New Nazi-Era Graves of Hitler's T-4 Euthanasia Victims Found in Austria

Hundreds of Nazi-era graves found at an Austrian state hospital will be exhumed to see if any are victims of Hitler's T-4 euthanasia program, where patients deemed unworthy to live were murdered. The discovery is a timely reminder of what President Obama's Nazi-inspired health-care program's death committees will bring if he is not thrown out of office. The discovery comes only days after Helga Zepp-LaRouche issued her statement "Operation Euthanasia-Never Again."

Some 220 bodies were found in a state hospital cemetery during a construction project in Hall, near the Tyrolean capital, Innsbruck. Since they had been buried between 1942 and 1944, suspicions were raised that they were victims of the T-4 euthanasia campaign.

Officials told a news conference that a panel of experts would oversee the two-year project to identify the dead from hospital records and genetic samples. A Reuters story appearing in today's Irish Times reports, "Nazi Germany, which annexed Austria in 1938, introduced mass killings of the physically and mentally handicapped in an effort to eradicate people deemed inferior. Thousands in Austria died in gas chambers at the Hartheim Castle euthanasia center near Linz. At least 360 patients from the hospital in Hall were sent to their deaths before the so-called T4 euthanasia program officially ended in August 1941, ushering in a new phase in which victims died from neglect, hunger or drug overdoses."

Historian Dr. Oliver Seifert told Reuters, "This phase of 'wild euthanasia' between 1942 and 1945 has really been examined in just a cursory way," Dr. Seifert said. "This is certainly a first step and a good opportunity to see what happened here and how to view it. We know that active killing went on at other institutions in Austria."

The hospital cemetery in Hall might have been opened in 1942 as part of plans — never realized — to set up its own euthanasia station, deputy medical director Christian Haring said.

"This dark chapter of history must now be carefully examined and cleared up," provincial Governor Guenther Platter told the Austria Press Agency, saying he was deeply shaken by the discovery