Remembering psychiatric patients murdered by the Nazi regime in Germany

Abstract

Only recently have people with mental illnesses and learning disabilities been considered victims of National Socialist politics. In 2010, at the initiative of its President, Frank Schneider, the German Association for Psychiatry and Psychotherapy (DGPPN) finally offered its “sincerest apologies…to all the victims and their families who suffered such injustice and pain at the hands of the German associations and their psychiatrists”. Schneider admitted that he felt that the apology came “shamefully late”. According to studies done in the 1980s, there were an estimated 200 000 victims in the field of psychiatry. More recent research reveals that more than 300 000 people died of forced starvation, poor care, or a sedative drug overdose. In the period preceding the killings, these people were stigmatised and labelled, mainly as mentally disabled or mentally ill. Within the framework of the so-called Aktion T4 alone, 70 000 people who were disabled or mentally ill were murdered, as described in the DGPPN's travelling exhibition Registered, Persecuted, Annihilated: the Sick and the Disabled under National Socialism. In 1940, the central bureaucratic station in charge of planning the systematic mass killing of patients and people in need of care moved into a villa at Tiergartenstraße 4 in Berlin. In accordance with this address, T4 became the camouflage abbreviation for referring to the station and its murder programme.