简体中文
A memorial wall was unveiled Tuesday in Berlin to commemorate the systematic murder of up to 300,000 mentally ill and disabled people under the Nazi regime.
The 24-meter blue glass wall is located at the now-demolished offices where more than 60 Nazi bureaucrats and doctors once worked in secret to implement the so-called "T4 euthanasia program".
The inauguration was attended by German Minister of Culture Monika Gruetters and Berlin Mayor Klaus Wowereit. After inauguration speeches, people, including some with disabilities and relatives of the "T4 program" victims, laid flowers by the blue glass as a symbol of remembrance.
The "T4 program" began in 1939. Between January 1940 and August 1941, about 70,000 people died in what the Nazis deemed "mercy killings" of "unfit members of the society". Victims were mainly sent to gas chambers or killed by lethal injection in death camps in Germany and Poland.
The program was ostensibly shut down in 1941, but continued in secret. Historians estimated that between 200,000 and 300,000 people were murdered.
The glass wall is the fourth memorial to distinct groups of Nazi victims. It stands near a memorial to the six million Jews murdered in the Holocaust, and two more to Roma and Sinti victims as well as homosexuals murdered by the Nazis.
The memorial has been designed to accommodate visitors in wheelchairs, and includes audio commentary for the blind, videos with sign language for the deaf, as well as simplified texts for the learning disabled.
