German town plans memorial to Nazi euthanasia victims

BERLIN (Reuters) - The German town of Brandenburg plans to open a new centre to commemorate more than 9,000 mentally ill people murdered there by the Nazis.

Historians estimate that more than 100,000 people were killed between 1940 and 1945 as part of a euthanasia policy outlined by Adolf Hitler in the 1920s in his book "Mein Kampf".

Hitler prepared the ground for his campaign, called Operation T4, with propaganda films which portrayed the mentally handicapped and the incurably ill as "useless mouths to feed" who could be relieved of their suffering by a "sensible doctor".

"Operation T4 was a precursor of the Holocaust," according to the region of Brandenburg's science and culture ministry, which is overseeing the project.

The documentary centre is due to be housed in a building that was once part of the extermination plant, one of six institutions which the Nazis disguised as nursing homes. The ministry said it was too early to say when it would be opened.

The Nazi euthanasia campaign was nominally ended in 1941 after protests. In practice, however, patients continued to be killed, by starvation, lethal injections or tablets.

Outdoor information plaques and stones commemorating the victims in the eastern town were unveiled in 1997 with the aid of some 78,000 euros ($118,700) of state funding.

The ministry said around 560,000 euros had been earmarked for the new centre.

(Reporting by Carolyn Palmer; edited by Richard Meares)

($1=.6573 Euro)