A doctor and the grey form

Our doctor is an established German psychiatrist, in his forties, recruited in the summer of 1940 to serve as a Gutachter, an evaluator, in an operation administered from a villa at Tiergartenstraße 4, in Berlin — an address that will give the programme its code name: 'T4'.

The mechanism was born of a mandate signed by Hitler, back-dated to September 1939, entrusting Philipp Bouhler and the physician Karl Brandt with the killing of patients judged 'incurable'. Since the autumn of 1939, questionnaires — the Meldebogen — have been sent to hospitals and psychiatric asylums of the Reich. Presented as a simple statistical census, they focus above all on the patient's capacity to work and on the diagnosis.

The completed forms come back by the thousand. 3 evaluators, each at home, without ever seeing the patient, decide in a black-bordered box: a red plus means death, a blue minus survival. Those marked are transferred by buses to centres such as Brandenburg, where a chamber disguised as a shower, fed with carbon monoxide, has been installed.

The task is presented to our doctor as a clinical act, paid, covered by the Führer's authority. He must answer.