On March 26, 1945, as United States Army units advanced into central Germany, they liberated the Hadamar State Hospital, a psychiatric clinic that had served as one of the 6 principal killing facilities in the Nazi regime’s so-called euthanasia program. What they encountered were catastrophic conditions. More than 500 patients remained inside the institution, many of them starved and weakened by systematic neglect and deliberate malnutrition. Although American medical personnel provided emergency care and additional rations, the assistance came too late for several of the victims. In the days and weeks following liberation, a number of patients died from the cumulative effects of prolonged abuse and deprivation.
An investigation began immediately. Key members of the hospital administration who remained on site were arrested and interrogated. Among those taken into custody was the deputy head nurse, Karl Willig.
Karl Willig had been born in 1894 in the town of Gräveneck, then part of the German Empire. During the early 1930s, Germany was gripped by economic and political crisis. The worldwide depression had devastated the German economy. Millions were unemployed. Widespread frustration was directed at the parliamentary government, which many citizens regarded as weak and incapable of restoring stability or national dignity after Germany’s defeat in World War I. Fear of further decline and anger at perceived humiliation created fertile conditions for radical political movements.
In 1932, Willig joined the National Socialist German Workers’ Party. A coworker would later describe him as a “fanatical National Socialist.” On January 30, 1933, Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany by President Paul von Hindenburg. Once in power, the regime rapidly implemented racial policies rooted in the ideology of eugenics, often termed “racial hygiene,” a late 19th- and early 20th-century movement that claimed to improve the genetic quality of a population through selective reproduction.
Under National Socialist rule, medical professionals became central agents in implementing these doctrines. Individuals defined as “hereditarily ill”—those with mental, physical, or certain social disabilities—were portrayed as both a genetic and financial burden upon the German state. In 1933, the regime enacted the Law for the Prevention of Offspring with Hereditary Diseases, commonly known as the Hereditary Health Law. This legislation mandated the compulsory sterilization of individuals diagnosed with 9 specified conditions, including schizophrenia. Ultimately, approximately 400,000 Germans were forcibly sterilized under this law.
Hitler personally authorized the decriminalization of abortion in cases where fetuses were deemed racially or hereditarily defective by medical authorities. In contrast, abortion of healthy “Aryan” fetuses remained strictly prohibited. In 1935, the Marital Hygiene Law further prohibited marriage between individuals considered genetically “inferior” and those defined as healthy “Aryans.”
These measures formed the ideological and administrative foundation for a far more radical policy: the systematic murder of institutionalized individuals with disabilities. The clandestine euthanasia program began in 1939, approximately 2 years before the systematic mass murder of Europe’s Jews commenced under what became known as the “Final Solution.” The euthanasia initiative sought to eliminate those labeled “life unworthy of life,” individuals whom regime officials claimed imposed both genetic and economic burdens upon the German nation.
In the spring and summer of 1939, planners organized a secret operation targeting disabled children. After the outbreak of World War II on September 1, 1939, the program expanded to include institutionalized adults. Hitler signed a secret authorization, backdated to September 1, 1939, to shield participating physicians, nurses, and administrators from prosecution. This authorization gave legal cover to what became known internally as “T4,” named after the address of the Führer Chancellery in Berlin.
Under the leadership of Philipp Bouhler, director of the Führer Chancellery, and physician Karl Brandt, T4 operatives established 6 centralized killing facilities. One of these was the state hospital at Hadamar.
Hadamar had been founded in 1883 as a correctional institution for released prisoners and converted into a mental health facility in 1906. During the early years of National Socialist rule, overcrowding, inadequate food rations, and reduced nursing care led to deteriorating conditions. In late August 1939, the institution ceased operating as a psychiatric facility and was converted into a military hospital. By November 1940, it had been remodeled as a euthanasia killing center under the code name “Anstalt E.”
In mid-January 1941, Hadamar began functioning as a gassing facility. For the next 8 months, buses transported patients daily to the site. Approximately 100 staff members operated the killing process. Victims were received, weighed, photographed, and then led to a gas chamber disguised as a shower room in the cellar. Bottled carbon monoxide gas was used to asphyxiate them. The bodies were cremated in ovens attached to the facility. Ashes were collected, placed in urns, and sent to families along with falsified death certificates listing fictitious causes and dates of death.
Between January and August 1941, approximately 10,000 mentally and physically disabled individuals were murdered at Hadamar under Operation T4. In July 1941, Karl Willig began working there, first as an orderly and later as deputy head nurse. In the summer of 1941, staff members reportedly celebrated the cremation of the 10,000th victim with beer and wine. Crematorium ovens frequently contained 2 corpses at once, and incomplete cremations often produced thick, acrid smoke that hung over the town.
Public protest led to the formal suspension of centralized gassings in August 1941. However, the killings resumed in a different form in 1942. From that year until the end of the war in May 1945, Hadamar personnel murdered an additional 4,400 victims, primarily through lethal overdoses of medication and deliberate starvation.
Willig, along with other nurses and chief physician Adolf Wahlmann, participated in selecting victims and administering overdoses or enforcing food deprivation. The victims included German citizens with disabilities, elderly persons from bombed cities who were disoriented or infirm, children classified as “half-Jewish,” forced laborers and their disabled children, and German as well as foreign Waffen-SS soldiers deemed psychologically incurable.
Willig developed a reputation for brutality. After the war, he admitted that he had worked at Hadamar voluntarily. No one had threatened him with imprisonment in a concentration camp if he refused. He had not sought dismissal. He later stated that he remained in his position because leaving would have cost him his pension.
Among those murdered at Hadamar were not only German nationals but also foreign forced laborers. At one point, the staff was informed that Polish and Soviet laborers suffering from tuberculosis would be transported to the facility and “liquidated.” Willig accompanied one of the transports from the nearby town of Limburg an der Lahn. The victims were given sedatives, including veronal or chloral hydrate, and subsequently killed. The following morning, the chief physician confirmed their deaths.
In total, historians estimate that the euthanasia program in all its phases claimed approximately 250,000 lives.
After the liberation of Hadamar in March 1945, American authorities sought to prosecute those responsible. However, they encountered a legal obstacle. Under prevailing interpretations of international law, U.S. military tribunals lacked jurisdiction to try German nationals for murdering German citizens. A prosecutorial avenue emerged, however, in the killing of 476 Soviet and Polish forced laborers who were citizens of Allied nations.
On October 15, 1945, a U.S. military tribunal convened to try 7 Hadamar defendants associated with the murders of these foreign victims. Chief prosecutor Leon Jaworski secured convictions against all of them. The tribunal sentenced chief administrator Alfons Klein and nurses Heinrich Ruoff and Karl Willig to death by hanging.
On March 14, 1946, at Bruchsal Prison, Karl Willig was executed. As he was led to the gallows, he declared, “I did my duty as a German official. God is my witness.” He was 51 or 52 years old.
No public mourning accompanied his death. His execution marked one of the earliest postwar prosecutions of Nazi medical personnel and underscored the central role that ordinary administrators and nurses had played in implementing policies of systematic murder.
