The Castle

On the occasion of the celebrations for April 25, 2026, the Permanent Project on the Resistance and the Holocaust of Lenz Fondazione will include a site-specific installation inside the Parma City Council Chamber entitled Il Castello, a visual and sound installation on the euthanasia program for disabled people, already poetically explored by Lenz in the 2017 show Aktion T4.

This is a contemporary artistic reworking on the themes of discrimination, social stigma, and institutionalized violence among people born with physical and mental disabilities during Nazism. The installation of images and fairy-tale words of disabled children activates participants' consciousness through a playful and childlike experience that transforms into a tragic one.

The installation takes its inspiration from Hartheim Castle, home to the Hartheim extermination centre (German: NS-Tötungsanstalt Hartheim).

It was an extermination facility involved in the Nazi program known as Aktion T4, in which German citizens deemed mentally or physically unfit were systematically killed with poison gas.

Aktion T4 was a Nazi program initiated in 1939 and coordinated by Tiergartenstrasse 4 headquarters in Berlin. In the name of “purity of race”, the regime organized the secret elimination of people with mental or physical disabilities, considered “unworthy of life”. Through an efficient bureaucratic system –from patient selection in hospitals to transfer to extermination centers – thousands of people were killed in gas chambers and cremated.

Although propaganda tried to justify these actions as acts of “mercy”, the population and the Churches began to oppose them, leading to the official suspension of the program in 1941.

HARTHEIM CASTLE

Hartheim Castle, home to the Hartheim extermination center (German: NS- Tötungsanstalt Hartheim), was an extermination facility involved in the Nazi program known as Aktion T4, in which German citizens deemed mentally or physically unfit were systematically killed with poison gas. This was initially a legally permitted involuntary euthanasia program, ostensibly to allow the legal and painless killing of incurable patients; these murders continued even after the law was repealed in 1942 and extended to Jews, communists, and others deemed undesirable by the state. Concentration camp inmates who were unfit for work or otherwise deemed problematic were also executed at the center. The extermination center was housed in Hartheim Castle in the municipality of Alkoven, near Linz, Austria.

In June 1945, during investigations conducted by the United States at the former Hartheim gasification plant, the American in charge of the investigation Charles Dameron opened a steel safe in which Hartheim's usage statistics were found: a 39-page booklet produced for internal purposes of the Nazi euthanasia programme (Aktion T4) containing monthly statistics on gassings of physically and mentally handicapped patients, referred to by the term "disinfection" in the document, carried out in the six euthanasia centres set up on Reich territory.

In 1968 and 1970 a former employee of the plant revealed that he had compiled the material in late 1942. Among the pages of the pamphlet, one indicates the bill that "the disinfection of 70,273 people with a life expectancy of 10 years" had saved in terms of food and other resources worth 141,775,573.80 Reichsmarks. According to statistics, a total of 18,269 people were killed in the Hartheim gas chamber during the 16-month period between May 1940 and September 1, 1941. These statistics cover only the first phase of the Nazi euthanasia program Aktion T4, a program that ended with Hitler's order of August 24, 1941 after protests from the Roman Catholic Church. In all, it is estimated that a total of 30,000 people, including sick people, disabled people, and concentration camp prisoners, were executed in Hartheim by carbon monoxide poisoning.