back...Remembrance Day for Victims of the Extermination of People with Psychiatric Disorders in Occupied Poland during the Second World War

The 22^nd of September marks the first official commemoration of the Remembrance Day for Victims of the Extermination of People with Psychiatric Disorders in Occupied Poland during the Second World War. This day was established by the Sejm of the Republic of Poland to honour the memory of those who perished in the criminal operation by the German occupiers known as Aktion T4.

The date of 22^nd September 1939 marks the beginning of the systematic euthanasia campaign against patients at the Psychiatric Hospital in Kocborowo. However, the mass murder of disabled people had already begun on 15^th September 1939 at the Provincial Mental Hospital in Owińska and at Fort VII in Poznań.

Aktion T4, which took its name from the address of the Chancellery department overseeing the operation – Tiergartenstrasse 4 in Berlin – was designed to eliminate individuals deemed unproductive for society under the eugenic policies of the Third Reich. It was targeted at people with both physical and mental disabilities, who were its first victims. Patients' food rations were restricted, and they were administered medications that worsened their condition. Executions were carried out by firing squad or by gassing in specially adapted lorries.

In 1941, the operation was expanded to include the elimination of physically disabled people and was implemented in the extermination camps. There, immediately upon arrival, prisoners underwent selection, and those deemed sick were sent to the gas chambers.

It is estimated that approximately 200,000 disabled people were murdered between 1939 and 1945.

Children were also murdered in the criminal Aktion T4 operation. The most notorious centre for children on Polish soil was the Hospital for the Mentally and Nervously Ill in Lubliniec, where, between 1942 and 1944, approximately 200 Polish and German children from the Silesia region were murdered with lethal doses of Luminal.

In the Łódź region, Aktion T4 was carried out at the Psychiatric Hospital in Kochanówka (Łódź), the Jewish community's shelter for the mentally ill on Wesoła Street and the hospital in Warta. In total, between March 1940 and December 1942, approximately 1,473 people, mostly Jews, were murdered by gassing.