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150-829: During the Partitions of Poland from 1793, the bulk of the area had been annexed by the Kingdom of Prussia until 1807 as South Prussia . From 1815 to 1849, the territory was within the autonomous Grand Duchy of Posen , which was the Province of Posen until Poland was re-established in 1918–1919 following World War I . The area is currently the Greater Poland Voivodeship . After the German Wehrmacht invaded Poland in September 1939,

300-1202: A Kripo officer who later played a prominent role in the Final Solution (extermination of Jews) as commandant of newly built death camps in occupied Poland. In addition to Brandenburg, the killing centres included Grafeneck Castle in Baden-Württemberg (10,824 dead), Schloss Hartheim near Linz in Austria (over 18,000 dead), Sonnenstein in Saxony (15,000 dead), Bernburg in Saxony-Anhalt and Hadamar in Hesse (14,494 dead). The same facilities were also used to kill mentally sound prisoners transferred from concentration camps in Germany, Austria and occupied parts of Poland. Condemned patients were transferred from their institutions to new centres in T4 Charitable Ambulance buses, called

450-562: A "euthanasia note", backdated to 1 September 1939, which authorised his physician Karl Brandt and Reichsleiter Philipp Bouhler to begin the killing. The killings took place from September 1939 until the end of the war in 1945; from 275,000 to 300,000 people were killed in psychiatric hospitals in Germany and Austria, occupied Poland and the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia (now the Czech Republic). The number of victims

600-475: A "trial" case in late 1938. Hitler instructed Brandt to evaluate a petition sent by two parents for the "mercy killing" of their son who was blind and had physical and developmental disabilities. The child, born near Leipzig and eventually identified as Gerhard Kretschmar , was killed in July 1939. Hitler instructed Brandt to proceed in the same manner in all similar cases. On 18 August 1939, three weeks after

750-703: A Jewish invention". Bishop Heinrich Wienken of Berlin, a leading member of the Caritas Association , was selected by the Fulda episcopal synod to represent the views of the Catholic Church in meetings with T4 operatives. In 2008, Michael Burleigh wrote Wienken seems to have gone partially native in the sense that he gradually abandoned an absolute stance based on the Fifth Commandment in favour of winning limited concessions regarding

900-798: A bone of contention between Poland and Hungary , which was a part of the Monarchy. Nevertheless, the Ottoman Empire, the Bar confederation and its French and European volunteers were defeated by Russian forces and Polish governmental ones with the aid of Great Britain. As Russia moved into the Crimea and the Danubian Principalities (which the Habsburg monarchy long coveted), King Frederick II of Prussia and Maria Theresa were worried that

1050-553: A brief medical examination on arrival. They were induced to enter what appeared to be a shower block, where they were gassed with carbon monoxide (the ruse was also used at extermination camps). Some of the victims knew their fate and tried to defend themselves. The SS functionaries and hospital staff associated with Aktion T4 in the German Reich were paid from the central office at Tiergartenstraße 4 in Berlin from

1200-471: A cautionary tale for the writers of the U.S. Constitution . Aktion T4 Aktion T4 (German, pronounced [akˈtsi̯oːn teː fiːɐ] ) was a campaign of mass murder by involuntary euthanasia in Nazi Germany . The term was first used in post- war trials against doctors who had been involved in the killings. The name T4 is an abbreviation of Tiergartenstraße  4,

1350-687: A child could be killed. The Ministry used deceit when dealing with parents or guardians, particularly in Catholic areas, where parents were generally uncooperative. Parents were told that their children were being sent to "Special Sections", where they would receive improved treatment. The children sent to these centres were kept for "assessment" for a few weeks and then killed by injection of toxic chemicals, typically phenol ; their deaths were recorded as " pneumonia ". Autopsies were usually performed and brain samples were taken to be used for "medical research". Post mortem examinations apparently helped to ease

1500-517: A forced labour, penal and internment camp and racial research center, with the children subjected to starvation, exhausting labour, beating even up to death and diseases, and the camp was nicknamed "little Auschwitz " due to its conditions. Germanisation camps for Polish children taken away from their parents were operated in Kalisz, Poznań, Puszczykowo and Zaniemyśl . The children were given new German names and surnames, and were punished for any use of

1650-536: A large portion had not been ethnically Polish. By seizing northwestern Poland, Prussia instantly gained control over 80% of the Commonwealth's total foreign trade. Through levying enormous customs duties, Prussia accelerated the collapse of the Commonwealth. After having occupied their respective territories, the three partitioning powers demanded that King Stanisław and the Sejm approve their action. When no help

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1800-572: A list of conditions. The conditions included schizophrenia, epilepsy, Huntington's chorea , advanced syphilis , senile dementia , paralysis , encephalitis and "terminal neurological conditions generally". Many doctors and administrators assumed that the reports were to identify inmates who were capable of being drafted for "labour service" and tended to overstate the degree of incapacity of their patients, to protect them from labour conscription. When some institutions refused to co-operate, teams of T4 doctors (or Nazi medical students) visited and compiled

1950-473: A mental health facility and people with simple physical disabilities. New insulin shock treatments were used by German psychiatrists to find out if patients with schizophrenia were curable. Karl Brandt , doctor to Hitler and Hans Lammers , the head of the Reich Chancellery, testified after the war that Hitler had told them as early as 1933—when the sterilisation law was passed—that he favoured

2100-546: A nurse and mother of a child with a disability, vehemently petitioned to Hermann Linden at the Reich Ministry of the Interior in Berlin to prevent her son, Alfred, from being transferred from Gugging, where he lived and which also became a euthanasia center. Wödl failed and Alfred was sent to Am Spiegelgrund , where he was killed on 22 February 1941. His brain was preserved in formaldehyde for "research" and stored in

2250-684: A prison camp in Żabikowo , where mostly Poles were imprisoned, but also Luxembourgers, Dutch, Hungarians, Slovaks, Americans, Russians and deserters from the Wehrmacht , and many were tortured and executed, and the prison in Sieradz , whose mostly Polish and Jewish prisoners were subjected to insults, beatings, forced labour, tortures, executions, and were even given meals prepared from rotten vegetables, spoiled fish and dead dogs, thus often dying of exhaustion, starvation or torture. Over 270,000 Polish children aged 10–18 were subjected to forced labour in

2400-458: A program of complete removal of the formerly Polish citizenry upon his nomination by Heinrich Himmler . The plan also entailed the re-settling of ethnic Germans from the Baltic and other regions into farms and homes formerly owned by Poles and Jews. He also authorized the clandestine operation of exterminating 100,000 Polish Jews (about one-third of the total Jewish population of Wartheland ), in

2550-714: A royal one. The next king could be a member of the Russian ruling dynasty now. The Sejm approved this. Resulting reaction among some of Poland's Roman Catholics, as well as the deep resentment of Russian intervention in the Commonwealth's domestic affairs including the exile to Russia of the top Roman Catholic bishops, the members of the Polish Senate, led to the War of the Confederation of Bar of 1768–1772, formed in Bar , where

2700-514: A state symbol (in contrast to the white eagle , a symbol of Poland). The Commonwealth had been forced to rely on Russia for protection against the rising Kingdom of Prussia , which demanded a slice of the northwest in order to unite its Western and Eastern portions; this would leave the Commonwealth with a Baltic coast only in Latvia and Lithuania . Catherine had to use diplomacy to win Austria to her side. The Commonwealth had remained neutral in

