ACTION T4

Il Programma Aktion T4: Tiergartenstrasse is the road of the Berlin Zoological Garden. The number 4 He was inhabited by Karl Brant, medico, e Viktor Brack, His assistant, who had been in charge of building an organization capable of eliminate all the patients of the mind, All bearers of incurable diseases and all children born with hereditary malformations and tare. Adolf Hitler, He had the order issued on 1 September of the 1939. The goal was to make the Aryan breed increasingly pure and to prevent contamination derived from among other things from serious mental diseases.

Tiergartenstrasse 4 became the headquarters of the operation T4. The operation in summary consisted of only three simple phases: Send a form to psychiatric hospitals and ask who the sick were with less work skills, proceed with the transfer of the sick to intermediate sorting centers and therefore Send them to the elimination centers where in a short time the sick were brought to the gas chambers and therefore cremated. Everything had to happen in the utmost secrecy.

As always in that regime The propaganda machine immediately set up in motion. All the means of communication of the time were activated: films and theatrical performances were made whose canvas was always the same: a family discovered that she had a mind of the mind and after having suffered both – the family and the patient – many suffering was decided to entrust it to an entity that, By the work of charity, proceeded to eliminate. The machine t4 For the physical elimination of mind and disabled people, it was operational in January 1940, At the beginning with a few cases, Then slowly the numbers began to become more substantial: circa 1300 per month for the nursing home. I Cittadini Di Hadamar, locations where an elimination center was located, They realized with certainty that the nauseating stink that invaded the city was the result of the cremation of the sick and therefore it happened that the families refused to deliver the sick relatives and in the end even the two Catholic and Protestant churches began to make their voices heard. The gestapo did a search and discovered that in the population the aversion to the T4 program was very high, So the program was suspended.

ACTION T4
Original text and imagery | Francesco Pititto
Installazione e regia | Maria Federica Masters
Musica | Andrew Azzali
Performer | Alessia Dell'Imperio, James Rastelli, Thomas Sementa, Carlotta Spaggiari, Barbara Voghera
you over | Marco Musso

Production | Lenz Foundation
In collaboration with | ISREC