Paul Braune was a pastor who worked as the director of a psychiatric facility near Berlin called Hoffnungstaler Anstalten Lobetal.1 When rumors surfaced in early 1940 that residents of German psychiatric institutions were being killed, Braune spent more than two months investigating the murders. In July 1940 he completed a 12-page report that he titled “The Planned Transfer of Residents from Healing and Care Facilities.” This report documented the early phases of the Nazis’ so-called T4 program—a systemic campaign to murder people with mental and physical disabilities. Protestant church leaders then formally submitted Braune’s report to the office of German Chancellor Adolf Hitler. The featured translation of the report was submitted as evidence in the Doctors' Trial at Nuremberg, which took place in 1946–47.2
While Braune did not list the methods used to kill the victims at hospitals and psychiatric institutions, he included many other details. This memorandum—a copy of which is featured here—describes transports of patients between facilities, the Nazi government’s takeover of certain hospitals, individual patient histories, numbers of people murdered, and the alleged reasons for their deaths. In addition to submitting the memorandum to the Reich Chancellery, Braune and his colleague Friedrich von Bodelschwingh3 met with several government officials to share the findings and express concern about the government’s actions.
Braune anticipated that his investigation could have negative consequences for him. In a letter written to Bodelschwingh on May 10, 1940, Braune addressed the possibility that the regime might attempt to punish or silence him. He wrote, “In any case, to this point I have done what I could and have tried to ensure that the voice of the Church will not remain silent in these ongoing negotiations."4
Only weeks after he submitted his report, Gestapo agents searched Braune’s home, seized his files, arrested him, and held him in so-called “protective custody” at the Gestapo prison Prinz-Albrecht-Straße.5 He was released on October 31, 1940, after Bodelschwingh and other colleagues petitioned on his behalf. Braune wrote after the war that Gestapo officials had demanded that he sign a declaration that he “would not undertake anything against the state and the party."6
Despite the personal consequences Braune faced, the memorandum did not stop the T4 program. The following summer, in August 1941, another Christian leader, Catholic Bishop Clemens August von Galen, condemned the government’s murder of people with disabilities in a sermon that was widely circulated. The sermon coincided with growing public opposition to the murders and shortly thereafter Hitler ordered a public halt to the program, although it secretly continued in a different form for the remainder of the war.
Braune survived the war and gave several postwar interviews about his experiences. He continued to work on behalf of the Lobetal care facility in postwar East Germany until his death in 1954. In 1953, Braune led a successful campaign to prevent Communist state authorities from taking control of the facility.7