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Germany's Gray Bus Memorial

         This is a memorial to those who were victims of the Gray Bus. During WWII, the Nazi's murdered over 200,000 men, women, and children who were mentally ill, or and handicapped during World War II. They were considered “not worthy of living”. At least 90,000 patients died of hunger or inadequate nourishment, or were murdered with drugs in state-run sanatoriums. More than 70,000 men, women, and children were murdered in gas chambers during the secret operation “T4” in 1940/41. The mass murder was centrally organised at Tiergartenstraße 4 in Berlin (therefore the abbreviation “T4”). Grafeneck, Brandenburg, Bernburg, Hartheim (near Linz), Sonnenstein and Hadamar were the towns where the murders took place. The staff of these killing institutions later worked in concentration camps such as Auschwitz, Treblinka, Sobibor, and Belzec. The buses were painted gray, with even the windows also painted gray.

         The “Monument of the Grey Buses” serves as a reminder of the transports of the patients to their deaths. The artists Horst Hoheisel and Andreas Knitz designed
the monument for the Weißenau Psychiatric Centre near Ravensburg in 2006. A bus based on the same model as the one that drove from the hospitals to the death camps in the years 1940 and 1941, in its original size and concrete form, commemorates the mass murder. “Where are you taking us?” – the question of one of the patients - is inscribed on the bus monument.

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