Qualla: Brandenburg Euthanasia Centre

Brandenburg Euthanasia Centre: Introduction

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit A.Savin, FAL. The building on Neuendorfer Straße was put up in 1790 to shelter people who had nowhere else to go — a royal house for the destitute and for soldiers who had come home unable to work. By 1820 Prussia had turned it into a penitentiary. When a new prison opened out at Görden in 1931, the old place stood mostly empty, apart from six months in 1933 and 1934 when it held one of the first concentration camps in Germany. Then, in 1939, men from an office at Tiergartenstraße 4 in Berlin came to look at the walled yard behind it. They were not interested in the cells. They wanted a room they could seal.

Image: A.Savin | FAL

Brandenburg Euthanasia Centre: The Room They Could Seal

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit USHMM, Public domain. A shed in the yard was fitted out to look like a communal shower, with fixtures on the walls and pipes running to it. The pipes carried carbon monoxide. Christian Wirth worked on the installation and the tests. In January 1940 roughly fifteen men gathered to watch it used on huma...

Image: USHMM | Public domain

Brandenburg Euthanasia Centre: The Transports

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Judith Richmann, CC BY-SA 4.0. The victims were collected from psychiatric hospitals and care homes across northern and central Germany, people whose families had entrusted them to institutions and were told they were simply being moved to another one. On 27 September 1940 about 158 Jewish patients were brough...

Image: Judith Richmann | CC BY-SA 4.0

Brandenburg Euthanasia Centre: Paul Goesch

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Gregor Rom, CC BY-SA 4.0. One of the dead has a catalogue raisonné. Paul Goesch was born in Schwerin on 30 August 1885 and became an architect, painter and lithographer of real standing — a member of the November Group and the Arbeitsrat für Kunst, part of the Glass Chain circle around Bruno Taut, a contr...

Image: Gregor Rom | CC BY-SA 4.0

Brandenburg Euthanasia Centre: Certificates, Urns and Smoke

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit SchiDD, CC BY 3.0. A registry office called Sonderstandesamt Brandenburg II operated inside the killing centre for the sole purpose of falsifying the record. It issued death certificates giving plausible natural causes — pneumonia, heart failure — with dates and places that had nothing to do with w...

Image: SchiDD | CC BY 3.0

Brandenburg Euthanasia Centre: What Left Brandenburg in October

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Gregor Rom, CC BY-SA 4.0. In October 1940 the whole operation — equipment, doctors, drivers, clerks, the entire staff — was moved to a newly prepared site at Bernburg. The table of figures the administrators compiled in 1942, found by investigators in 1945 and known as the Hartheim Statistics, records 9,7...

Image: Gregor Rom | CC BY-SA 4.0