On a beautiful summer day in 1941, as thick, acrid
smoke bellowed from the hospital’s giant chimneys and blanketed the surrounding town, the staff
at the secretive hospital were having a party. Doctors and nurses were parading around
the grounds, drinking beer and wine and toasting to their success. They were
celebrating the death of their 10,000th “undesirable” patient, whose body was being
cremated in the hospital’s furnace as they partied beneath the giant chimney. The hospital would come
to be known as the Nazi’s incredibly evil House of Shutters, and the techniques being celebrated
there that day would go on to form the blueprints for the horrific atrocities that would take
place in the Nazi’s notorious death camps. The Nazis’ hatred of the Jews was no secret,
and their deplorable treatment of the Jewish people has been well documented. But in their
quest for German superiority and racial purity, the Nazis’ cruelty knew no limits, and not even
their own people were safe. In order to stop the so-called “denegration” of the German race, in
1939 the Nazis developed the T4 Euthanasia program to rid the country of “undesirables”. It started
with the forced sterilization of children that the Nazi regime deemed unfit to reproduce, but it
quickly expanded into a program of extermination. In the end, more than 200,000 adults and
children would be killed under this program. Half-Jewish children, people with mental or
physical disabilities, even shell-shocked soldiers and SS men - all of them would meet their horrific
ends at the hands of the doctors and nurses employed at 1 of 6 euthanasia institutions around
the country. The Hadamar Euthanasia Center, known as The House of Shutters, was quite possibly the
worst and most horrific of these terrifying sites. Established in 1883 as a halfway house for
released prisoners, Hadamar was converted into a mental asylum in 1906, and by 1930 it
was home to 320 mentally ill patients. When the Nazis decreed that funding for the care of the
mentally ill would be slashed in 1934, Hadamar, along with countless other mental institutions,
became overcrowded and conditions for patients became abysmal. By 1939, 600 mentally ill people
were crowded into a building designed to house no more than 250. There were severe shortages of food
and many patients were near starvation, there were not nearly enough staff to care for the patients,
and the facilities - and the patients themselves - were filthy and decrepit. Soon enough, though,
these would be the least of Hadamar’s problems. The first sign that something was
amiss at Hadamar was the buses. Townspeople noticed a steady stream of grey
postal buses arriving at Hadamar every day. The buses, which the locals called the “killing
crates”, were filled with people when they arrived. The buses would disappear behind
the towering gates of the hospital grounds, before reemerging hours later completely empty.
Day after day, bus after bus drove through the imposing gates to deliver their human cargo to the
horrors within. Then came the smoke. The Nazis had quietly made some renovations to the hospital.
The townspeople couldn’t see the gas chamber and crematorium that had been added to the hospital’s
basement, but they could see - and smell - the new chimneys that towered over the hospital and
blanketed the entire town in a putrid smog. The townspeople knew better than to ask questions
about what went on inside the hospital’s walls, but that didn’t stop the rumors from flying.
Soon, it would be common for local children to taunt each other, saying “You’re not very clever
- you will go to Hadamar and into the ovens!” The townspeople may have had an idea about
what was going on inside the House of Shutters, but they could never have imagined just how brutal
and horrific things really were inside its walls. As the “killing crate” buses arrived at
the loading dock, they would be met by one of the hospital’s nurses. They would unload
their human cargo - up to 100 people each day who had been rounded up from nearby
mental institutions and transported to Hadamar - and the nurse would order them to
strip naked and prepare for a medical exam. This was no ordinary exam, though. The
patients would inevitably be diagnosed with one of the 60 so-called fatal diseases - everyone
from the physically and mentally disabled, to shell-shocked soldiers to half-Jewish children
were deemed “undesirable” and slated for a “mercy killing”. Once diagnosed, the patients would be
sorted into groups and labelled with different colored stickers - red for “kill”, orange
for “kill and remove brain for research”, and yellow for “kill and remove gold
teeth”. Then, it was on to the gas chamber. The gas chamber had been disguised as a
shower room, with the noxious and deadly gas piped in through the walls from an adjoining room.
