Near the 15th century castle, a sanitarium was opened near Pirna, Germany, just south of Dresden. Like Grafeneck, it still serves the handicapped through a company located there which employs them. The psychiatric hospital had been closed in 1939. The Nazis took over the building and installed a gas chamber and crematorium. some 100 people were employed there and by 24 August 1941, when Hitler officially "ended" Action T4, 13,270 men, women, and chiuldren had been murdered there in the name of science.
That summer, shipments of inmates began to arrive from Buchenwald, Sachenhausen, and Auschwitz, since Birkenau was not yet operational. Knowing and teaching about T4 is crucial to teaching about the Holocaust, as crucial as teaching about World War One and the Weimar Hyperinflation to understand the Nazi rise to power. While the Afro-Germans were the first to be persecuted, the handicapped were the first to die, justified by scientists as good eugenics and Darwinian. This was the first small step to gain public acceptance of and international tolerance of murder in the name of accepted science. It was in the T4 program that the Nazis worked out that gassing was an effective method for mass killings, a technology which they transferred to the death camps. Indeed, these sites were the training grounds for the experts later posted to Treblinka, Sobibor, Balzec, and San Sabba to operate the gas chambers there.
Sadly, at Grafeneck, Hartheim, and Sonnenstein, there were no large crowds in line to see and learn, no waiting list of educators and scholars, and all required some difficulty in locating. As educators, we need to do better.