Here you will find descriptions of a range of terms, events, themes and institutions featured on the website.
Operation 14f13
Under the cover name »Aktion 14f13«, the National Socialists extended the mass crime of »euthanasia« murders to another group. From spring 1941, they killed up to 20,000 concentration camp prisoners who they deemed »no longer fit for work« in the Bernburg, Sonnenstein and Hartheim facilities. Medical commissions select the inmates. The cover name results from the SS unit file plan: 14 for the IKL, f for death and 13 for gassing in a killing center.
The SS (»Schutzstaffel«) under the leadership of Heinrich Himmler was envisioned as an elite paramilitary organisation of the National Socialist state. With Himmler’s takeover and reorganisation of the police, the SS became the regime’s central instrument of terror. In 1934, it was given control over all concentration camps. The Reich Security Main Office (RSHA), formed in 1939 as the planning centre for crimes in German-occupied Europe, was subordinated to it.
Inspection of the concentration camps
| In 1934, Reichsführer SS Heinrich Himmler appointed the former commandant of Dachau concentration camp, Theodor Eicke, as inspector of the concentration camps. A few months later, the authority of the same name was formed (IKL). This institution was responsible for overseeing the management and guarding of 32 main camps and became the central authority of concentration camp terror: in regular meetings, the IKL coordinated the daily operations of the camps, including the crimes committed against prisoners. |
Operation T4
»Operation T4« was the code name for the Nazis’ programme to murder people with mental or physical disabilities. The abbreviation stands for the address Tiergartenstraße 4 in Berlin, where the »T4 headquarters« coordinated the crimes. In 1940–1941 more than 70,000 patients were killed with poison gas in six killing centres. Following public protests, »Operation T4« was officially terminated in summer 1941, doctors continued the programme of murder in the form of »decentralised euthanasia«. A proportion of the programme’s staff were transferred to occupied Poland, where they implemented the mass murder of the Jewish population in 1942–1943.