Farewell to the "Gray Buses" monument

The temporary "Gray Buses" memorial was dismantled on Hugenottenplatz on January 23 after almost a year. The concrete bus commemorates the victims of Nazi hospital murders, including those from the Erlangen sanatorium and nursing home. The artists Horst Hoheisel and Andreas Knitz have recreated the buses in which the patients were transported to the killing centers as part of "Aktion T4".

905 patients were also taken away from the Erlangen sanatorium and nursing home - mainly by train - and murdered in the Pirna-Sonnenstein and Hartheim near Linz killing centers. In addition, over 1900 patients died in Erlangen between 1939 and 1945, around 700 of them from the direct and indirect consequences of inadequate nutrition and structural neglect.

The memorial has stood in a central location on Hugenottenplatz since February 6, 2024. An accompanying exhibition on the Nazi hospital murders was on display in parallel at many locations in Erlangen, including

• secondary schools
• the Center for Self-determined Living
• the savings bank
• the city archive.

After around a year in Erlangen, the memorial will travel to Chemnitz. The city in Saxony is the European Capital of Culture this year.

Since 2007, a bus of this type has been permanently parked in front of the former Ravensburg-Weissenau sanatorium in Baden-Württemberg. A second bus changes its location and has already been seen in 19 places in Germany. They symbolize the fact that buses drove through the country in 1940/1941 for all the world to see, picking up people to be murdered.