It is a black and white picture. Two men are standing in front of an open window with casements. The man on the left is taller. He is wearing a striped suit with a shirt and tie. The man on the right is smaller. He is wearing a coarse dark suit with a jumper and shirt. He appears to have a black eye. Both of them have their hair slicked back. They are facing each other but look past each other out of the picture.

Adolf Wahlmann (left) and nurse Karl Willig (right) after their arrest by US Army soldiers, 5 April 1945.

Troy A. Peters, US Army, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

HADAMAR

From 1942 onwards, foreign patients who were no longer fit for work were murdered at the Hadamar institution and nursing home. These included at least 126 Soviet and Polish forced labourers. Most of them had already been admitted to a institution and nursing home and were suffering from homesickness or mental illness.

From July 1944 onwards, Hadamar began accepting increasing numbers of female forced labourers who were suffering from tuberculosis. Their admission was requested by the local employment offices, which also organised the collective transports to Hadamar. There, the sick women were often murdered on the day of their arrival. The senior physician Adolf Wahlmann was responsible for this. Several nurses carried out the killings. Officially, according to the entries in the medical records, the sick had been »returned to their homeland«. In fact, they were murdered.

From September 1944 onwards, Hadamar was the »collection centre for foreigners« for Hesse. It is not known how many foreign patients were admitted and murdered in total.

Following »Aktion T4«, a further 4,500 people died in Hadamar between 1942 and the end of the war in 1945 as a result of malnutrition and overdoses of medication.

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