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The Sonnenstein Castle is a castle in Pirna, near Dresden, Germany. It housed a mental hospital, which operated from 1811 to the end of World War II in 1945. During the War, it functioned as an extermination centre for the Nazi Aktion T4 program. It was shut down following the war, and reopened in 1970.
Sonnenstein castle, located at Pirna near Dresden, above the river Elbe, was built after 1460 on the site of a former medieval castle. Sonnenstein castle was used as a mental home since 1811. Among other patients, Sonnenstein was the asylum in which Daniel Paul Schreber wrote his Denkwürdigkeiten eines Nervenkranken in 1900–2. Because of the advanced methods practiced there, it received worldwide acclaim and served as a model for other institutions. Sonnenstein Asylum was one of the first 'therapeutic asylums'; activity rooms included billiards and music rooms.
From early 1940 until the end of June 1942, a part of the castle was converted into a killing centre. A gas chamber and crematorium were installed in the cellar of the former men's sanitary (building C 16). A high brick-wall on two sides of the complex shielded it from outside while a high hoarding (billboard) was erected on the other sides. Four buildings were located inside the shielding. They were used for offices, living rooms for the personnel etc. Sleeping quarters for the men who burned the bodies were provided for in the attic of building C 16. It is possible that other sections of the buildings were also used by T4.
From end of June 1940 until September 1942, approximately 15,000 persons were killed in the scope of the programme and the Sonderbehandlung 14f13. The staff consisted of about 100 persons. One third of them were ordered to the extermination camps in occupied Poland, because of their experiences in deception, killing, gassing and disposing of prisoners.
During August / September 1942 the Sonnenstein killing centre was liquidated and incriminating installations such as gas chambers and crematorium ovens dismantled. From October 1942 the buildings were used as a military hospital.
In the summer of 1947 some Action T4 members appeared as accused in the Dresdner Ärzteprozess (Doctor's Trial in Dresden). Professor Paul Nitsche, medical chief of T4, and two male nurses from Sonnenstein were sentenced to death.
It took about 40 years to recognise the part Sonnenstein played in the T4 program, and in 1989 the public commemorated the history of the centre. On 9 June 2000 a memorial center for the T-4 Program was opened in the house. It is managed by the Stiftung Sächsische Gedenkstätten zur Erinnerung an die Opfer politischer Gewaltherrschaft (Foundation for Memorial Institutions in Saxony for the Victims of Tyranny).
Since 1970, the building has again housed disabled people. After the establishment of a rehabilitation center, a workshop for disabled people was opened in 1991.
Bilfinger Berger worked on the refurbishment of Sonnenstein Castle in a project completed in 2011. [1]
The small Saxon Psychiatric Museum in Leipzig, established in 2000, is also giving attention to the history of Sonnenstein castle.
Stiftung Sächsische Gedenkstätten zur Erinnerung an die Opfer politischer Gewaltherrschaft (ed.), Pirna-Sonnenstein : Von einer Heilanstalt zu einem Ort nationalsozialistischer Tötungsverbrechen (2001). ISBN 3-934382-02-9
Aktion T4 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, 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". In October 1939, Adolf Hitler signed a "euthanasia note", backdated to 1 September 1939, which authorised his physician Karl Brandt and Reichsleiter Philipp Bouhler to begin the killing.
Pirna is a town in Saxony, Germany and capital of the administrative district Sächsische Schweiz-Osterzgebirge. The town's population is over 37,000. Pirna is located near Dresden and is an important district town as well as a Große Kreisstadt.
Hermann Paul Nitsche was a German psychiatrist known for his expert endorsement of the Third Reich's euthanasia authorization and who later headed the Medical Office of the T-4 Euthanasia Program.
Elfriede Lohse-Wächtler was a German painter of the avant-garde whose works were banned as "degenerate art", and in some cases destroyed, in Nazi Germany. She became mentally ill and was murdered in a former psychiatric institution at Sonnenstein castle in Pirna under Action T4, a forced euthanasia program of Nazi Germany. Since 2000, a memorial center for the T4 program in the house commemorates her life and work in a permanent exhibition.
Eva Schulze-Knabe was a German painter and graphic artist, as well as a resistance fighter against the Third Reich.
The Hadamar killing centre was a killing facility involved in the Nazi involuntary euthanasia programme known as Aktion T4. It was housed within a psychiatric hospital located in the German town of Hadamar, near Limburg in Hessen.
The Grafeneck Euthanasia Centre housed in Grafeneck Castle was one of Nazi Germany's killing centres as part of their forced euthanasia programme. Today, it is a memorial site dedicated to the victims of the state-authorised programme also referred to since as Action T4. At least 10,500 mentally and physically disabled people, predominantly from Bavaria and Baden-Württemberg, were systematically killed during 1940. It was one of the first places in Nazi Germany where people were killed in large numbers in a gas chamber using carbon monoxide. This was the beginning of the Euthanasia Programme. Grafeneck was also the central office of the "Charitable Ambulance Transport GmbH" (Gekrat), which was headed by Reinhold Vorberg and responsible for the transport of T4.
