Germany opens memorial for disabled killed during Holocaust

Benjamin Traub, a sad-eyed German boy born in 1914, was considered a bright child by his parents and called gifted by his teachers.

But a schizophrenia diagnosis at the age of 16 put him on a path that would end in a Nazi gas chamber, where he became one of up to 300,000 ill and disabled people, including children, who were murdered under Adolf Hitler's rule.

Those victims will be honoured with a new memorial opening tomorrow in Berlin, in a ceremony attended by political leaders and Traub's nephew Hartmut.

It is to be the fourth and probably final major memorial to the Nazis' victims built in or near Berlin's central Tiergarten park, following sites dedicated over the last decade to Jews, gays and Roma slaughtered in the Holocaust while Hitler was in power.

Traub was admitted to a psychiatric hospital near the Dutch border in 1931.