearest signs of how normal killing had become for the people who worked here. They were not strangers to this work. It was their daily job.

In August 1941, Hitler halted the gassing programme, partly because of growing public unrest. But at Hadamar, the killing did not stop. It only changed form. From 1942 until the end of the war, staff murdered patients with overdoses of medication and through deliberate starvation. This second phase was slower and quieter. It is less known than the gas chamber, yet thousands more people died this way on this hill.

The victims of this second phase were not only psychiatric patients. They included forced labourers from Eastern Europe who had fallen ill, often with tuberculosis. They also included children whom the Nazis labelled as "half-Jewish", brought to a children's home at Hadamar and then killed. Altogether, historians estimate that close to fifteen thousand people died here during the Nazi years. Each one had a name, a family and a story.

In March 1945, American troops reached Hadamar. Later that year, a United States military commission put staff members on trial. The trial focused on the murder of several hundred Polish and Soviet forced labourers, because those were crimes against foreign nationals. The chief administrator and two others were sentenced to death. Later, a German court in Frankfurt tried staff for the murder of German patients, including a head nurse. Many others never faced justice.

Behind the buildings, a path leads to the hillside cemetery. During the second phase, the dead were buried here in mass graves, often several bodies together. Today the slope is calm and green, with a memorial stone. Its German inscription reads "Mensch achte den Menschen", which means "Human, respect the human". The memorial centre that you visit today opened in the 1980s and now teaches students and visitors from many countries.

One more thing surprises many people. Part of this site still works as a psychiatric hospital today. Patients are cared for here, a short walk from the basement you may have just seen. Please keep this in mind as you move around. Speak quietly near the clinic buildings, and respect the privacy of the people who live and work here now.

As you walk back down the hill, look again at the windows, the trees and the roofs of the town below. People in those houses saw the buses and smelled the smoke. Some of them spoke out, and many stayed silent. The question this place leaves is simple and difficult. What do we notice around us... and what do we choose to do about it?