Editing Aktion T4 (section)

===Exposure===
In the towns where the killing centres were located, some people saw the inmates arrive in buses, saw smoke from the crematoria chimneys and noticed that the buses were returning empty. In Hadamar, ashes containing human hair rained down on the town and despite the strictest orders, some of the staff at the killing centres talked about what was going on. In some cases families could tell that the causes of death in certificates were false, e.g. when a patient was claimed to have died of [[appendicitis]], even though his appendix had been removed some years earlier. In other cases, families in the same town would receive death certificates on the same day.{{sfn|Lifton|1986|p=75}} In May 1941, the Frankfurt County Court wrote to Gürtner describing scenes in Hadamar, where children shouted in the streets that people were being taken away in buses to be gassed.{{sfn|Sereny|1983|p=58}}

[[File:Hans Gerhard Creutzfeldt (ca. 1920).jpg|thumb|upright|left|[[Hans Gerhard Creutzfeldt]] in 1920]]
During 1940, rumours of what was taking place spread and many Germans withdrew their relatives from asylums and sanatoria to care for them at home, often with great expense and difficulty. In some places doctors and psychiatrists co-operated with families to have patients discharged or if the families could afford it, transferred them to private clinics beyond the reach of T4. Other doctors "re-diagnosed" patients so that they no longer met the T4 criteria, which risked exposure when Nazi zealots from Berlin conducted inspections. In [[Kiel]], Professor [[Hans Gerhard Creutzfeldt]] managed to save nearly all of his patients.{{sfn|Lifton|1986|pp=80, 82}} Lifton listed a handful of psychiatrists and administrators who opposed the killings; many doctors collaborated, either through ignorance, agreement with Nazi eugenicist policies or fear of the regime.{{sfn|Lifton|1986|pp=80, 82}}

Protest letters were sent to the Reich Chancellery and the Ministry of Justice, some from Nazi Party members. The first open protest against the removal of people from asylums took place at [[Absberg]] in [[Franconia]] in February 1941 and others followed. The SD report on the incident at Absberg noted that "the removal of residents from the Ottilien Home has caused a great deal of unpleasantness" and described large crowds of Catholic townspeople, among them Party members, protesting against the action.{{sfn|Lifton|1986|p=90}} Similar petitions and protests occurred throughout Austria as rumours spread of mass killings at the Hartheim Euthanasia Centre and of mysterious deaths at the children's clinic, {{lang|de|Am Spiegelgrund}} in Vienna. Anna Wödl, a nurse and mother of a child with a disability, vehemently petitioned to Hermann Linden at the Reich Ministry of the Interior in Berlin to prevent her son, Alfred, from being transferred from Gugging, where he lived and which also became a euthanasia center. Wödl failed and Alfred was sent to {{lang|de|Am Spiegelgrund}}, where he was killed on 22 February 1941. His brain was preserved in formaldehyde for "research" and stored in the clinic for sixty years.{{sfn|NEP|2017}}