Irmgard Huber

Irmgard Huber was born in 1901 in Hadamar in Hessen, Germany, trained as a nurse, entered the profession in 1932 and rose to be head nurse of the Hadamar Clinic, a major psychiatric facility. From late 1939 the Hadamar site was run as one of six main centres of Action T4, the secret Nazi programme of sterilization and so-called euthanasia, where nearly 15,000 people with physical or mental disabilities were murdered, children first and then adults. Her entry is kept in this atlas as part of the history of nursing under the Nazi regime, as a record of what was done and judged, and not as an example of care. After 1945 a United States military court found that she had helped select patients for murder, had falsified death certificates and had controlled the supply of the drugs used for lethal overdoses; she was convicted as an accomplice and sentenced to 25 years. A later German court added eight years for the murder of German citizens. Her sentence was reduced and she was released in the early 1950s. Sources disagree on the year of her death.