As a soldier in the U.S. Army towards the end of World War II, George Jaeger, who was part of V Corps’s four-man war crimes team, happened upon the town of Hadamar, located between Frankfurt am Main and Cologne. Hadamar has since become notorious as the site of a top-secret extermination site involved in the sterilization and extermination of the handicapped and mentally ill in Nazi Germany. The Hadamar Euthanasia Centre was one of the six sites carrying out Action T4 resulting in the mass murder of those deemed “undesirable” by the Nazis. The program claimed 70,000 victims in its two years of operation from 1939 to 1941. Although the program was officially concluded in 1941, operations and practices of physicians went underground.
Killings still went on during this covert phase where additional estimates of 200,000 people were killed in all the Action T4 facilities. Under the Action T4 program, the development of the use of lethal gas to perform mass murders occurred. These techniques were later implemented for mobile death vans and extermination camps. Following World War II, Hadamar fell within the American occupation zone. In October 1945, Americans conducted the Hadamar Trial, which was the first mass atrocity trial after the end of World War II. Jaeger and the V Corps later went to Flossenbürg concentration camp, which was used for, among others, political opponents. In a gripping account which is often difficult to read, Jaeger describes the horrific scenes he and his colleagues discovered and the emotional stress he experienced.
