Thomas Stöckle
Gedenkstätte Grafeneck
Münsingen

The Grafeneck Memorial was established to commemorate the victims of the so-called “Euthanasia” crimes during the National Socialist regime. At the same time, the Memorial has a documentation centre. As the Memorial is a close cooperation partner of the Research Unit for History and Ethics of Medicine, it is connected with all Centres for Psychiatry in Baden-Wuerttemberg. As a historical place, Grafeneck stands for a “big crime” of the NS regime, which was closely associated with the medicine and especially with the subdiscipline of the psychiatry. According to the current state of research, between January and December 1940, 10.654 people were murdered in a gas chamber erected for this purpose. The victims were men, women and children to whom an existing or supposed mental disorder was to be their fate.

The murder of the mentally and physically disabled in the German Southwest (among others with the historical states of Wuerttemberg, Baden und Hohenzollern) started here on 18 January 1940. Grafeneck as a place of systematic murder of people in National Socialist Germany represents a starting point for dreadful crimes against humanity. This perspective is additionally emphasized by the later assumption of responsibility for the murder of the European Jews as well as by the fact that a quarter of the Grafeneck’s culprits was a part of the later stuff in concentration camps like Belzec, Treblinka, Sobibor and Auschwitz-Birkenau. 

For more information please visit the official homepage of the Grafeneck Memorial:
http://www.gedenkstaette-grafeneck.de/