As of August 1939, midwives and doctors in the German Reich had to report disabled children to the health offices. They sent the reports to a “Reich Committee for the Scientific Registration of Serious Hereditary and Congenital Illnesses”. The forms were actually processed in the Führer’s office. They were then pre-sorted and sent to the three experts of the Reich Committee: the child psychiatrist Hans Heinze (1895-1983) and the paediatricians Werner Catel (1894-1981) and Ernst Wentzler (1891-1973). They decided on the further assessment or the immediate “treatment”, i.e. the killing of the children. The “Reich Committee Children” were placed in one of the 30 specially created “children’s specialist wards” throughout the Reich. There, they were observed and finally either released as capable of development or killed because of the severity of their handicap. By the end of the war, over 5,000 children had died in this way. The “Reich Committee” also decided on force abortions on eugenic ground and on applications for killing on demand.