On Friday, 12 January 1940, the Germans murdered more than 400 patients, both adults and children, staying there on the premises of a psychiatric hospital in occupied Chelm. This crime was part of the Nazi policy of exterminating the disabled and mentally ill, and its victims were described as ‘lives not worth living’.

Even before the German aggression against Poland, in September 1939, preparations were already underway in the Third Reich to implement the policy of exterminating the mentally ill and disabled. The final decision on the subject was taken on 20 September 1939, during a meeting that took place in the Grand Hotel in Sopot, attended by Adolf Hitler himself.

The action was to be supervised by SS-Obergruppenführer Philipp Bouhler, head of Hitler’s chancellery. The entire crime was planned at the Reich State Labour Community for Care and Treatment Institutions in Berlin, which had its headquarters at Tiergartenstrasse 4. This is also the origin of one of its names, i.e. ‘Aktion T-4’, the other being E-Aktion. German ideology referred to the extermination of the sick and disabled as the “elimination of life unworthy of life” (German: Vernichtung von lebensunwertem Leben), while the killing was referred to as the “end of suffering” or “merciful death”.

The extermination campaign was initially carried out in the Third Reich and later also in the occupied Polish territories. The Germans murdered the sick with lethal injections but found this method ineffective. As part of their work on mass murder under Aktion T-4, the Nazis began operating gas chambers and crematoria.

In early January 1940, an SS commission arrived at the psychiatric hospital in occupied Chelm to visit the entire facility. A few days later, on 12 January, the facility was cordoned off by an SS unit. Machine-gun positions were then set up. The medical staff were ordered by the Germans to leave the hospital building, and designated nurses were ordered to lead out groups of 10 patients each, who were then shot. Some of the patients scattered in panic through the hospital rooms but were caught and murdered by the Germans who entered the facility. A total of 400 people were murdered that day, including children. The bodies of the victims were buried in a mass grave near the hospital.