By Jonathon Van Maren, European Conservative. (image: Tim Mossholder/ Unsplash)
When governments set eligibility for euthanasia, they’re deciding whose lives are too valuable to end—and whose are deemed worthless enough to facilitate their death.
Last month, investigators “found a layer of human ashes and bone remains several centimeters thick, measuring approximately 460 square meters” at “depths of 80 centimeters to 1.50 meters” just outside Hartheim Castle near the Austrian city of Linz. The crushed and incinerated bodies were victims of the Third Reich’s T-4 euthanasia program, which ended the lives of between 70,000 and 20,000 people that the Nazis deemed “life unworthy of life.”
Hartheim Castle, which is now a memorial site, was one of the eight centers where Nazi doctors murdered people with disabilities, mental illnesses, and other people categorized as “useless eaters.” Between May 1940 and November 1944, around 30,000 people were murdered in gas chambers, burned in a specially constructed crematorium, and dumped in a tributary of the Danube, or, we now know, on the castle grounds. The victims also included Dutch Jews as well as prisoners from Spain, Poland, and France.
Hartheim Castle was selected as a killing center immediately after the Aktion T-4 euthanasia program was launched in October 1939, when Hitler personally signed a note to his doctor Karl Brandt and Reichsleiter Philipp Bouhler authorizing the killing. Despite protest from some religious figures including, most notably, Clemens August Count von Galen, Bishop of Münster, the Nazis insisted that the murders were “mercy killings.” It would be better for everyone—society, their families, and certainly themselves—if these people did not exist.
In December 2024, investigators noted anomalies in the soil on the castle grounds on aerial photographs and followed up with ground-penetrating radar and targeted drilling that confirmed the presence of the dead. “Investigators based their suspicions on testimonies from witnesses of the time, according to which human ashes had been dumped into the Danube River for a time,” said Florian Schwanninger, director of the Learning and Commemoration Center of Hartheim Castle. “This became too conspicuous for the Nazis over time, which is why from an unknown point in time, the ash was buried.”
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