The victims shown here were among the first people targeted by Nazi Germany's organised programme of mass murder. Under the Aktion T4 programme, thousands of children and adults with physical disabilities, learning disabilities and mental illnesses were labelled as "life unworthy of life" and systematically murdered between 1939 and 1945. Their persecution marked the beginning of the Nazi regime's policy of state-sponsored killing and provided many of the methods, personnel and technologies later used during the Holocaust.

Although officially presented as a medical programme, Aktion T4 was driven by Nazi racial ideology and the belief that those considered "unfit" had no place in German society. Doctors, nurses and administrators became active participants in the programme, while specially constructed gas chambers and crematoria were first used at the killing centres of Hadamar, Hartheim, Bernburg, Sonnestein, Brandenburg and Grafeneck. Other institutions, including Kaufbeuren-Irsee, also became sites of systematic murder through starvation, neglect and lethal injections. Many of the personnel who organised and carried out these crimes later played leading roles in Operation Reinhard, where they helped oversee the extermination camps of Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka.

The individuals featured here represent only a small number of the thousands of victims whose lives were deliberately erased by the Nazi regime. Behind every photograph was a person with a family, ambitions and a future that was taken from them. Their stories remind us that the Holocaust did not begin with the extermination camps, but with discrimination, dehumanisation and the systematic persecution of those whom the Nazis considered undesirable.

Behind every name and face was a person with a family, hopes and dreams. By remembering them, we honour their humanity and preserve the historical truth of one of the darkest chapters of Nazi persecution.