2850-512: A street address of the Chancellery department set up in early 1940, in the Berlin borough of Tiergarten , which recruited and paid personnel associated with Aktion T4. Certain German physicians were authorised to select patients "deemed incurably sick, after most critical medical examination" and then administer to them a "mercy death" ( Gnadentod ). In October 1939, Adolf Hitler signed

3000-524: A time. On each they marked a + (death), a - (life), or occasionally a ? meaning that they were unable to decide. Three "death" verdicts condemned the person and as with reviews of children, the process became less rigorous, the range of conditions considered "unsustainable" grew broader and zealous Nazis further down the chain of command increasingly made decisions on their own initiative. The first gassings in Germany proper took place in January 1940 at

3150-565: A wide-scale social reform, virtually impossible. Solovyov specified the cultural, language and religious break between the supreme and lowest layers of the society in the east regions of the Commonwealth, where the Belarusian and Ukrainian serf peasantry was Orthodox. Russian authors emphasized the historical connections between Belarus, Ukraine and Russia, as former parts of the medieval old Russian state where dynasty of Rurikids reigned ( Kievan Rus' ). Thus, Nikolay Karamzin wrote: "Let

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3300-551: Is generally suppressed, then unless we will get new measures our race must rapidly deteriorate. Within the Nazi administration, the idea of including in the programme people with physical disabilities had to be expressed carefully, because the Reich Minister of Propaganda , Joseph Goebbels , had a deformed right leg. After 1937, the acute shortage of labour in Germany arising from rearmament, meant that anyone capable of work

3450-479: Is not allowed" but the declaration was not upheld by all Catholic authorities in Germany. In the summer of 1941, protests were led in Germany by the bishop of Münster, Clemens von Galen , whose intervention led to "the strongest, most explicit and most widespread protest movement against any policy since the beginning of the Third Reich", according to Richard J. Evans . Several reasons have been suggested for

3600-735: The Danzig (now Gdańsk ) area, some 7,000 Polish patients of various institutions were shot and 10,000 were killed in the Gdynia area. Similar measures were taken in other areas of Poland destined for incorporation into Germany. The first experiments with the gassing of patients were conducted in October 1939 at Fort VII in Posen (occupied Poznań), where hundreds of prisoners were killed by means of carbon monoxide poisoning, in an improvised gas chamber developed by Albert Widmann , chief chemist of

3750-758: The Hungarian Revolution of 1848 ). Poland would be briefly resurrected—if in a smaller frame—in 1807, when Napoleon set up the Duchy of Warsaw . After his defeat and the implementation of the Congress of Vienna treaty in 1815, the Russian-dominated Congress Kingdom of Poland was created in its place. After the Congress, Russia gained a larger share of Poland (with Warsaw ) and, after crushing an insurrection in 1831 ,

3900-536: The Kościuszko Uprising began. Kosciuszko's ragtag insurgent armies won some initial successes, but they eventually fell before the superior forces of the Russian Empire. The partitioning powers, seeing the increasing unrest in the remaining Commonwealth, decided to solve the problem by erasing any independent Polish state from the map. On October 24, 1795, their representatives signed a treaty, dividing

4050-548: The Noteć River (the Netze District ), and parts of Kuyavia (but not the city of Toruń ). Despite token criticism of the partition from Empress Maria Theresa , Austrian statesman Wenzel Anton, Prince of Kaunitz-Rietberg , was proud of wresting as large a share as he did, with the rich salt mines of Bochnia and Wieliczka . To Austria fell Zator and Auschwitz ( Oświęcim ), part of Lesser Poland embracing parts of

4200-555: The Persian Empire ), and reserved a place in its diplomatic corps for an Ambassador of Lehistan (Poland). Several scholars focused on the economic motivations of the partitioning powers. Hajo Holborn noted that Prussia aimed to take control of the lucrative Baltic grain trade through Gdańsk . In the 18th century the Russian peasants were escaping from Russia to the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth (where

4350-603: The Russian Enlightenment , as Russian writers such as Gavrila Derzhavin , Denis Fonvizin , and Alexander Pushkin stressed degeneration of Catholic Poland and the need to "civilize" it by its neighbors. Nonetheless, other 19th century contemporaries were much more skeptical; for example, British jurist Sir Robert Phillimore discussed the partition as a violation of international law ; German jurist Heinrich Bernhard Oppenheim presented similar views. Other older historians who challenged such justifications for

4500-632: The Russian Revolution and the Treaty of Versailles finally allowed and helped the restoration of Poland's full independence after 123 years. The term "Fourth Partition of Poland" may refer to any subsequent division of Polish lands, including: If one accepts more than one of those events as partitions, fifth, sixth, and even seventh partitions can be counted, but these terms are very rare. (For example, Norman Davies in God's Playground refers to

4650-678: The Seven Years' War (1756–1763), yet it sympathized with the alliance of France, Austria , and Russia, and allowed Russian troops access to its western lands as bases against Prussia. Frederick II retaliated by ordering enough Polish currency counterfeited to severely affect the Polish economy. Through the Polish nobles whom Russia controlled and the Russian Minister to Warsaw, ambassador and Prince Nicholas Repnin , Empress Catherine

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4800-777: The US had passed laws enabling coerced sterilisation . Studies conducted in the 1920s ranked Germany as a country that was unusually reluctant to introduce sterilisation legislation. In his book Mein Kampf (1924), Hitler wrote that one day racial hygiene "will appear as a deed greater than the most victorious wars of our present bourgeois era". In July 1933, the " Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring " prescribed compulsory sterilisation for people with conditions thought to be hereditary, such as schizophrenia, epilepsy , Huntington's chorea and "imbecility". Sterilisation

4950-476: The University of Paderborn , Joseph Mayer, on the likely reactions of the churches in the event of a state euthanasia programme being instituted. Mayer – a longstanding euthanasia advocate – reported that the churches would not oppose such a programme if it was seen to be in the national interest. Brack showed this paper to Hitler in July and it may have increased his confidence that

5100-546: The Warthegau alone among the areas annexed by Germany while the Soviet forces began to push the retreating German forces back through the Polish lands. Most German residents along with over a million colonists fled westward. Some did not, due to restrictions by Germany's own government and the quickly advancing Red Army. An estimated 50,000 refugees died from the severe winter conditions, others as war atrocities committed by

5250-543: The once dire conditions had improved, unlike in Russia ) in significant enough numbers to become a major concern for the Russian Government sufficient to play a role in its decision to partition the Commonwealth (one of the reasons Catherine II gave for the partition of Poland was that thousands of peasants escaped from Russia to Poland to seek a better fate"). Jerzy Czajewski and Piotr Kimla assert that in

5400-480: The "euthanasia" decree, in a 1939 conference with Leonardo Conti , Reich Health Leader and State Secretary for Health in the Interior Ministry, and Hans Lammers, Chief of the Reich Chancellery, Hitler gave as examples the mentally ill who he said could only be "bedded on sawdust or sand" because they "perpetually dirtied themselves" and "put their own excrement into their mouths". This issue, according to

