Forgotten Victims of Nazism. The Remembrance of the Nazi-Euthanasia Crimes: Tiegenhof (Dziekanka) and Hadamar

Abstract

The Nazi-euthanasia crimes are still - at least in Polish reflections – a rather unexplored topic. Thus, the remembrance of their victims, of people – whose lives were announced as “unworthy of life” – murdered for both race and economic reasons, remains a gap in Polish culture. It has to be placed in opposition do German researches, which try – for obvious reasons – to describe and criticize all the single facts of Nazi crimes. This difference should be filled with some comments, for Nazi-euthanasia was not a meaningless episode, and it took hundreds of thousands of innocent lives, taking place also in mental hospitals located in the occupied areas of Poland. The article aims to describe the Nazi-euthanasia crimes, to set them in the context of the Holocaust and – before all – to compare the ways of memorialisation of annihilated patients, using the samples of hospitals in Hadamar (Hessia) and Gniezno (Greater Poland).