Murder of Patients

Gaubschat Fahrzeugwerke in Berlin had been manufacturing bodies for lorries and buses since the 1920s and advertised its products with posters like this one from 1937. In 1941, the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA), the central police authority that organised the mass murder of European Jews, commissioned the company to produce gas-tight box bodies for 20 lorries. These “gas vans” were subsequently converted by the RSHA and used to murder civilians, especially patients in the occupied Soviet Union.

Murders of people with disabilities or the chronically ill were committed by members of the Einsatzgruppen, police and military under German occupation, particularly in Eastern Europe. Unlike the murders disguised under the term “euthanasia” in the German Reich, these crimes are hardly known to the German public. They clearly reveal the combination of an inhuman world view and genocidal practice.