5550-566: The "euthanasia" programme would be acceptable to German public opinion. Notably, when Sereny interviewed Mayer shortly before his death in 1967, he denied that he formally condoned the killing of people with disabilities but no copies of this paper are known to survive. Some bureaucrats opposed the T4 programme; Lothar Kreyssig , a district judge and member of the Confessing Church , wrote to Justice Minister Franz Gürtner protesting that

5700-477: The 1772 population remained in Poland. Prussia named its newly gained province South Prussia , with Poznań (and later Warsaw) as the capital of the new province. Targowica confederates, who did not expect another partition, and the king, Stanisław August Poniatowski , who joined them near the end, both lost much prestige and support. The reformers, on the other hand, were attracting increasing support, and in 1794

5850-576: The 1807 creation of the Duchy of Warsaw as the fourth partition, the 1815 Treaty of Vienna as the fifth, the 1918 Treaty of Brest-Litovsk as the sixth, and the 1939 division of Poland between Nazi Germany and the USSR as the seventh.) However, in recent times, the 1815 division of the Duchy of Warsaw at the Congress of Vienna and the 1939 division of Poland have been sometimes called the fourth and fifth partitions, respectively. The term "Fourth Partition"

6000-458: The 18th century until the partitions solved this problem, Russian armies increasingly raided territories of the Commonwealth, officially to recover the escapees, but in fact kidnapping many locals; Piotr Kimla noted that the Russian government spread international propaganda, mainly in France, which falsely exaggerated serfdom conditions in Poland, while ignoring worse conditions in Russia, as one of

6150-457: The Austrian 47,000 km (18,147 sq mi) with 1.2 million and Lublin and Kraków. The King of Poland , Stanisław August Poniatowski , under Russian military escort left for Grodno where he abdicated on November 25, 1795; next he left for Saint Petersburg , Russia, where he would spend his remaining days. This act ensured that Russia would be seen as the most important of

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6300-538: The Austrians established Galicia in the Austrian partition, whereas the Russians gained Warsaw from Prussia and formed an autonomous polity known as Congress Poland in the Russian partition. In Polish historiography, the term "Fourth Partition of Poland" has also been used, in reference to any subsequent annexation of Polish lands by foreign invaders. Depending on source and historical period, this could mean

6450-520: The Brandenburg Euthanasia Centre. The operation was headed by Brack, who said "the needle belongs in the hand of the doctor". Bottled pure carbon monoxide gas was used. At trials, Brandt described the process as a "major advance in medical history". Once the efficacy of the method was confirmed, it became standard and was instituted at a number of centres in Germany under the supervision of Widmann, Becker and Christian Wirth –

6600-424: The Commonwealth had been showing the beginning signs of a slow recovery and see the last two partitions as an answer to strengthening reforms in the Commonwealth and the potential threat they represented to its power-hungry neighbours. As historian Norman Davies stated, because the balance of power equilibrium was observed, many contemporary observers accepted explanations of the "enlightened apologists" of

6750-489: The Commonwealth's population, Austria with 32%, and Russia with 45%. (Wandycz also offers slightly different total annexed territory estimates, with 18% for Austria, 20% for Prussia and 62% for Russia.) During the Napoleonic Wars and in their immediate aftermath the borders between partitioning powers shifted several times, changing the numbers seen in the preceding table. Ultimately, Russia ended up with most of

6900-565: The Community Patients Transports Service. They were run by teams of SS men wearing white coats, to give it an air of medical care. To prevent the families and doctors of the patients from tracing them, the patients were often first sent to transit centres in major hospitals, where they were supposedly assessed. They were moved again to special treatment ( Sonderbehandlung ) centres. Families were sent letters explaining that owing to wartime regulations, it

7050-705: The Congress Kingdom's autonomy was abolished and Poles faced confiscation of property, deportation, forced military service, and the closure of their own universities. After the uprising of 1863 , Russification of Polish secondary schools was imposed and the literacy rate dropped dramatically. In the Austrian sector which now was called Galicia , Poles fared better and were allowed to have representation in Parliament and to form their own universities, and Kraków with Lemberg (Lwów/Lviv) became centers of Polish culture and education. Meanwhile, Prussia Germanized

7200-598: The Gaubschat GmbH in Berlin and before February 1942, killed 3,830 Polish Jews and around 4,000 Romani , under the guise of "resettlement". After the Wannsee conference , implementation of gassing technology was accelerated by Heydrich. Beginning in the spring of 1942, three killing factories were built secretly in east-central Poland. The SS officers responsible for the earlier Aktion T4 , including Wirth, Stangl and Irmfried Eberl , had important roles in

7350-434: The German Criminal Police (Kripo). In December 1939, Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler witnessed one of these gassings, ensuring that this invention would later be put to much wider uses. The idea of killing adult mental patients soon spread from occupied Poland to adjoining areas of Germany, probably because Nazi Party and SS officers in these areas were most familiar with what was happening in Poland. These were also

7500-504: The German Reich occupied the whole of the Greater Poland area - the erstwhile Polish Poznań Voivodeship - and split the territory between four Reichsgaue and the General Government area (further east). The Militärbezirk Posen was created in September 1939; in accordance with a decree of 8 October 1939, Germany annexed it on 26 October 1939 as the Reichsgau Posen . SS Obergruppenfuhrer Arthur Greiser became Gauleiter on 21 October. He would remain in this post until

7650-435: The German army, rescued Polish children kidnapped by the Germans, and facilitated escapes of Allied prisoners of war from German POW camps. The Germans cracked down on the resistance several times, and even kidnapped children of the resistance members and sent them to the camp for Polish children in Łódź. From August 1944 to January 1945, the Germans used hundreds of thousands of Poles as forced labour to build fortifications in

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7800-399: The Gestapo. It is a terrible, unjust and catastrophic thing when man opposes his will to the will of God ... We are talking about men and women, our compatriots, our brothers and sisters. Poor unproductive people if you wish, but does this mean that they have lost their right to live? Galen's sermons were not reported in the German press but were circulated illegally in leaflets. The text

7950-421: The Great forced a constitution on the Commonwealth at the so-called Repnin Sejm of 1767, named after ambassador Repnin, who effectively dictated the terms of that Sejm (and ordered the capture and exile to Kaluga of some vocal opponents of his policies, including bishop Józef Andrzej Załuski and others). This new constitution undid the reforms made in 1764 under Stanisław II . The liberum veto and all

8100-486: The Holocaust. As a related aspect of the "medical" and scientific basis of this programme, the Nazi doctors took thousands of brains from 'euthanasia' victims for research. From August 1939, the Interior Ministry registered children with disabilities, requiring doctors and midwives to report all cases of newborns with severe disabilities; the 'guardian' consent element soon disappeared. Those to be killed were identified as "all children under three years of age in whom any of

8250-410: The Jews he told me that I could proceed with these according to my own judgement." There were numerous camps and prisons in the province, including a subcamp of the Gross-Rosen concentration camp in Owińska , and a subcamp of the Stutthof concentration camp in Obrzycko . Particularly notorious camps and prisons included the Fort VII concentration camp in Poznań, the Radogoszcz prison in Łódź,

8400-417: The Nazi appropriation of Church property in Münster to accommodate people made homeless by an air raid, in July and August 1941, the bishop of Münster , Clemens August Graf von Galen , gave four sermons criticising the Nazis for arresting Jesuits , confiscating church property and for the euthanasia program. Galen sent the text to Hitler by telegram, calling on ... the Führer to defend the people against

