Estonian Psychiatric Hospitals During the German Occupation (1941-1944)

Abstract

During the period of the German occupation (1941-1944), Estonia, along with Latvia, Lithuania, and Belorussia, formed the Ostland Reichkomissariat, an administrative unit created by the German occupation force. Despite the administrative ties, the faces of the occupation differed. There were commonalities (e.g., the extermination of the Jewish population and high death rates due to poor nutritional conditions), but there seems to have been a difference with respect to the extermination policy (euthanasia) of mental patients. Psychiatric patients seem to have escaped extermination in Estonia (perhaps also in Lithuania), but not in Belarus and Latvia. In addition, no evidence exists that sterilizations were carried out in Nazi-occupied Estonia, although several eugenic abortions did take place. The low number of deaths in Lithuania can perhaps be explained by Catholic opposition to the strategies of negative eugenics. Similarly low numbers of deaths in Estonia, where the ideolgy of eugenics was, by contrast, well established may perhaps be explained by racial and administrative particularities. Estonians were declared Aryans by some racial theorists. Even more important must have been the relative cooperation of Estonians with the German occupation, thus diminishing the activities of the Nazi-oriented security forces responsible for the crimes against mental patients in other regions of Ostland. As the same traits also characterized Latvia, the main question to be solved in the future is the etiology of different practices in these two neighboring Baltic states. As of now, the conclusion derived from the attitude toward mental patients in Nazi-occupied Estonia is that Estonians, if collaborating, are best understood as having been pro-German rather than pro-Nazi.