National Socialist crimes in Pirna
About 15,000 people were murdered in the National Socialist killing centre Pirna-Sonnenstein during 1940 and 1941. Most were
women, men, and children with intellectual disabilities or mental illnesses. Under National Socialist ideology, they were classified as “life unworthy of living.” In the summer of 1941, the National Socialists killed more than 1,000 prisoners deemed unfit for work or ill, from the concentration camps Auschwitz, Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen.
Due in no small part to the number of victims it claimed, this extermination centre is the worst scene of National Socialist crimes in Saxony. The Sonnenstein killing centre was also instrumental in developing the personnel, organisation and technology later employed in the Holocaust.
'Action T4' was the post-war name for an extermination programme supervised by offices of the NSDAP and Reich Interior Ministry and coordinated by a special central office headquartered at Tiergartenstrasse 4 in Berlin. Within the scope of this programme six killing centres were set up in Germany in 1940 and 1941. Over 70,000 persons with intellectual disabilities or mental illnesses from psychiatric institutions, nursing homes and hospitals were gassed at these sites.