8550-513: The Nazi regime with enthusiasm. Many were appointed to positions in the Health Ministry and German research institutes. Their ideas were gradually adopted by the majority of the German medical profession, from which Jewish and communist doctors were soon purged. During the 1930s, the Nazi Party had carried out a campaign of propaganda in favour of euthanasia. The National Socialist Racial and Political Office (NSRPA) produced leaflets, posters and short films to be shown in cinemas, pointing out to Germans

8700-414: The Nazi regime, assumed a new urgency in wartime. After the invasion of Poland , Hermann Pfannmüller (Head of the State Hospital near Munich ) said It is unbearable to me that the flower of our youth must lose their lives at the front, so that that feeble-minded and asocial element can have a secure existence in the asylum. Pfannmüller advocated killing by a gradual decrease of food, which he believed

8850-399: The Nazis expelled a further 45,000 people, and from autumn of that year, they began killing Jews by shooting and in gas vans , at first spasmodically and experimentally. Reichsgau Wartheland had the population: 4,693,700 by 1941. Greiser wrote in November 1942: "I myself do not believe that the Führer needs to be asked again in this matter, especially since at our last discussion with regard to

9000-404: The Partitions included French historian Jules Michelet , British historian and politician Thomas Babington Macaulay , and Edmund Burke , who criticized the immorality of the partitions. Nonetheless, most governments accepted the event as a fait acompli . The Ottoman Empire was either the only, or one of only two countries in the world that refused to accept the partitions, (the other being

9150-461: The Poles tried to expel Russian forces from Commonwealth territory. The irregular and poorly commanded Polish forces had little chance in the face of the regular Russian army and suffered a major defeat. Adding to the chaos was a Ukrainian Cossack and peasant rebellion in the east ( Koliyivshchyna ), which erupted in 1768 and resulted in massacres of Polish noblemen ( szlachta ), Jews, Uniates , ethnic minorities and Catholic priests, before it

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9300-433: The Poles. During Aktion T4 , the SS-Sonderkommandos gassed over 2,700 mentally ill people from the psychiatric hospitals in Owińska , Dziekanka and Kościan . Most of the Jewish residents were eventually imprisoned at the Łódź Ghetto (officially established in December 1939) and exterminated at Chełmno extermination camp ( German : Vernichtungslager Kulmhof , operational from December 1941 onwards). From 1940,

9450-433: The Polish core at the expense of Prussia and Austria. Following the Congress of Vienna , Russia controlled 82% of the pre-1772 Commonwealth's territory (this includes its puppet state of Congress Poland ), Austria 11%, and Prussia 7%. As a result of the Partitions, Poles were forced to seek a change of status quo in Europe. Polish poets, politicians, noblemen, writers, artists, many of whom were forced to emigrate (thus

9600-460: The Polish language, even with death. After their stay in the camps, the children were deported to Germany; only some returned to Poland after the war, while the fate of many remains unknown to this day. The Polish resistance movement was active in the region, including the Union of Armed Struggle , Bataliony Chłopskie , Gray Ranks and Home Army . The Polish Underground State was organized, and in July 1940, even an underground Polish parliament

9750-416: The SS men of Einsatzkommando 16, Selbstschutz and EK-Einmann under the command of SS- Sturmbannführer Rudolf Tröger, overseen by Reinhard Heydrich , during Operation Tannenberg . All hospitals and mental asylums of the Wartheland were emptied. The region was incorporated into Germany and earmarked for resettlement by Volksdeutsche following the German conquest of Poland. In

9900-437: The Soviet military. The remaining ethnically German population was expelled to Allied-occupied Germany after the war ended in accordance with the Potsdam Agreement . 52°24′00″N 16°55′00″E  /  52.400000°N 16.916667°E  / 52.400000; 16.916667 Partitions of Poland The Partitions of Poland were three partitions of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth that took place toward

10050-400: The T4 programme. Hitler wrote a confidential letter in October 1939 to overcome opposition within the German state bureaucracy. Hitler told Bouhler that, "the Führer's Chancellery must under no circumstances be seen to be active in this matter". Gürtner had to be shown Hitler's letter in August 1940 to gain his co-operation. In the towns where the killing centres were located, some people saw

10200-443: The action was illegal since no law or formal decree from Hitler had authorised it. Gürtner replied, "If you cannot recognise the will of the Führer as a source of law, then you cannot remain a judge" and had Kreyssig dismissed. Hitler had a policy of not issuing written instructions for matters which could later be condemned by the international community but made an exception when he provided Bouhler and Brack with written authority for

10350-488: The areas where Germans wounded from the Polish campaign were expected to be accommodated, which created a demand for hospital space. The Gauleiter of Pomerania , Franz Schwede-Coburg , sent 1,400 patients from five Pomeranian hospitals to undisclosed locations in occupied Poland, where they were shot. The Gauleiter of East Prussia , Erich Koch , had 1,600 patients killed out of sight. More than 8,000 Germans were killed in this initial wave of killings carried out on

10500-474: The best young men died in war, causing a loss to the Volk of the best genes. The genes of those who did not fight (the worst genes) then proliferated freely, accelerating biological and cultural degeneration". The advocacy of eugenics in Germany gained ground after 1930, when the Depression was used to excuse cuts in funding to state mental hospitals, creating squalor and overcrowding. Many German eugenicists were nationalists and antisemites , who embraced

10650-419: The centres continued to be used to kill concentration camp inmates: eventually some 20,000 people in this category were killed. In 1971, Gitta Sereny conducted interviews with Stangl, who was in prison in Düsseldorf , having been convicted of co-responsibility for killing 900,000 people, while commandant of the Sobibor and Treblinka extermination camps in Poland. Stangl gave Sereny a detailed account of

10800-704: The child-killing programme, such as Unger, Heinze and Hermann Pfannmüller. The recruits were mostly psychiatrists, notably Professor Carl Schneider of Heidelberg, Professor Max de Crinis of Berlin and Professor Paul Nitsche from the Sonnenstein state institution. Heyde became the operational leader of the programme, succeeded later by Nitsche. In early October, all hospitals, nursing homes, old-age homes and sanatoria were required to report all patients who had been institutionalised for five years or more, who had been committed as "criminally insane", who were of "non- Aryan race" or who had been diagnosed with any on

10950-558: The clinic for sixty years. The Lutheran theologian Friedrich von Bodelschwingh (director of the Bethel Institution for Epilepsy at Bielefeld ) and Pastor Paul-Gerhard Braune (director of the Hoffnungstal Institution near Berlin) protested. Bodelschwingh negotiated directly with Brandt and indirectly with Hermann Göring , whose cousin was a prominent psychiatrist. Braune had meetings with Gürtner, who

11100-409: The consciences of many of those involved, giving them the feeling that there was a genuine medical purpose to the killings. The most notorious of these institutions in Austria was Am Spiegelgrund, where from 1940 to 1945, 789 children were killed by lethal injection, gas poisoning and physical abuse. Children's brains were preserved in jars of formaldehyde and stored in the basement of the clinic and in

