Qualla: Sonnenstein Euthanasia Centre

Sonnenstein Euthanasia Centre: Introduction

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Stefan Kühn, CC0. The letters arrived in ordinary envelopes. A family in Saxony would learn that their mother, or their son, had been transferred to an institution at Pirna, and then, some weeks later, that she had died there suddenly of pneumonia or a heart condition, and that the body had already been cremated for reasons of hygiene. Almost none of it was true. The cause of death had been invented in advance, in a room on the ground floor of a building called Haus C 16, by two doctors who looked at each person once. The transfer was real. The death was real. Everything written to explain it was a fabrication, produced by a staff of about a hundred people whose job was to kill patients and then write to their families about it.

Image: Stefan Kühn | CC0

Sonnenstein Euthanasia Centre: The Hill Above Pirna

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Stefan Kühn, CC0. Sonnenstein had been a fortress before it was anything else. In 1811 the site was converted into an institution for mentally ill patients considered curable, and under its first director, the physician Ernst Gottlob Pienitz, it earned a reputation across Germany for reform-minded...

Image: Stefan Kühn | CC0

Sonnenstein Euthanasia Centre: Tiergartenstraße 4

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Stefan Kühn, CC0. The programme that took over the site was run from a villa at Tiergartenstraße 4 in Berlin, and the address became its codename: T4. Sonnenstein was one of six killing centres established across Germany in 1940 and 1941, in which roughly seventy thousand people were gassed — pati...

Image: Stefan Kühn | CC0

Sonnenstein Euthanasia Centre: Thirteen Thousand Seven Hundred and Twenty

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Elfriede Lohse-Wächtler, Public domain. Buses came several times a week from institutions across Saxony and beyond. Between the end of June 1940 and the beginning of September 1941, 13,720 people were murdered in the cellar at Sonnenstein. They were people with schizophrenia and epilepsy and learning disabilities, peop...

Image: Elfriede Lohse-Wächtler | Public domain

Sonnenstein Euthanasia Centre: What Was Carried East

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Stefan Kühn, CC0. This is the part that makes Sonnenstein more than a local atrocity. The killing centre was dissolved in the summer of 1942, and about a third of the people who had worked there — drivers, orderlies, stokers, clerks, nurses — were sent during 1942 and 1943 to Bełżec, Sobibór and T...

Image: Stefan Kühn | CC0

Sonnenstein Euthanasia Centre: Nineteen Eighty-Nine

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Gedenkkreuz_Pirna-Sonnenstein_1.JPG: Brücke-Osteuropa derivative work: Hic et nunc, CC0. The site stayed busy for half a century and silent about why it mattered. An Adolf Hitler School and a Wehrmacht hospital occupied it until 1945, then a refugee camp and a police school. From 1954 a factory built aircraft turbines on the grounds, and a rehabilitation centre opene...

Image: Gedenkkreuz_Pirna-Sonnenstein_1.JPG: Brücke-Osteuropa derivative work: Hic et nunc | CC0