The stories of 13 British-born disabled victims murdered during the Nazi’s involuntary euthanasia programme, Aktion T4, will be uncovered in a temporary exhibition at Holocaust Centre North.

Opening on October 2, Finding Ivy: A Life Worth Living will delve into the tragic lives of some of the 70,000 adults with mental and physical disabilities who were systematically murdered in killing centres between 1940 and 1941 because they were deemed to be “unworthy of life”.

The exhibition will focus on the 13 British-born victims of the programme, some of whom were from mixed British-German or British-Austrian marriages, who fatefully returned to Germany before the Second World War.

The title refers to Ivy Angerer, who was born to Austrian and German parents in Broughty Ferry, near Dundee, in 1911, and who had learning disabilities.

When Ivy’s Austrian father was rounded up as an enemy alien and imprisoned in an internment camp in Britain, Ivy and her mother travelled back to Germany. In 1916, Ivy’s mother died, when her husband was still in interned. Around 1919, he returned to Vienna with his daughter.

In 1930, Ivy was institutionalized in a large psychiatric hospital in Vienna called Am Steinhof, where she lived and worked in the laundry room. In 1940, she was transported to the Hartheim killing centre at Alkoven in Upper Austria and murdered.

Aktion T4 was named after Berlin headquarters of the euthanasia campaign: 4 Tiergartenstrasse.

Between 1940 and 1941, 70,000 institutionalised adults who were selected for the T4 programme, were transported by bus or trail to one of six killing centres in either Germany of Austria: Brandenburg, Grafeneck, Bernburg, Sonnenstein, Hartheim, and Hadamar.

Within hours of arriving at the centres, victims were killed in gas chambers disguises as showers and then with cremated. Their families — often months later — received an urn from a common pile of ash, along with a death certificate and other documentation listing a fictive cause and date of death.

Though Aktion T4 began in October 1939 and officially ceased in 1941, physicians in German and Austrian asylums continued the euthanasia campaign until the defeat of Germany in 1945, using drug overdose, lethal injection and starvation as more covert methods of killing.

Overall, between 275,000 and 300,000 people were killed under the Nazi’s euthanasia programme in Germany, Austria and Nazi-occupied Europe.

To mark the exhibition opening, a free to attend launch event will take place at the Holocaust Centre North on October 2, with presentations from curators Dr Helen Atherton and Dr Simon Jarrett, alongside Professor Paul Weindling, a historian whose specialism is on psychiatry in Nazi Germany.

Together, they will shed light on their meticulous research that has unearthed these 13 stories.

Ivy Angerer, whose story will be in the Finding Ivy exhibition at Holocaust Centre North (Photo: courtesy of Holocaust Centre North)

It was on a trip in 2010 to Hartheim, Austria, one of the killing centres where the Nazis systematically murdered people with disabilities and mental illnesses, that curator Dr Atherton first found our there were British born victims of Aktion T4.

“I was surprised and obviously shocked. At that point, I couldn't quite understand how they'd managed to get from Britain to Germany and Austria and end up in that situation,” she said.

“Together with Simon, and a team working with us in Germany and Austria, we set about uncovering their stories as we very much wanted to honour them in some way. We used evidence from local, regional and national archives to find out more. “

She also spoke with relatives of the victims, some of whom knew nothing of the truth.

She added: “We are thrilled to bring it to Holocaust Centre North to share and be a part of the remarkable work they are doing to preserve the lives and legacies of those whose lives were affected by the atrocities of Nazi persecution.”

Ivy with her grandmother (Photo: courtesy of Holocaust Centre North)

Dr Simon Jarrett said: “The T4 programme was a precursor to the wider Holocaust and was where the Nazi regime tried and tested its methods to commit genocide, including mass killing by gas, public deception, calming techniques to ensure orderly killing process and recruitment of German civilians into killing programmes.

“Much of the equipment used at T4 killing centres was packed up and sent to be reassembled at the death camps in Poland, and perpetrators of T4 went on to become perpetrators, sometimes at a very senior level, in the Holocaust.

The exhibition will therefore show how the medical profession at all levels “easily and willingly became complicit in mass murder”.

Finding Ivy marks the first time Holocaust Centre North will have hosted an exhibition “which tells the largely untold story of those persecuted and killed under Nazi occupied Germany for having a disability”, according to Hannah Randall, head of learning at the centre.

Tickets for the launch event are free but can be booked in advance here