11250-539: The corollary that unanimous consent was needed for all measures. A single member of parliament's belief that a measure was injurious to his own constituency (usually simply his own estate), even after the act had been approved, became enough to strike the act. Thus it became increasingly difficult to undertake action. The liberum veto also provided openings for foreign diplomats to get their ways, through bribing nobles to exercise it. Thus, one could characterise Poland–Lithuania in its final period (mid-18th century) before

11400-485: The cost of maintaining asylums for the incurably ill and insane. These films included The Inheritance ( Das Erbe , 1935), The Victim of the Past ( Opfer der Vergangenheit , 1937), which was given a major première in Berlin and was shown in all German cinemas, and I Accuse ( Ich klage an , 1941) which was based on a novel by Hellmuth Unger, a consultant for "child euthanasia". In mid-1939, Hitler authorised

11550-581: The counties of Kraków and Sandomir and the whole of Galicia , less the city of Kraków . Empress Catherine II of Russia was also satisfied despite the loss of Galicia to the Habsburg monarchy. By this "diplomatic document" Russia gained Polish Livonia , and lands in eastern Belarus embracing the counties of Vitebsk , Polotsk and Mstislavl . By this partition, the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth lost about 30% of its territory and half of its population (four million people), of which

11700-691: The creation of the Reich Committee for the Scientific Registering of Serious Hereditary and Congenital Illnesses ( Reichsausschuss zur wissenschaftlichen Erfassung erb- und anlagebedingter schwerer Leiden ) led by his physician, Karl Brandt, administered by Herbert Linden of the Interior Ministry, leader of German Red Cross Reichsarzt SS und Polizei Ernst-Robert Grawitz and SS - Oberführer Viktor Brack . Brandt and Bouhler were authorised to approve applications to kill children in relevant circumstances, though Bouhler left

11850-766: The defeat of the Ottoman Empire would severely upset the balance of power in Eastern Europe. Frederick II began to construct the partition to rebalance the power in Eastern Europe. In February 1772, the agreement of partition was signed in Vienna . Early in August, Russian, Prussian and Austrian troops occupied the provinces agreed upon among themselves. However, fighting continued as Bar confederation troops and French volunteers refused to lay down their arms (most notably, in Tyniec , Częstochowa and Kraków ). On August 5, 1772,

12000-427: The details to subordinates such as Brack and SA- Oberführer Werner Blankenburg . Extermination centres were established at six existing psychiatric hospitals: Bernburg , Brandenburg , Grafeneck , Hadamar , Hartheim , and Sonnenstein . One thousand children under the age of 17 were killed at the institutions Am Spiegelgrund and Gugging in Austria. They played a crucial role in developments leading to

12150-464: The end of 1940, some 325,000 Poles and Jews from the Wartheland and the so-called Polish Corridor were expelled to General Government, often forced to abandon most of their belongings. Fatalities were numerous. Many Poles were also enslaved as forced labour and either sent to forced labour camps or German colonists in the region or deported to Germany and other German-occupied countries. In 1941,

12300-529: The end of the 18th century and ended the existence of the state, resulting in the elimination of sovereign Poland and Lithuania for 123 years. The partitions were conducted by the Habsburg monarchy , the Kingdom of Prussia , and the Russian Empire , which divided up the Commonwealth lands among themselves progressively in the process of territorial seizures and annexations. The First Partition

12450-760: The end of the war in 1945. Reichsgau Posen was renamed "Reichsgau Wartheland" on 29 January 1940. In the new Reichsgau Posen the Wehrmacht established Wehrkreis XXI, based at Poznań ( German : Posen ), under the command of General der Artillerie Walter Petzel . Its primary operational unit was the 48th Panzer Korps, covering so-called Militärische Unterregion-Hauptsitze including Posen ( Polish : Poznań ), Lissa ( Polish : Leszno ), Hohensalza ( Polish : Inowrocław ), Leslau ( Polish : Włocławek ), Kalisch ( Polish : Kalisz ), and Litzmannstadt ( Polish : Łódź ). It maintained training areas at Sieradz and Biedrusko . It also maintained

12600-433: The end of the year, partly because the areas they served had been cleared and partly because of public opposition. In 1941, however, the centres at Bernburg and Sonnenstein increased their operations, while Hartheim (where Wirth and Franz Stangl were successively commandants) continued as before. Another 35,000 people were killed before August 1941, when the T4 programme was officially shut down by Hitler. Even after that date

12750-716: The entire school system of its Polish subjects, and had no more respect for Polish culture and institutions than the Russian Empire. In 1915 a client state of the German Empire and Austria-Hungary was proposed and accepted by the Central Powers of World War I: the Regency Kingdom of Poland . After the end of World War I, the Central Powers' surrender to the Western Allies , the chaos of

12900-459: The events of 1815 , or 1832 and 1846 , or 1939 . The term "Fourth Partition" in a temporal sense can also mean the diaspora communities that played an important political role in re-establishing the Polish sovereign state after 1918. During the reign of Władysław IV (1632–1648), the liberum veto was developed, a policy of parliamentary procedure based on the assumption of the political equality of every " gentleman/Polish nobleman ", with

13050-411: The families could afford it, transferred them to private clinics beyond the reach of T4. Other doctors "re-diagnosed" patients so that they no longer met the T4 criteria, which risked exposure when Nazi zealots from Berlin conducted inspections. In Kiel , Professor Hans Gerhard Creutzfeldt managed to save nearly all of his patients. Lifton listed a handful of psychiatrists and administrators who opposed

13200-418: The following 'serious hereditary diseases' were 'suspected': idiocy and Down syndrome (especially when associated with blindness and deafness); microcephaly ; hydrocephaly ; malformations of all kinds, especially of limbs, head, and spinal column; and paralysis, including spastic conditions". The reports were assessed by a panel of medical experts, of whom three were required to give their approval before

13350-421: The foreigners denounce the partition of Poland: we took what was ours." Russian historians often stressed that Russia annexed primarily Ukrainian and Belarusian provinces with Eastern Slavic inhabitants, although many Ruthenians were no more enthusiastic about Russia than about Poland, and ignoring ethnically Polish and Lithuanian territories also being annexed later. A new justification for partitions arose with

13500-786: The four main prisoner-of-war camps in the province, i.e. Stalag XXI-A in Ostrzeszów , Stalag XXI-B in Szubin , Stalag XXI-C in Wolsztyn and Stalag XXI-D in Poznań, which housed Polish, French , British, Dutch, Belgian, Serbian, Italian , Soviet, American, Norwegian, Moroccan, Algerian and French Sudanese prisoners of war. The territory of the Reichsgau was inhabited predominantly by ethnic Poles, by German settlers (a minority of 16.7% in 1921), and by Polish Jews. The Polish population

13650-553: The front and was supervised by Bouhler and Brandt. The officials in charge included Herbert Linden, who had been involved in the child killing programme; Ernst-Robert Grawitz, chief physician of the SS and August Becker , an SS chemist. The officials selected the doctors who were to carry out the operational part of the programme; based on political reliability as long-term Nazis, professional reputation and sympathy for radical eugenics. The list included physicians who had proved their worth in

13800-579: The implementation of the "Final Solution" for the next two years. The first killing centre, equipped with stationary gas chambers, modelled on technology developed under Aktion T4 , was established at Bełżec in the General Government territory of occupied Poland; the decision preceded the Wannsee Conference of January 1942 by three months. In January 1939, Brack commissioned a paper from Professor of Moral Theology at

