By Susan Brinkmann, OCDS
Staff Journalist
A mass grave has been discovered outside a psychiatric hospital in western Austria which is believed to contain the remains of 220 victims of the Nazi euthanasia program.
AOL News is reporting that the grave was discovered by construction workers who were digging the foundation for an extension to the Hall Hospital, in Tyrol province. All construction at the site has ceased until investigators can begin exhuming the remains when the ground thaws in the spring.
Even though tests still need to be done to verify the exact cause of death, the corpses are believed to be those of mentally and physically handicapped individuals whom the Nazi’s deemed “unworthy of life.” In a program known as Action T-4, which was headed by Hitler’s personal physician, Dr. Karl Brandt, the Nazi’s routinely gathered handicapped infants and children, the elderly and the mentally ill, and “compassionately” euthanized them at hospitals and psychiatric institutions, usually with injections of potassium chloride. More than 200,000 people are believed to have been killed by the Nazis under this program.
Approximately 100 people are known to have been killed under the Action T-4 program at Hall Hospital, but the number of bodies discovered in the grave is “exorbitantly large,” according to Horst Schreiber, a history professor at the University of Innsbruk. Schreiber told an Austrian television network that the additional bodies may verify a long-existing suspicion that the Nazi’s locked hundreds more patients in the facility and left them to starve to death.
Guenther Platter, governor of Tyrol province, told the BBC that he was “deeply shaken” by the discovery of the grave in his backyard.
“This dark chapter of history must now be carefully brought to light,” he said.
Historians and archaeologists are being brought in to supervise the excavations at the Hall grave site.
“The dead shall be identified, the cause of their deaths shall be established and the graveyard shall be salvaged in a scientifically correct way,” Tilak spokesman Johannes Schwamberger told DPA.
This is not the first time a mass grave of euthanasia victims has been discovered. A grave containing the remains of 22 children and 29 adults was uncovered in 2006 in the cemetery of a Catholic church in the village of Menden-Barge in Germany.
According to a report by the BBC, some of the children’s bodies showed signs of physical handicaps and had been thrown haphazardly into the grave without coffins.
© All Rights Reserved, Living His Life Abundantly®/Women of Grace® http://www.womenofgrace.com
