Adolf Wahlmann (1876 – 1956)

Psychiatrist Adolf Wahlmann was born in Koblenz-Ehrenbreitstein in 1876. After studying medicine and getting his licence to practice medicine, he worked in several state hospitals in Hesse-Nassau, such as in Weilmünster, Eichberg and Hadamar. From early on he was interested in new therapies, which he, as an institutional doctor, also used after 1933.

He joined the National Socialist Party in 1933 and the SS in 1934. In September 1933, he became a senior physician in Hadamar, where he had already worked from 1908 to 1911. Exempted from normal duties in 1936, he was put into service again in Weilmünster – a T4 intermediate institution – in 1940. In August 1942, he was once again sent to Hadamar. As Chief Medical Officer and Medical Director, he was responsible here for the killing of more than 4,400 inpatients by overdoses of medicine or deliberate starvation. The victims included not only hospital patients, but also institutional Jewish »half-breeds« or forced labourers who had become ill with tuberculosis.

Due to these murders, a US court sentenced him to life imprisonment in October 1945 (»Hadamar Trial«). He was sentenced to death in a second trial at the Regional Court of Frankfurt am Main, but this was commuted to a prison sentence. In 1953, he was pardoned and released and he died in the town of Michelfeld in Baden-Württemberg in 1956.