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. Three 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.