After patient murder. Structure and daily asylum life of former extermination centres in the four occupation zones 1945-1955

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Due to the murder of the psychiatric patients by the Nazis, Germany occupies a unique place in a negative sense within the history of institutional psychiatry. The low point of National Socialist psychiatric policies is epitomised by those asylums and nursing homes in which the sick were systematically murdered. While the euthanasia crimes have been intensively researched in the last 30 years, little is known about the history of psychiatric hospitals immediately after the war. Efforts to come to terms with the consequences of National Socialism as well as the internal and external reorientation of institutional psychiatry in the post-war era are therefore investigated on the basis of four selected former extermination centres. The starting point of the study is the liberation and subsequent care of the surviving institution inmates by allied troops. One psychiatric asylum was chosen from each of the four occupation zones. They are comparable due to their similarly high numbers of victims during the second phase of National Socialist euthanasia, when patients died by starvation or by overdosed medication: Hadamar Extermination Centre for the American zone, the Oldenburg institution at Wehnen for the British zone, the Palatine asylum at Klingenmünster for the French zone and the Saxon asylum at Großschweidnitz for the Soviet occupation zone. Differences and similarities in the approaches of the four occupying powers are to be focussed on for the purpose of comparison. The project thus examines breaks and/or continuities after the dissolution of the Nazi regime. The effects of the foundation of the Federal Republic of Germany and the German Democratic Republic on the four example institutions will also be investigated. The study covers the period up to the year 1955, when the occupation status of the four zones formally ended. The project will make a significant contribution to the understanding of the as yet barely researched history of psychiatry immediately following the Second World War due to its time frame, its comparative approach and its focus on institutional and patient history.