BERLIN — Germany inaugurated a memorial Tuesday to more than 200,000 people with physical and mental disabilities who were deemed “worthless” by the Nazis and killed.
The transparent 79-foot blue glass wall outside the Berlin Philharmonic concert hall is near memorials to the Jewish Holocaust victims and the Nazis’ homosexual and Gypsy victims, which opened over the past decade.
It stands on the site of a villa where the murder of patients at hospitals and mental institutes was coordinated. More than 70,000 people were gassed at centers for what the Nazis described as their euthanasia operation, coded “T4” in reference to the building’s address, Tiergartenstrasse 4, in 1940 and 1941.
Tens of thousands more were killed using methods such as injections and starvation, and mental patients were targeted by SS units in countries invaded by Nazi Germany. In all, estimates of the number of mentally and physically disabled people killed under various Nazi euthanasia programs range from around 200,000 to 300,000.
Few of the administrators and doctors involved were brought to justice after World War II.
Culture Minister Monika Gruetters said it had taken too long for Germany to publicly commemorate the long-ignored victims.