Reich Cooperative for State Hospitals and Nursing Homes and the
Charitable Foundation for Institutional Care. Teams of psychiatrists
serving as consultants selected the victims on the basis of these
questionnaires. The disabled patients were never even seen, much less
examined, by the psychiatrists deciding their fate. At first, victims
were selected only from state and private mental hospitals, but soon
the search for victims was widened to include psychiatric clinics,
nursing homes, old age homes, as well as specialized homes as, for
example, Zieglers Institution for Deafmutes in Wilhelmsdorf, Württemberg,
a residential school.The task of secretly killing large numbers of human beings and disposing of their bodies posed additional problems. The method used to kill the children—medications in regular hospitals—was deemed too slow to accomplish the job. T4 decided to use gas as the killing method , and created for this purpose the "killing center," an invention that Nazi Germany has bequeathed to the world. T4 established six killing centers—Brandenburg, Grafeneck, Hartheim, Bernburg, Sonnenstein, and Hadamar—equipped with gas chambers and crematoria. There the T4 operatives killed their victims in assembly-line fashion in the gas chamber and burned their bodies in the crematorium. And prior to cremation, they looted the corpses, taking from the corpses gold teeth for the enrichment of the German state and body organs for the research of German scientists. Later they exported their invention to the East, where killing centers like Treblinka and Auschwitz applied the same method to kill Jews and Gypsies.
On August 24, 1941, Hitler ordered an end to the gassing of the disabled. In the preceding twenty months, about eighty thousand disabled human beings had been murdered. A change of heart did not cause Hitler to issue this order. Instead, he was reacting to the growing popular opposition to the killings. The secrecy surrounding the murders had not lasted, and the outrage of relatives of victims had become too public. Catholic and Protestant church leaders, who for more than a year had privately petitioned the government without success, finally spoke out in public. The regime could not afford such public disquiet in the middle of the war.
Hitler's order, which applied only to the killing centers, did not end the murders. The T4 centers were thereafter used to kill concentration camp prisoners, and underemployed T4 operatives were posted to Poland to operate killing centers for Jews and Gypsies. The killing of the disabled continued unabated in Poland and the occupied Soviet Union where public opinion did not matter. Even inside Germany, where the murder of disabled children had not been stopped, the murder of disabled adults soon resumed. But henceforth they were killed in selected state hospitals through starvation, overdoses of medication, or deadly injections. As these killings occurred in regular hospitals and were spread over a longer period of time, public knowledge was limited and popular opposition was muted. The T4 operatives used the term "wild" euthanasia to describe these decentralized killings; the number of victims was just as large as before.
As the war continued, the decentralized killings became even more arbitrary and the killing hospitals came to resemble concentration camps. In the Pomeranian state hospital Meseritz-Obrawalde, one of the leading killing institutions of "wild" euthanasia, the staff not only killed those unable to work, but in addition also patients "who increased the workload of the nurses, were deafmute, sick, or disobedient."