Our first "authentic" site, Hadamar, was one of the 6 hospitals used for the Nazi T-4 (named for the location of the building that administered the program - Tiergartenstrasse 4 in Berlin - not too far from where I am sitting right now) "euthanasia" program. This was not mercy killing, however, this was where the Nazis killed those they deemed unworthy of living -- the mentally and physically disabled for the most part.
Hadamar is an extremely quaint German village. (I do have MANY photos of everything, but I will add pictures after I get home.) Who could have imagined that a hospital in such a place would have turned into a killing center? Disabled people - men, women, and children - were brought from other institutions on buses with darkened windows. Imagine you are a low functioning individual and you are torn from the place where you are cared for, where you feel secure, and put onto a dark bus....It must have been terrifying.
The doctors and nurses - those trained for healing - were the ones who carried out the orders at Hadamar. Gas chambers were built in the basement of the hospital -- a rehearsal for what would come all too soon. T-4 "patients" were also starved and killed by lethal injection. In fact, the program began by targeting children under 3. Ironically, the next building is a psychiatric hospital with a section for the criminally insane behind barbed wires.
The night before, in Frankfurt, a few of us met a teacher who has a mutual friend (a holocaust survivor) with a member of our group. She's a very nice woman, about my age, and she's involved in local Frankfurt Christian-Jewish relations. She lived in Hadamar for a time, and her husband's grandmother still lives there. The grandmother lived in Hadamar in the 1940s and remembers seeing the buses with the painted windows coming through town. She also remembers the smell, a smell that was accompanied by small pieces of ash that blew in the wind. The same type of description that one hears about Auschwtitz.
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