After the receipt of this order, an organization was set up to execute this program, Karl Brandt headed the medical section and Philipp Bouhler, the administrative section. The defendant Hoven, as chief surgeon of the Buchenwald concentration camp, took part in the program and personally ordered the transfer of at least 300 to 400 Jewish inmates of different nationalities, mostly non-German, to their death in the euthanasia station at Bernburg. The defendants Brack and Blome participated in their capacities as assistants to Bouhler and Conti. Questionnaires were forwarded to the Ministry of the Interior from the various institutes and were then submitted to Karl Brandt and his staff for an expert opinion in order to determine the status of each patient. Then each of those experts indicated his opinion as to the eventual disposition of the patient; that is, whether or not the patient should be transferred to a killing station. The questionnaires were supposedly returned to the Ministry of the Interior, which, in turn, sent lists of the doomed patients to the different insane asylums, ordering the directors of the asylums to hand over the patients to a thing called the General Sick Transport Corporation for transfer to the particular stations where the killings took place. This Transport Corporation was not a real organization, but one of the code names used to disguise the true nature of the activities. The patients were then transferred to the station where they were immediately killed. This entire procedure took place without the consent of the relatives, but the relatives did receive a death certificate on which the cause of death was falsified. The Euthanasia Program was an open secret in top Nazi circles. However, every possible effort had been made to keep it from the public in order to avoid intervention by the churches. In spite of all these precautions, it became commonly known in Germany as early as the summer of 1940 that these killings were going on and church authorities, as well as various legal officials, tried in vain to stop the killings. Typical of the letters reaching the Minister of Justice and the Minister of Interior is the following: Addressed to The Reich Minister of Justice: “I have a schizophrenic son in a Wuerttemberg mental institution. I am shocked about the following absolutely reliable information.