Lorenz Hackenholt was a member of the Schutzstaffel (SS) with the rank of Hauptscharführer. During World War II Hackenholt built and operated the gas chamber at the Bełżec extermination camp in occupied Poland during Operation Reinhard. In so doing, he personally carried out the murder of hundreds of thousands of people.
Erwin Hermann Lambert was a German perpetrator of the Holocaust. In profession, he was a master mason, building trades foreman, Nazi Party member and member of the Schutzstaffel with the rank of SS-Unterscharführer (corporal). He supervised construction of the gas chambers for the Action T4 euthanasia program at Hartheim, Sonnenstein, Bernburg and Hadamar, and then at Sobibór and Treblinka extermination camps during Operation Reinhard. He specialized in building larger gas chambers that killed more people than previous efforts in the extermination program.
Action 14f13, also called Sonderbehandlung14f13 and Aktion 14f13, was a campaign by Nazi Germany to murder Nazi concentration camp prisoners. As part of the campaign, also called invalid or prisoner euthanasia, the sick, the elderly and those prisoners who were no longer deemed fit for work were separated from the rest of the prisoners during a selection process, after which they were murdered. The Nazi campaign was in operation from 1941 to 1944 and later covered other groups of concentration camp prisoners.
The Sonnenstein Euthanasia Clinic was a Nazi killing centre located in the former fortress of Sonnenstein Castle near Pirna in eastern Germany, where a hospital had been established in 1811.
The Hartheim killing centre was a killing facility involved in the Nazi programme known as Aktion T4, in which German citizens deemed mentally or physically unfit were systematically murdered with poison gas. Often, these patients were transferred from other killing facilities such as the Am Spiegelgrund clinic in Vienna. This was initially a programme of "involuntary euthanasia" permitted under the law ostensibly to enable the lawful and painless killing of incurably ill patients; these murders continued even after the law was rescinded in 1942. Other victims included Jews, Communists and those considered undesirable by the state. Concentration camp inmates who were unfit for work, or otherwise deemed troublesome, were also executed here. The facility was housed in Hartheim Castle in the municipality of Alkoven, near Linz, Austria, which now is a memorial site and documentation centre.
Heinrich Arthur Matthes was a German SS commander during the Nazi era. He served as a deputy commandant of Treblinka extermination camp during the Operation Reinhard phase of the Holocaust in Poland. Matthes was appointed chief of the extermination area at Camp 2 where the gas chambers were built and managed by the SS personnel overseeing some 300 slave labourers disposing of corpses under penalty of death. He was tried in the 1964 Treblinka trials, convicted, and sentenced to life imprisonment.
Albert Widmann was an SS officer and German chemist who worked for the Action T4 euthanasia program during the regime of Nazi Germany. He was convicted in two separate trials in the West German courts in the 1960s for his criminal activities during World War II.
Stiftung Sächsische Gedenkstätten zur Erinnerung an die Opfer politischer Gewaltherrschaft is a public foundation founded by the Free State of Saxony, which owns and supports memorials to the victims of Communism and National Socialism. The foundation is a founding member institution of the Platform of European Memory and Conscience.
SS-UnterscharführerGustav Münzberger, born in Weißkirchlitz (Sudetenland), was a carpenter and factory worker before his involvement in the Holocaust. Following the Nazi German invasion of Poland at the onset of World War II he was posted as a serviceman in August 1940 at the Sonnenstein Euthanasia Centre at Schloss Sonnenstein in Pirna. He arrived at the Treblinka extermination camp in late September 1942 and became assistant to deputy commandant SS-Oberscharführer Heinrich Matthes, in charge of leading Jews into the gas chambers and gassing them.
The Euthanasia trials were legal proceedings against the main perpetrators and accomplices involved in the "euthanasia" murders of the Nazi era in Germany.
Dasein ohne Leben – Psychiatrie und Menschlichkeit is a 1942 Nazi propaganda film about the physically and mentally disabled. The film labeled inherited mental illness as a threat to public health and society, and called for extermination of those affected.
Bautzen II was a 20th-century political prison in the town of Bautzen in Saxony operational during the communist regime in East Germany. It was the only East German prison directly under the control of the Stasi.
The Provincial Mental Sanatorium Kortau was a psychiatric hospital in Kortau, East Prussia. Founded in 1886, it was located about 2 km south of the town center of Allenstein (Olsztyn), at the Kortsee. The hospital housed up to 1,400 patients from all over East Prussia. During World War II, many of Kortau's patients were sent to Germany and executed as part of Nazi Germany's euthanasia programme. Most of the remaining patients and staff were killed by the Red Army in January 1945.
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