Hartheim Castle Exhibits The men responsible for killing the handicapped are shown in this poster Franz Stangl was appointed by Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler to be the superintendent of the T-4 Euthanasia Program at Schloss Hartheim in 1940. He was transferred to the Sobibor extermination camp in Poland in March 1942 where he was the Commandant until September 1942 when he was transferred to the extermination camp at Treblinka. Stangl is pictured on the poster above; his photo is on the far right in the left-hand column. Figures which represent the perpetrators One room of the old castle is devoted to this display which represents the men who worked in the euthanasia program which killed those "unworthy of life." Each of the figures has the name of one of the perpetrators and the dates of their birth and death. One of the SS soldiers who worked at Hartheim was Josef Vallaster of Silbertal, Austria, who has been recently in the news. One room in the exhibit area has posters from America, as shown in the two photographs below. These posters promote the idea that heredity is to blame for the mentally and physically handicapped. In Hitler's Germany, deformed and mentally retarded persons, who had been institutionalized by their families, were sent to Hartheim Castle or the five other euthanasia centers, where they were murdered. The Nazis kept track of how much money the government had saved by putting these people to death. After the war these documents were found by General Patton's army. The total amount saved by killing over 70,000 handicapped people was 885,000,000 Reichsmark or 3 billion dollars in today's money. Continue Previous Back to Hartheim index Home This page was last updated on February 17, 2008