On a beautiful summer day in 1941, as thick, acrid smoke bellowed from the hospital’s giant chimneys
and blanketed the surrounding town, the staff at the secretive hospital were having a party.
Doctors and nurses were parading around the grounds, drinking beer and wine
and toasting to their success. They were celebrating the death of their 10,000th
“undesirable” patient, whose body was being cremated in the hospital’s furnace as they partied
beneath the giant chimney. The hospital would come to be known as the Nazi’s incredibly evil House
of Shutters, and the techniques being celebrated there that day would go on to form the blueprints
for the horrific atrocities that would take place in the Nazi’s notorious death camps.
The Nazis’ hatred of the Jews was no secret, and their deplorable treatment of the Jewish
people has been well documented. But in their quest for German superiority and racial purity,
the Nazis’ cruelty knew no limits, and not even their own people were safe. In order to stop
the so-called “denegration” of the German race, in 1939 the Nazis developed the T4 Euthanasia program
to rid the country of “undesirables”. It started with the forced sterilization of children that
the Nazi regime deemed unfit to reproduce, but it quickly expanded into a program of extermination.
In the end, more than 200,000 adults and children would be killed under this program.
Half-Jewish children, people with mental or physical disabilities, even shell-shocked soldiers
and SS men - all of them would meet their horrific ends at the hands of the doctors and nurses
employed at 1 of 6 euthanasia institutions around the country. The Hadamar Euthanasia Center, known
as The House of Shutters, was quite possibly the worst and most horrific of these terrifying sites.
Established in 1883 as a halfway house for released prisoners, Hadamar was converted
into a mental asylum in 1906, and by 1930 it was home to 320 mentally ill patients. When the
Nazis decreed that funding for the care of the mentally ill would be slashed in 1934, Hadamar,
along with countless other mental institutions, became overcrowded and conditions for patients
became abysmal. By 1939, 600 mentally ill people were crowded into a building designed to house no
more than 250. There were severe shortages of food and many patients were near starvation, there were
not nearly enough staff to care for the patients, and the facilities - and the patients themselves
- were filthy and decrepit. Soon enough, though, these would be the least of Hadamar’s problems.
The first sign that something was amiss at Hadamar was the buses.
Townspeople noticed a steady stream of grey postal buses arriving at Hadamar every day.
The buses, which the locals called the “killing crates”, were filled with people when they
arrived. The buses would disappear behind the towering gates of the hospital grounds,
before reemerging hours later completely empty. Day after day, bus after bus drove through the
imposing gates to deliver their human cargo to the horrors within. Then came the smoke. The Nazis had
quietly made some renovations to the hospital. The townspeople couldn’t see the gas chamber and
crematorium that had been added to the hospital’s basement, but they could see - and smell - the new
chimneys that towered over the hospital and blanketed the entire town in a putrid smog.
The townspeople knew better than to ask questions about what went on inside the hospital’s walls,
but that didn’t stop the rumors from flying. Soon, it would be common for local children to
taunt each other, saying “You’re not very clever - you will go to Hadamar and into the ovens!”
The townspeople may have had an idea about what was going on inside the House of Shutters,
but they could never have imagined just how brutal and horrific things really were inside its walls.
As the “killing crate” buses arrived at the loading dock, they would be met by
one of the hospital’s nurses. They would unload their human cargo - up to 100 people each day
who had been rounded up from nearby mental institutions and transported to
Hadamar - and the nurse would order them to strip naked and prepare for a medical exam.
This was no ordinary exam, though. The patients would inevitably be diagnosed with one
of the 60 so-called fatal diseases - everyone from the physically and mentally disabled,
to shell-shocked soldiers to half-Jewish children were deemed “undesirable” and slated for a “mercy
killing”. Once diagnosed, the patients would be sorted into groups and labelled with different
colored stickers - red for “kill”, orange for “kill and remove brain for research”,
and yellow for “kill and remove gold teeth”. Then, it was on to the gas chamber.
The gas chamber had been disguised as a shower room, with the noxious and deadly gas
piped in through the walls from an adjoining room. The patients would be crowded into the shower
room, the doors would be closed, and the air would be sucked out of the chamber by a ventilator.
Then, for about 10 minutes, deadly carbon monoxide gas would be piped into the room, and the doctors
would watch through the window as the patients suffered and died a slow, agonizing death.
After the war, one former staffer would paint a gruesome picture of
the horrific death these patients experienced. He testified at trial,
describing the scene he witnessed through a window that looked into the gas chamber: “I saw 40-45 men
who were pressed together in the next room and were now slowly dying. Some lay on the ground,
others had slumped down, many had their mouths open as if they could not get any more air.
The form of death was so painful that one cannot talk of a humane killing.”
After the cruel process was done and all of the patients were dead - a process which took
about an hour - fresh air was then pumped back into the room, forcing the gas out,
so that the hospital staff could enter and deal with the corpses. Those slated for research would
be moved to a special room, but the vast majority of the bodies went immediately to the ovens
where they were burned, and the ashes were dumped into mass graves behind the hospital.
In August of 1941, the hospital’s head doctor invited the entire staff to join him in the
hospital’s front hall for a bizarre and macabre celebration. In the hall,
the staff were each given beers before they were led down into the cellar. There, the staff saw the
naked body of a dead patient with hydrocephalus strapped to a stretcher. The head doctor proudly
told his staff that this man was the 10,000th patient to be gassed to death at Hadamar,
and after another doctor who was dressed as a priest gave a lewd fake funeral oration,
the body was ceremoniously cremated in front of the entire staff. Then, the party moved outside
to the grounds, where the staff continued to drink and toast, playing music and finally
participating in a drunken procession through the hospital grounds in celebration of their success.