The patients would be crowded into the shower room, the doors would be closed, and the air would
be sucked out of the chamber by a ventilator. Then, for about 10 minutes, deadly carbon monoxide
gas would be piped into the room, and the doctors would watch through the window as the patients
suffered and died a slow, agonizing death. After the war, one former staffer
would paint a gruesome picture of the horrific death these patients
experienced. He testified at trial, describing the scene he witnessed through a window
that looked into the gas chamber: “I saw 40-45 men who were pressed together in the next room and
were now slowly dying. Some lay on the ground, others had slumped down, many had their mouths
open as if they could not get any more air. The form of death was so painful that
one cannot talk of a humane killing.” After the cruel process was done and all of
the patients were dead - a process which took about an hour - fresh air was then pumped
back into the room, forcing the gas out, so that the hospital staff could enter and deal
with the corpses. Those slated for research would be moved to a special room, but the vast majority
of the bodies went immediately to the ovens where they were burned, and the ashes were
dumped into mass graves behind the hospital. In August of 1941, the hospital’s head doctor
invited the entire staff to join him in the hospital’s front hall for a bizarre
and macabre celebration. In the hall, the staff were each given beers before they were
led down into the cellar. There, the staff saw the naked body of a dead patient with hydrocephalus
strapped to a stretcher. The head doctor proudly told his staff that this man was the 10,000th
patient to be gassed to death at Hadamar, and after another doctor who was dressed as
a priest gave a lewd fake funeral oration, the body was ceremoniously cremated in front of
the entire staff. Then, the party moved outside to the grounds, where the staff continued to
drink and toast, playing music and finally participating in a drunken procession through the
hospital grounds in celebration of their success. But the jubilant mood wouldn’t last
- a German bishop, horrified by the rumors of what was happening at
Hadamar and other institutions, persuaded the German people to speak
out against the euthanasia program, and he succeeded in getting Hitler to
put a stop to the mercy killings in 1941. No one knows for sure why Hitler was willing to
publicly denounce his euthanasia program, but in hindsight it’s easy to imagine that his focus was
elsewhere - he had already begun implementing the techniques developed and perfected at Hadamar
and other euthanasia centers on a much larger scale in his Nazi death camps, where millions
of European Jews would be brutally exterminated. Sadly, this brief period of respite from
euthanasia wouldn’t last. When the program quietly restarted in 1942, things were even more horrific
and brutal than ever. This period became known as the “wild euthanasia”, when hospital staff
killed indescriminately and without any pretense of medical care. Patients were no longer given
even a cursory medical exam before being sent to the gas chamber. Instead, they were simply killed
on arrival and later diagnosed with tuberculosis. Along with gassing patients, the staff now
invented new and more tortuous methods of extermination. During this period of wild
euthanasia, many thousands of patients were murdered by lethal injection, tortured and
experimented on, or simply starved to death. In 1943, Hadamar once again upped the
ante when it opened a ward for children. The ward was camouflaged as an educational
home for children from mixed Jewish families, but in reality, this was simply a cover story
that allowed them to indiscriminately kill Jewish children. All of the children who arrived
at Hadamar were healthy, but every one of them would be executed by lethal injection under
the guise of one made up disease or another. Though the war officially ended on May 8th,
1945, the staff at Hadamar continued on with their devious mission. They went on killing some
patients, and letting others starve to death for weeks after the war - the last known patient to
die at the House of Shutters was a 4 year old mentally handicapped boy who was killed on May
29th, a full 3 weeks after the war had ended. The area around Hadamar fell under American
control after the war ended. The Americans had learned about the atrocities being committed
at the House of Shutters as early as April 1945, but they wouldn’t grasp the true magnitude of
the horrors committed there until they saw it for themselves. George Jaeger was part of a 4-man war
crimes team that had been travelling the German countryside looking for evidence of Nazi war
crimes. They followed up on many leads, though they were often given incorrect information,
or arrived too late to bring anyone to justice. So when, on a particularly beautiful Sunday
afternoon, George was approached by a filthy, rail-thin man, he was understandably skeptical
of the man’s story. He claimed to have been a French spy who had escaped death after he
was captured by pretending to be insane, which had landed him in Hadamar - a fate arguably
worse than death. George and his team cautiously followed the man through the towering gates and
into the hospital, and even though they had been warned about the horrors committed there, they
were utterly unprepared for what they would find. Years later, George would recount the lasting
impression these horrors had on him, saying: “My sharpest memory is of the distinctive acrid
smell of death, of unwashed bodies and despair”. In the hospital pharmacy, the soldiers found
10 kilograms of barbiturate drugs - far more than any hospital could reasonably expect to
need. They found the hospital crowded with incredibly ill, filthy and starving patients.
The uncovered and blew open 2 locked safes, in which they found meticulously detailed
records of all the patients who had been killed in the House of Shutters - most of whom
were reported to have died of Tuberculosis. And, most damningly, they found the gas chamber and
the ovens in the hospital basement. Outside, they uncovered mass graves behind the buildings
- after townspeople complained of the stench from the burning of victims’ bodies, the staff had
begun forcing mentally ill patients to dig deep, shaft-like holes behind the hospital, where
bodies of the victims of wild euthanasia were unceremoniously piled on top of one another.
When George arrived, his team found an open grave full of the bodies of recently-killed
patients that had yet to be covered. George and his men successfully captured the
entire staff without incident - shockingly, they had mistakenly believed that their
insane asylum cover story would protect them, so rather than flee, they had stayed put and
even continued killing after the Nazis fell. In October of 1945, Hadamar went down in history
yet again as the site of the very first war crimes trial in the wake of World War 2. The trial, the
first of many countless such trials to follow, would see the prosecution of many doctors, nurses
and other hospital staff on charges of murder. Irmgard Huber, a matronly-looking head
nurse who was directly responsible for most of the deaths at Hadamar, along
with many of the hospitals attending physicians, were found guilty and
sentenced to 25 years in prison, despite trying to defend themselves by saying
that they were simply following orders. Throughout the trial, the full scale of the
atrocities committed at the House of Shutters was revealed. More than 15,000 German citizens, in
addition to countless others from Poland and other occupied territories, met their horrible end at
the House of Shutters. 10,000 victims were gassed, while at least 5,000 more were murdered by
lethal injection at the Hadamar site alone. Today, Hadamar continues to operate as
a hospital, and the building includes a memorial dedicated to the tens of thousands
of victims of the Nazi euthanasia program who met their end in the Nazi’s incredibly evil
House of Shutters. Hopefully this memorial serves to remind us of the horrible atrocities that human
beings are capable of inflicting on one another, in the hopes that such terrible
crimes are never again repeated. If you thought this video was horrifying, you
need to check out our other videos, like this one called “The Nazi Psycho Doctor - Josef Mengele”.
Or maybe you’ll like this other video, instead. As always, thanks for watching, and don’t
forget to like, share and subscribe! See you next time!
