January 1941

Hadamar Euthanasia Centre

Hadamar's gas chamber operates from January to August 1941

The first bus carried thirty men from the Eichberg institution. They were murdered the day they arrived, and the transports kept coming for seven more months.

13 January 1941: the first transport

T4's organizers converted Hadamar into the sixth centralized killing facility. Its first transport arrived on 13 January 1941 — thirty men from the Eichberg institution, among them 29-year-old Hans Frey — and all were murdered that day.

Staff killed the victims with bottled carbon monoxide in a cellar gas chamber built to look like a shower room, cremated the bodies, and sent relatives urns with invented causes and dates of death.

The deception ran to the vehicles as well: the buses that brought patients to Hadamar had painted-over windows to conceal their passengers.

Not a date but a phase

The entry's figure of 10,072 is cumulative, not a single day's toll, which is why it resists a date. The Hadamar Memorial dates the murders from 13 January 1941 and the halt of the T4 programme to 24 August 1941; the last transport reached Hadamar on 21 August.

The 10,072 figure itself comes from the perpetrators' own internal compilation, the Hartheim statistics, which records that many people murdered at Hadamar during the 1941 centralized gassing phase. An updated Hadamar victim list raises the count to 10,122. The Hadamar Memorial says more than 10,000 people were murdered there; the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum says around 10,000.

August 1941 was when the cumulative phase ended, not a single month — or day — in which the entire toll was incurred. The buses kept arriving through the summer, and people were still being gassed in August, up to the last transport on the 21st.

What the numbers must not be merged with

T4's internal calculation for all six centralized gassing facilities between January 1940 and August 1941 is 70,273. That total should not be merged with estimates of roughly 250,000 to 300,000 victims of the broader Nazi "euthanasia" programme and other disability-targeted killing actions through 1945.

Killing at Hadamar resumed in August 1942 in decentralized form — lethal drug overdoses, starvation and deliberate neglect rather than gas — and more than 4,400 people were killed there before March 1945.

"Euthanasia" was the perpetrators' own euphemism; the victims did not consent, and what the term describes is organized mass murder.

Sources

Researched 23 Aug 2026 7 sources 2 audit passes, 3 issues open Date disputed

How this was checked

Researched from the web into a fact sheet, rewritten from that sheet, then audited against it by a different model. How the pipeline works →

Date disputed. Sources disagree; the research places it at 1941-01-13 (phase running to 24 August 1941).

What the sources leave uncertain

The listed item is not a single-day event. It summarizes a phase running from January through August 1941, so the date field can only encode its starting month.
January 13 is independently supported as the first transport and first day of killing at Hadamar. The Hadamar Memorial gives August 21 as the last transport, while the formal T4 stop was dated August 24.
The exact 10,072 figure comes from the perpetrators’ surviving Hartheim statistical compilation. Current memorial and USHMM accounts conservatively say “more than” or “around” 10,000 rather than treating the internal figure as a complete modern reconstruction.