But the jubilant mood wouldn’t last - a German bishop, horrified by the
rumors of what was happening at Hadamar and other institutions,
persuaded the German people to speak out against the euthanasia program,
and he succeeded in getting Hitler to put a stop to the mercy killings in 1941.
No one knows for sure why Hitler was willing to publicly denounce his euthanasia program, but in
hindsight it’s easy to imagine that his focus was elsewhere - he had already begun implementing the
techniques developed and perfected at Hadamar and other euthanasia centers on a much larger
scale in his Nazi death camps, where millions of European Jews would be brutally exterminated.
Sadly, this brief period of respite from euthanasia wouldn’t last. When the program quietly
restarted in 1942, things were even more horrific and brutal than ever. This period became known
as the “wild euthanasia”, when hospital staff killed indescriminately and without any pretense
of medical care. Patients were no longer given even a cursory medical exam before being sent to
the gas chamber. Instead, they were simply killed on arrival and later diagnosed with tuberculosis.
Along with gassing patients, the staff now invented new and more tortuous methods of
extermination. During this period of wild euthanasia, many thousands of patients were
murdered by lethal injection, tortured and experimented on, or simply starved to death.
In 1943, Hadamar once again upped the ante when it opened a ward for children.
The ward was camouflaged as an educational home for children from mixed Jewish families,
but in reality, this was simply a cover story that allowed them to indiscriminately kill
Jewish children. All of the children who arrived at Hadamar were healthy, but every one of them
would be executed by lethal injection under the guise of one made up disease or another.
Though the war officially ended on May 8th, 1945, the staff at Hadamar continued on with
their devious mission. They went on killing some patients, and letting others starve to death for
weeks after the war - the last known patient to die at the House of Shutters was a 4 year old
mentally handicapped boy who was killed on May 29th, a full 3 weeks after the war had ended.
The area around Hadamar fell under American control after the war ended. The Americans
had learned about the atrocities being committed at the House of Shutters as early as April 1945,
but they wouldn’t grasp the true magnitude of the horrors committed there until they saw it for
themselves. George Jaeger was part of a 4-man war crimes team that had been travelling the German
countryside looking for evidence of Nazi war crimes. They followed up on many leads, though
they were often given incorrect information, or arrived too late to bring anyone to justice.
So when, on a particularly beautiful Sunday afternoon, George was approached by a filthy,
rail-thin man, he was understandably skeptical of the man’s story. He claimed to have been a
French spy who had escaped death after he was captured by pretending to be insane,
which had landed him in Hadamar - a fate arguably worse than death. George and his team cautiously
followed the man through the towering gates and into the hospital, and even though they had been
warned about the horrors committed there, they were utterly unprepared for what they would find.
Years later, George would recount the lasting impression these horrors had on him, saying:
“My sharpest memory is of the distinctive acrid smell of death, of unwashed bodies and despair”.
In the hospital pharmacy, the soldiers found 10 kilograms of barbiturate drugs - far more
than any hospital could reasonably expect to need. They found the hospital crowded with
incredibly ill, filthy and starving patients. The uncovered and blew open 2 locked safes,
in which they found meticulously detailed records of all the patients who had been
killed in the House of Shutters - most of whom were reported to have died of Tuberculosis. And,
most damningly, they found the gas chamber and the ovens in the hospital basement. Outside,
they uncovered mass graves behind the buildings - after townspeople complained of the stench from
the burning of victims’ bodies, the staff had begun forcing mentally ill patients to dig deep,
shaft-like holes behind the hospital, where bodies of the victims of wild euthanasia
were unceremoniously piled on top of one another. When George arrived, his team found an open grave
full of the bodies of recently-killed patients that had yet to be covered.
George and his men successfully captured the entire staff without incident - shockingly,
they had mistakenly believed that their insane asylum cover story would protect them,
so rather than flee, they had stayed put and even continued killing after the Nazis fell.
In October of 1945, Hadamar went down in history yet again as the site of the very first war crimes
trial in the wake of World War 2. The trial, the first of many countless such trials to follow,
would see the prosecution of many doctors, nurses and other hospital staff on charges of murder.
Irmgard Huber, a matronly-looking head nurse who was directly responsible for
most of the deaths at Hadamar, along with many of the hospitals attending
physicians, were found guilty and sentenced to 25 years in prison,
despite trying to defend themselves by saying that they were simply following orders.
Throughout the trial, the full scale of the atrocities committed at the House of Shutters
was revealed. More than 15,000 German citizens, in addition to countless others from Poland and other
occupied territories, met their horrible end at the House of Shutters. 10,000 victims were gassed,
while at least 5,000 more were murdered by lethal injection at the Hadamar site alone.
Today, Hadamar continues to operate as a hospital, and the building includes a
memorial dedicated to the tens of thousands of victims of the Nazi euthanasia program
who met their end in the Nazi’s incredibly evil House of Shutters. Hopefully this memorial serves
to remind us of the horrible atrocities that human beings are capable of inflicting on one another,
in the hopes that such terrible crimes are never again repeated.
If you thought this video was horrifying, you need to check out our other videos, like this one
called “The Nazi Psycho Doctor - Josef Mengele”. Or maybe you’ll like this other video, instead.
As always, thanks for watching, and don’t forget to like, share and subscribe!
See you next time!