In recent years, two Italian publishers have brought out landmark volumes on Operation T4—a choice of profound significance. In 2017, Einaudi released Zavorre. Storia dell'Aktion T4. L'«eutanasia» nella Germania nazista, 1939-1945 by Götz Aly (translated by Daniela Idra), and in 2018 Marsilio published I prescelti by Steve Sem-Sandberg (translated by Alessandra Albertari).
Protocols, reports, expert assessments, letters—Götz Aly, a German journalist and historian, spent more than thirty years gathering an extraordinary archive to produce one of the most comprehensive accounts of Hitler's program to eliminate lives deemed "unworthy of living." Zavorre traces the program's origins, development, and execution, and Aly makes clear that responsibility extends far beyond a handful of perpetrators. Thousands of ordinary Germans didn't merely witness the killing; they actively participated in the genocide, going well beyond simple obedience to orders. Aly also examines the sudden halt to the T4 program in 1941—though murders continued until the war's end—and credits this pause to military setbacks, growing German disillusionment with Nazism, and above all to the Catholic Church's resistance. Three sermons delivered between July and August 1941 by Clemens August von Galen, the Bishop of Münster, proved decisive. He denounced the killing of "those unfit for work, the crippled, the incurably ill, the weak and elderly." Those words shattered the silence surrounding atrocities that many knew of but pretended not to see.
Swedish writer and journalist Steve Sem-Sandberg dedicated I prescelti to the children murdered in Operation T4, particularly those tortured and killed between 1940 and 1945 at the Spiegelgrund clinic in Vienna, and to the adults who participated in the horror. The novel weaves together the stories of Adrian Ziegler, a young patient, and Anna Katschenka, a nurse. Adrian survived the killings but carried the scars for life—compounded by his own country's failure to reckon with the past. Anna was tried in 1948 for crimes at the clinic, convicted despite a full confession, and sentenced to only eight years; she served four before returning to work as a pediatric nurse.
Sem-Sandberg undertook equally rigorous research. In Vienna, he discovered the so-called Totenbuch, the "Book of the Dead"—a meticulous record kept by the clinic's doctors. Names, ages, physical and psychological descriptions, dates of admission and death. But it was the photographs that shook him. About eighty percent of the children in those pictures were smiling. "What else would a child do when a man in a white coat appears with a funny camera? A child's nature is to trust and smile. All those children trusted these people, who were there to kill them." Seeing over 800 young faces, all of them smiling back at the camera, hit him like a shock wave. Reading only the names would be "mere abstraction," he realized. "But seeing those smiles has an overwhelming power. I wanted those names and faces to become individuals again."