13950-654: The incident at Absberg noted that "the removal of residents from the Ottilien Home has caused a great deal of unpleasantness" and described large crowds of Catholic townspeople, among them Party members, protesting against the action. Similar petitions and protests occurred throughout Austria as rumours spread of mass killings at the Hartheim Euthanasia Centre and of mysterious deaths at the children's clinic, Am Spiegelgrund in Vienna. Anna Wödl,

14100-528: The inmates arrive in buses, saw smoke from the crematoria chimneys and noticed that the buses were returning empty. In Hadamar, ashes containing human hair rained down on the town and despite the strictest orders, some of the staff at the killing centres talked about what was going on. In some cases families could tell that the causes of death in certificates were false, e.g. when a patient was claimed to have died of appendicitis , even though his appendix had been removed some years earlier. In other cases, families in

14250-693: The jurisdiction of the national medical division of the Reich Interior Ministry. Further gassing experiments with the use of mobile gas chambers ( Einsatzwagen ) were conducted at Soldau concentration camp by Herbert Lange following Operation Barbarossa . Lange was appointed commander of the Chełmno extermination camp in December 1941. He was given three gas vans by the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA), converted by

14400-574: The justification for the partitions. Il Canto degli Italiani , the Italian national anthem, contains a reference to the partition. The ongoing partitions of Poland were a major topic of discourse in The Federalist Papers , where the structure of the government of Poland, and of foreign influence over it, is used in several papers ( Federalist No. 14 , Federalist No. 19 , Federalist No. 22 , Federalist No. 39 for examples) as

14550-526: The killing of the boy, the Reich Committee for the Scientific Registering of Hereditary and Congenital Illnesses was established to register sick children or newborns identified as defective. The secret killing of infants began in 1939 and increased after the war started; by 1941, more than 5,000 children had been killed. Hitler was in favour of killing those whom he judged to be lebensunwertes Leben (' Life unworthy of life '). A few months before

14700-468: The killing of the incurably ill but recognised that public opinion would not accept this. In 1935, Hitler told the Leader of Reich Doctors, Gerhard Wagner , that the question could not be taken up in peacetime; "Such a problem could be more smoothly and easily carried out in war". He wrote that he intended to "radically solve" the problem of the mental asylums in such an event. Aktion T4 began with

14850-621: The killing of those designated as juvenile delinquents. Jewish children could be placed in the net primarily because they were Jewish; and at one of the institutions, a special department was set up for 'minor Jewish-Aryan half-breeds'. More pressure was placed on parents to agree to their children being sent away. Many parents suspected what was happening and refused consent, especially when it became apparent that institutions for children with disabilities were being systematically cleared of their charges. The parents were warned that they could lose custody of all their children and if that did not suffice,

15000-731: The killing programme must be implemented with stealth "...to avoid a probable backlash of public opinion during the war". On 4 December 1940, Reinhold Sautter, the Supreme Church Councillor of the Württemberg State Church, complained to the Nazi Ministerial Councillor Eugen Stähle against the murders in Grafeneck Castle. Stähle said "The fifth commandment Thou shalt not kill, is no commandment of God but

15150-409: The killings, including eugenics , racial hygiene , and saving money. Physicians in German and Austrian asylums continued many of the practices of Aktion T4 until the defeat of Germany in 1945, in spite of its official cessation in August 1941. The informal continuation of the policy led to 93,521 "beds emptied" by the end of 1941. Technology developed under Aktion T4 , particularly

15300-570: The killings; many doctors collaborated, either through ignorance, agreement with Nazi eugenicist policies or fear of the regime. Protest letters were sent to the Reich Chancellery and the Ministry of Justice, some from Nazi Party members. The first open protest against the removal of people from asylums took place at Absberg in Franconia in February 1941 and others followed. The SD report on

15450-483: The lists, sometimes in a haphazard and ideologically motivated way. During 1940, all Jewish patients were removed from institutions and killed. As with child inmates, adults were assessed by a panel of experts, working at the Tiergartenstraße offices. The experts were required to make their judgements on the reports, not medical histories or examinations. Sometimes they dealt with hundreds of reports at

15600-479: The neighbors of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth ( Rzeczpospolita ), namely Prussia, Austria and Russia, signed a secret agreement to maintain the status quo : specifically, to ensure that the Commonwealth laws would not change. Their alliance later became known in Poland as the " Alliance of the Three Black Eagles " (or Löwenwolde 's Treaty ), because all three states used a black eagle as

15750-548: The occupation manifesto was issued, to the dismay of the weak and exhausted Polish state; the partition treaty was ratified by its signatories on September 22, 1772. Frederick II of Prussia was elated with his success; Prussia took most of Royal Prussia (except Gdańsk ) that stood between its possessions in Prussia and the Margraviate of Brandenburg , as well as Ermland ( Warmia ), northern areas of Greater Poland along

15900-480: The occupiers also operated several forced labour camps for Jews in the region. Due to poor feeding and sanitary conditions, epidemics spread in those camps, which, combined with frequent executions, led to a high mortality rate. On the order of Heinrich Himmler , most of the camps were dissolved in 1943, and its surviving prisoners were sent to ghettos and death camps. The Gauleiter and Reichsstatthalter of Reichsgau Wartheland, native-born Arthur Greiser , embarked on

16050-561: The old abuses of the last one and a half centuries were guaranteed as unalterable parts of this new constitution (in the so-called Cardinal Laws ). Repnin also demanded the Russian protection of the rights of peasants in private estates of Polish and Lithuanian noblemen, religious freedom for the Protestant and Orthodox Christians and the political freedoms for Protestants, Orthodox Christians and Eastern Catholics (Uniates), including their right to occupy all state positions, including

16200-519: The operations of the T4 programme based on his time as commandant of the killing facility at the Hartheim institute. He described how the inmates of various asylums were removed and transported by bus to Hartheim. Some were in no mental state to know what was happening to them but many were perfectly sane and for them various forms of deception were used. They were told they were at a special clinic where they would receive improved treatment and were given

16350-502: The orders of local officials, although Himmler certainly knew and approved of them. The legal basis for the programme was a 1939 letter from Hitler, not a formal "Führer's decree" with the force of law. Hitler bypassed Conti, the Health Minister and his department, who might have raised questions about the legality of the programme and entrusted it to Bouhler and Brandt. Reich Leader Bouhler and Dr. Brandt are entrusted with

16500-521: The parents could be threatened with call-up for 'labour duty'. By 1941, more than 5,000 children had been killed. The last child to be killed under Aktion T4 was Richard Jenne on 29 May 1945, in the children's ward of the Kaufbeuren - Irsee state hospital in Bavaria , Germany, more than three weeks after US Army troops had occupied the town. Brandt and Bouhler developed plans to expand

16650-647: The partitioning powers. With regard to population, in the First Partition, Poland lost over four to five million citizens (about a third of its population of 14 million before the partitions). Only about 4 million people remained in Poland after the Second Partition which makes for a loss of another third of its original population, about a half of the remaining population. By the Third Partition, Prussia ended up with about 23% of

