Grafeneck Euthanasia Centre

Grafeneck Castle stands in the hills above Gomadingen, a quiet village in Baden-Württemberg. Built in the 16th century as a hunting lodge for the Dukes of Württemberg, it later became a large Rococo palace before falling into disuse. In the 19th century the Forest Service took it over, and in 1928 the Samaritan Foundation opened an asylum for disabled people. In October 1939 the site was cleared in a single day to make way for the killing centre. The memorial records that at least 10,500 disabled men, women and children were murdered here in 1940 as part of Action T4. Grafeneck was one of the first places in Nazi Germany where carbon monoxide gas was used on such a scale. Transport was organised by the Charitable Ambulance Transport company under Reinhold Vorberg, which brought victims from forty-eight institutions across southern Germany. Doctors and police staff were recruited from Stuttgart and Berlin to run the operation. Visitors now find a documentation centre built in 2005 and a cemetery laid out in the 1950s. The castle houses offices and exhibition rooms, while the grounds include the site of the former gas chamber disguised as a shower room. A crematorium oven and a wooden hut with a hundred beds once stood nearby. The memorial preserves the records forged to hide the killings and the names of those who carried them out.