Albert Widmann

Albert Widmann was an SS officer and German chemist who worked for the Action T4 euthanasia program. He was convicted in two separate trials in the West German courts in the 1960s for his criminal activities during World War II. Widmann took part in the early discussions about killing methods, participated in the first Brandenburg gassing experiment, tested gassing and dynamiting in the occupied parts of the Soviet Union and, through KTI, obtained the necessary gas and poisons for T-4. An estimated 5,000 children had been murdered by this program by the end of the war. One of Widmann's main goals was to minimize the impact that the killings bore upon the killers, and to find a simpler way to kill the mentally diseased. He contacted other headquarters and contacted them by shooting them and other patients. He also experimented with dynamite as a means to kill patients, and also tested ways to pipe gas from a motor exhaust to the interior of a chamber of a euthanasia center. He died in 1986 at the age of 69, and was buried in Stuttgart.