16800-428: The partitioning state. 19th-century historians from countries that carried out the partitions, such as 19th-century Russian scholar Sergey Solovyov , and their 20th century followers, argued that partitions were justified, as the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth had degenerated to the point of being partitioned because the counterproductive principle of liberum veto made decision-making on divisive issues, such as

16950-472: The partitions as already in a state of disorder and not a completely sovereign state, and almost as a vassal state , with Polish kings effectively chosen in diplomatic maneuvers between the great powers Prussia, Austria, Russia, and France. This applies particularly to the last Commonwealth King Stanisław August Poniatowski , who for some time had been a lover of Russian Empress Catherine the Great . In 1730,

17100-477: The private collection of Heinrich Gross , one of the institution's directors, until 2001. When the Second World War began in September 1939, less rigorous standards of assessment and a quicker approval process were adopted. Older children and adolescents were included and the conditions covered came to include ... various borderline or limited impairments in children of different ages, culminating in

17250-500: The process of the region's complete " Germanization ". In the first year of World War II, some 630,000 Poles and Jews were forcibly removed from Wartheland and transported to the occupied General Government (more than 70,000 from Poznań alone) in a series of operations called the Kleine Planung covering most Polish territories annexed by Germany at about the same time. Both Poles and Jews had their property confiscated. By

17400-451: The programme of euthanasia to adults. In July 1939 they held a meeting attended by Conti and Professor Werner Heyde , head of the SS medical department. This meeting agreed to arrange a national register of all institutionalised people with mental illnesses or physical disabilities. The first adults with disabilities to be killed en masse by the Nazi regime were Poles. After the invasion on 1 September 1939, adults with disabilities were shot by

17550-447: The prospect of either having to imprison prominent, highly admired clergymen and other protesters – a course with consequences in terms of adverse public reaction they greatly feared – or else end the programme". Evans considered it "at least possible, even indeed probable" that the T4 programme would have continued beyond Hitler's initial quota of 70,000 deaths but for the public reaction to Galen's sermon. Burleigh called assumptions that

17700-681: The radical Jacobinism then at high tide in France, Russian forces invaded the Commonwealth in 1792. In the War in Defense of the Constitution , pro-Russian conservative Polish magnates , the Confederation of Targowica , fought against Polish forces supporting the constitution, believing that Russians would help them restore the Golden Liberty . Abandoned by their Prussian allies, Polish pro-constitution forces, faced with Targowica units and

17850-464: The region ahead of the advancing Eastern Front . In January 1945, before and during their retreat, the Germans committed several further massacres of Polish civilians, prisoners and Polish and other Allied POWs, including at Ostrzeszów , Pleszew , Marchwacz , Żabikowo and Łomnica and perpetrated several death marches . By 1945 nearly half a million Germanic Volksdeutsche had been resettled in

18000-588: The region of Greater Poland , which, in addition to German profits of 500 million marks , was aimed at the children's biological destruction. In Łódź, the occupiers operated a racial research camp for expelled Poles, and a concentration camp for kidnapped Polish children of two to 16 years of age from various parts of occupied Poland. In the racial research camp, Poles were subjected to racial selection before deportation to forced labour in Germany, and Polish children were taken from their parents and sent to Germanisation camps. The camp for kidnapped children served as

18150-502: The regular Russian army, were defeated. Prussia signed a treaty with Russia, agreeing that Polish reforms would be revoked, and both countries would receive chunks of Commonwealth territory. In 1793, deputies to the Grodno Sejm , last Sejm of the Commonwealth, in the presence of the Russian forces, agreed to Russian territorial demands. In the Second Partition, Russia and Prussia helped themselves to enough land so that only one-third of

18300-597: The remaining territories of the Commonwealth between their three countries. One of Russia's chief foreign policy authors, Alexander Bezborodko , advised Catherine II on the Second and Third Partitions of Poland. The Russian part included 120,000 km (46,332 sq mi) and 1.2 million people with Vilnius , the Prussian part (new provinces of New East Prussia and New Silesia ) 55,000 km (21,236 sq mi) and 1 million people with Warsaw, and

18450-456: The responsibility of extending the authority of physicians, to be designated by name, so that patients who, after a most critical diagnosis, on the basis of human judgment [ menschlichem Ermessen ], are considered incurable, can be granted mercy death [ Gnadentod ]. The killings were administered by Viktor Brack and his staff from Tiergartenstraße 4, disguised as the "Charitable Foundation for Cure and Institutional Care" offices which served as

18600-524: The restriction of killing to 'complete idiots', access to the sacraments and the exclusion of ill Roman Catholic priests from these policies. Despite a decree issued by the Vatican on 2 December 1940 stating that the T4 policy was "against natural and positive Divine law" and that "The direct killing of an innocent person because of mental or physical defects is not allowed", the Catholic Church hierarchy in Germany decided to take no further action. Incensed by

18750-669: The same town would receive death certificates on the same day. In May 1941, the Frankfurt County Court wrote to Gürtner describing scenes in Hadamar, where children shouted in the streets that people were being taken away in buses to be gassed. During 1940, rumours of what was taking place spread and many Germans withdrew their relatives from asylums and sanatoria to care for them at home, often with great expense and difficulty. In some places doctors and psychiatrists co-operated with families to have patients discharged or if

18900-406: The spring of 1940. The SS and police from SS-Sonderkommando Lange responsible for murdering the majority of patients in the annexed territories of Poland since October 1939, took their salaries from the normal police fund, supervised by the administration of the newly formed Wartheland district; the programme in Germany and occupied Poland was overseen by Heinrich Himmler. Before 2013, it

19050-548: The term Great Emigration ), became the revolutionaries of the 19th century, as desire for freedom became one of the defining parts of Polish romanticism . Polish revolutionaries participated in uprisings in Prussia , the Austrian Empire and Imperial Russia . Polish legions fought alongside Napoleon and, under the slogan of For our freedom and yours , participated widely in the Spring of Nations (particularly

19200-423: The two meanings. The consecutive acts of dividing and annexation of Poland are referred to as rozbiór (plural: rozbiory ), while the term zabór (plural: zabory ) refers to parts of the Commonwealth that were annexed in 1772–1795 and which became part of Imperial Russia, Prussia, or Austria. Following the Congress of Vienna in 1815, the borders of the three partitioned sectors were redrawn;

19350-636: The unsuccessful Polish Kościuszko Uprising the previous year. With this partition, the Commonwealth ceased to exist . In English, the term "Partitions of Poland" is sometimes used geographically as toponymy , to mean the three parts that the partitioning powers divided the Commonwealth into, namely: the Austrian Partition , the Prussian Partition and the Russian Partition . In Polish, there are two separate words for

19500-467: The use of lethal gas on large numbers of people, was taken over by the medical division of the Reich Interior Ministry, along with the personnel of Aktion T4 , who participated in mass murder of Jewish people . The programme was authorised by Hitler but the killings have since come to be viewed as murders in Germany. The number of people killed was about 200,000 in Germany and Austria, with about 100,000 victims in other European countries. Following

19650-449: The victims were cremated en masse ). The preparation of thousands of falsified death certificates took up most of the working day of the doctors who operated the centres. During 1940, the centres at Brandenburg, Grafeneck and Hartheim killed nearly 10,000 people each, while another 6,000 were killed at Sonnenstein. In all, about 35,000 people were killed in T4 operations that year. Operations at Brandenburg and Grafeneck were wound up at

