Projects

To date it remains little known that the murders committed within the Nazi euthanasia programme also included the territory of the present-day Czech Republic which was then occupied by Germany. Between October 2007 and September 2008, the Hartheim and Pirna-Sonnenstein Memorials and the Czech Academy of Sciences carried out a joint research project to fill this gap in the scholarship and to record the names and details of the murdered people of this region. On the website below you can see all the information and documents that the researchers managed to find, along with an insight into this chapter of the Nazi occupation that had been long overlooked.

For several years there has been ongoing research in the Place for Learning and Remembrance into the Niedernhart Mental Institute (later the Wagner-Jauregg Hospital, today the Neuromed Campus) in Linz. The focus is on the “decentralised” nature of the Nazi euthanasia, on the murder of psychiatric patients by doctors and nurses inside the institute itself. One aspect is the names of the people who died in Niedernhart during the National Socialist years and the location of their remains.

In 2019, a project on the victims of "Action T4" in Bavaria was initiated as part of a collaboration with the Grafeneck and Pirna-Sonnenstein memorial sites. The aim of this multi-year research project, conducted jointly with the Bavarian districts, was to clarify disputed cases where the actual place of death was not fully established and to improve the database entries. A travelling exhibition was also developed, which was completed in 2025.

The accompanying publication to the travelling exhibition "Ermordet in Grafeneck, Hartheim und Pirna-Sonnenstein. Die Opfer der "Aktion T4" aus Bayern" ("Murdered in Grafeneck, Hartheim and Pirna-Sonnenstein: The Victims of 'Action T4' from Bavaria"), published in 2025, brings together 14 life stories of people with disabilities and mental illnesses from Upper and Lower Bavaria, the Upper Palatinate, Upper, Middle and Lower Franconia, and Swabia. During the Nazi era, they were stigmatized by medical, nursing, and administrative staff as supposedly "lives unworthy of life" and ultimately murdered in one of the three "Action T4" killing centers: Grafeneck, Hartheim, or Pirna-Sonnenstein.

Boris Böhm, Peter Eigelsberger, Daniel Hildwein, Hagen Markwardt (Red.): Ermordet in Grafeneck, Hartheim und Pirna-Sonnenstein. Die Opfer der "Aktion T4" aus Bayern, Alkoven 2025, ISBN: 978-3-9504504-5-3

A project group at Hartheim Castle – Place for Learning and Remembrance, consisting of in-house staff plus other researchers, is investigating the history of the “foreign-race children’s homes” within the territory of the “Gau Upper Danube” in the National Socialist period. The “foreign-race children’s homes” were institutions in which children of Eastern European and Soviet forced labourers were housed after being taken from their mothers. They often lived under inhuman conditions. Many of the infants died of malnourishment and neglect.

The aim of the project to promote historical research into as many of the homes as possible (there were around a dozen in the territory of the “Gau Upper Danube”), to create an “atlas” of the homes and publish the findings in an anthology within the history series of Hartheim Castle – Place for Learning and Remembrance. But another objective is to initiate and promote local commemorative work.