Austria to look for 220 patients killed in Nazi era
By DPA, IANSMonday, January 3, 2011
VIENNA - Austrian experts will start excavations at a grave site in March to look for up to 220 victims of a Nazi-era medical killing programme, the hospital owning the location said Monday.
Construction work at a psychiatric clinic in Hall in Tyrol province was stopped as soon as research showed that the building site had possibly been a burial ground for victims of the National Socialist regime between 1942 and 1945.
Hospital operator Tilak said it had installed an expert commission.
“The dead shall be identified, the cause of their deaths shall be established and the graveyard shall be salvaged in a scientifically correct way,” Tilak spokesman Johannes Schwamberger said.
The clinic was already in operation in the 1940s. Historians assume that 100 to 360 psychiatric patients were killed in the so-called euthanasia programme.