19800-401: The war, a number of the perpetrators were tried and convicted for murder and crimes against humanity. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the sterilisation of people carrying what were considered to be hereditary defects and in some cases those exhibiting what was thought to be hereditary "antisocial" behaviour, was a respectable field of medicine. Canada , Denmark , Switzerland and

19950-445: Was advocated by Eugen Bleuler , who presumed racial deterioration because of "mental and physical cripples" in his Textbook of Psychiatry , The more severely burdened should not propagate themselves... If we do nothing but make mental and physical cripples capable of propagating themselves, and the healthy stocks have to limit the number of their children because so much has to be done for the maintenance of others, if natural selection

20100-649: Was also legalised for chronic alcoholism and other forms of social deviance. The law was administered by the Interior Ministry under Wilhelm Frick through special Hereditary Health Courts ( Erbgesundheitsgerichte ), which examined the inmates of nursing homes, asylums, prisons, aged-care homes and special schools, to select those to be sterilised. It is estimated that 360,000 people were sterilised under this law between 1933 and 1939. The policy and research agenda of racial hygiene and eugenics were promoted by Emil Kraepelin . The eugenic sterilisation of persons diagnosed with (and viewed as predisposed to) schizophrenia

20250-492: Was also used in the 19th and 20th centuries to refer to diaspora communities who maintained a close interest in the project of regaining Polish independence. Sometimes termed Polonia , these expatriate communities often contributed funding and military support to the project of regaining the Polish nation-state. Diaspora politics were deeply affected by developments in and around the homeland, and vice versa, for many decades. More recent studies claim that partitions happened when

20400-683: Was always dubious about the legality of the programme. Gürtner later wrote a strongly worded letter to Hitler protesting against it; Hitler did not read it but was told about it by Lammers. Bishop Theophil Wurm , presiding over the Evangelical-Lutheran Church in Württemberg , wrote to Interior Minister Frick in March 1940 and that month a confidential report from the Sicherheitsdienst (SD) in Austria, warned that

20550-633: Was believed that 70,000 persons were murdered in the euthanasia programme, but the German Federal Archives reported that research in the archives of former East Germany indicated that the number of victims in Germany and Austria from 1939 to 1945 was about 200,000 persons and that another 100,000 persons were victims in other European countries. In the German T4 centres there was at least the semblance of legality in keeping records and writing letters. In Polish psychiatric hospitals no one

20700-634: Was decided on August 5, 1772, after the Bar Confederation lost the war with Russia. The Second Partition occurred in the aftermath of the Polish–Russian War of 1792 and the Targowica Confederation when Russian and Prussian troops entered the Commonwealth and the partition treaty was signed during the Grodno Sejm on January 23, 1793 (without Austria). The Third Partition took place on October 24, 1795, in reaction to

20850-484: Was deemed to be "useful", exempted from the law and the rate of sterilisation declined. The term Aktion T4 is a post-war coining; contemporary German terms included Euthanasie ( euthanasia ) and Gnadentod (merciful death). The T4 programme stemmed from the Nazi Party policy of "racial hygiene", a belief that the German people needed to be cleansed of racial enemies, which included anyone confined to

21000-590: Was dropped by the Royal Air Force over German troops. In 2009, Richard J. Evans wrote that "This was the strongest, most explicit and most widespread protest movement against any policy since the beginning of the Third Reich". Local Nazis asked for Galen to be arrested but Goebbels told Hitler that such action would provoke a revolt in Westphalia and Hitler decided to wait until after the war to take revenge. In 1986, Lifton wrote, "Nazi leaders faced

21150-452: Was established in Poznań. Activities included secret Polish schooling , secret Catholic services, printing and distribution of Polish underground press , sabotage actions, espionage of German activity, military trainings, production of false documents, preparations for a planned uprising, and even secret football games. The Polish resistance provided aid to people in need, including prisoners, escapees from camps and ghettos and deserters from

21300-432: Was forthcoming and the armies of the combined nations occupied Warsaw to compel by force of arms the calling of the assembly, the only alternative was passive submission to their will. The so-called Partition Sejm , with Russian military forces threatening the opposition, on September 18, 1773, signed the treaty of cession, renouncing all claims of the Commonwealth to the occupied territories. In 1772, Jean-Jacques Rousseau

21450-526: Was invited to present recommendations for a new constitution for the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth , resulting in the Considerations on the Government of Poland (1782), which was to be his last major political work. By 1790, the Commonwealth had been weakened to such a degree that it was forced into an unnatural and terminal alliance with its enemy, Prussia. The Polish–Prussian Pact of 1790

21600-408: Was left behind. Killings were inflicted using gas-vans, sealed army bunkers and machine guns; families were not informed about the murdered relatives and the empty wards were handed over to the SS. After the official end of the euthanasia programme in 1941, most of the personnel and high-ranking officials, as well as gassing technology and the techniques used to deceive victims, were transferred under

21750-499: Was more merciful than poison injections. The German eugenics movement had an extreme wing even before the Nazis came to power. As early as 1920, Alfred Hoche and Karl Binding advocated killing people whose lives were "unworthy of life" ( lebensunwertes Leben ). Darwinism was interpreted by them as justification of the demand for "beneficial" genes and eradication of the "harmful" ones. Robert Lifton wrote, "The argument went that

21900-444: Was not possible for them to visit relatives in these centres. Most of these patients were killed within 24 hours of arriving at the centres and their bodies cremated. Some bodies were dissected for medical research whilst others had their gold teeth extracted. For every person killed, a death certificate was prepared, giving a false but plausible cause of death. This was sent to the family along with an urn of ashes (random ashes, since

22050-480: Was originally recorded as 70,273 but this number has been increased by the discovery of victims listed in the archives of the former East Germany . About half of those killed were taken from church-run asylums, often with the approval of the Protestant or Catholic authorities of the institutions. The Holy See announced on 2 December 1940 that the policy was contrary to divine law and that "the direct killing of an innocent person because of mental or physical defects

22200-527: Was put down by Russian and governmental Polish troops. This uprising led to the intervention of the Ottoman Empire, supported by Roman Catholic France and Austria. Bar confederation and France promised Podolia and Volhynia and the protectorate over the Commonwealth to the Ottoman Empire for armed support. In 1769, the Habsburg monarchy annexed a small territory of Spisz and in 1770 it annexed Nowy Sącz and Nowy Targ . These territories had been

22350-562: Was signed. The conditions of the Pact contributed to the subsequent final two partitions of Poland–Lithuania. The May Constitution of 1791 enfranchised the bourgeoisie, established the separation of the three branches of government, and eliminated the abuses of the Repnin Sejm . Those reforms prompted aggressive actions on the part of its neighbours, wary of the potential renaissance of the Commonwealth. Arguing that Poland had fallen prey to

22500-506: Was subjected to various crimes , including the Intelligenzaktion genocidal campaign. On 20–23 October 1939 alone, the German police and Einsatzgruppe VI carried out mass public executions of some 300 Poles in various towns in the region, i.e. Gostyń , Kostrzyn , Kościan , Kórnik , Krobia , Książ Wielkopolski , Leszno , Mosina , Osieczna , Poniec , Śmigiel , Śrem , Środa and Włoszakowice , to terrorize and pacify

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