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[1109] Tower of Remembrance

Description

The 470 Jewish and non-Jewish "euthanasia" victims from the former Lohr mental hospital, as well as all others murdered by the Nazis, have been commemorated since 1993, and since 2019, through the new memorial "Tower of Remembrance" by the sculptor Heike Metz. It is a memorial of the Lower Franconia district, which is also the owner of the Lower Franconia Hospital (BKH), the former mental hospital in Lohr am Main.
People with mental illness and physical or mental disabilities were considered "useless and inferior" in the inhuman ideology of National Socialism. From 1933, they were often forcibly sterilized. From the beginning of the war in 1939, the "ballast existences" were selected and murdered on Hitler's orders. The murder operation was centrally controlled from Berlin in specially established killing centers of the German Reich. Under the guise of "euthanasia," the so-called T4 action claimed over 70,000 victims from 1940 to 1941. According to a plaque text at the memorial, more than 200,000 patients were Nazi victims by 1945.