New study finds Nazis used hundreds of hospitals to kill 200 disabled, mentally ill

berlin (ap) | Nazi Germany used hundreds of hospitals and clinics to kill at least 200,000 disabled, mentally ill and other institutionalized patients who were deemed physically inferior, researchers said Tuesday.

The conclusion is based on what researchers said was the most comprehensive analysis of Nazi records on the sites that helped carry out Adolf Hitler's program to purify, as he saw it, the German race.

In a report compiled by Germany's federal archive, researchers found new evidence on the program under which doctors and hospital staff used gas, drugs or starvation to kill disabled men, women and children at medical facilities in Germany and in present-day Austria, Poland and the Czech Republic.

Even in internal documents, the Nazis cynically referred to the deaths as mercy killings, said Harald Jenner, a researcher at the federal archive.

The program originated at the Nazi regime's highest levels, Jenner said in a recent essay. "The fuhrer's chancellery and the Reich Interior Ministry were the starting point for the murders.'

The three-year effort to catalog the deaths was intended to "restore some dignity to the victims' while encouraging further research into a dark chapter of history, German Culture Minister Christina Weiss said at a news conference Tuesday.

"We know that these crimes were meant to be kept secret,' Weiss said. "The relatives of the victims received fake letters of condolence. The doctors in charge worked under false names.'

The Nazis launched the drive to root out what they called "worthless lives' in the summer of 1939, predating their full-scale organization of the Holocaust in which they killed 6 million European Jews.

Between January 1940 and August 1941, the Nazis turned six hospitals — in Brandenburg, Grafeneck, Hartheim, Sonnenstein, Bernburg and Hadamar — into the main killing grounds for what they referred to as "euthanasia.' Other clinics and hospitals were added as the program expanded.

The federal archive is not publishing names of victims, but is posting a list of the facilities used on its Web site.