Portal:Featured Article Of The Week
Featured Article Of The Week
Grafeneck
On the site of a former medieval castle, between 1556 and 1560 Grafeneck Castle was built on a hill near Marbach. During 1762 and 1772, Duke Karl Eugen converted the castle to a contemporary style. In 1929 a Samaritan (Samariterstiftung) foundation took over the building in order to install a home for physically and mentally handicapped persons.
On 24 May 1939, a first visitation by members of Aktion T4 took place in order to find out if the building could be used for their program, and on 14 October Grafeneck Castle was duly confiscated. Between 10 and 15 manual laborers from nearby villages started to convert the castle into a killing center.
300 m away from the castle several barracks were built, fenced in with a hoarding up to 4 m high. On the first floor of the castle the following facilities were installed: accommodations and offices for the doctors, a registry office, a police office, the office for the comfort letters and others. On the second floor, small living- and sleeping rooms for the personnel were installed. The main building of the killing facility was a barrack (68 m long and 7 m wide), which included several rooms. In one of them 100 beds were placed, covered with straw-bags. Three big buses for transportation of the victims and an ambulance car stood in a wooden garage. Two mobile cremation ovens were located in another wooden barrack. Because of the immense heat, generated by the round-the-clock cremation, the roof of the barrack was removed and after a short time the surrounding trees even blackened. The gas chamber, resembling a shower bath, could hold 75 persons. A former horse stable (round and 15 m in diameter) probably served as storage room for the corpses. At the bottom of the hill, at the access road, a high hoarding and a guardhouse were built. Fences with barbed wire surrounded the whole castle whilst armed guards with dogs patrolled these perimeters. Click here for more...
