Magazine of the INTERNATIONAL ASSOCIATION AGAINST PSYCHIATRIC ASSAULT No. 2 – September 2004

 

The
Bernburg case

Bernburg: formerly a psychiatric
extermination institution in the national socialist era, today a psychiatric
and forensic hospital

Memorial plaque
The text shown on the next
website is taken from the memorial plaque which members of the international
organization IAAPA (International Association Against Psychiatric Assault)
installed in the memorial site in Bernburg on May 2, 2004, which is a day
of commemoration of the medical mass murder in Germany in 1939-1948 and the
day of resistance against psychiatric violations of human rights.

From 1939 to
1948 an estimated 300,000 psychiatric prisoners were systematically murdered
in Germany. The murders began with the so-called “Aktion T4”, which lasted
from 1939 to 1941. Altogether at least 275,000 people (according to data of
the Nuremberg Tribunals) were murdered in the periodof 1939 to 1945 – the
end of the National Socialist regime. But the murders by systematic starvation
in the psychiatric prisons in Germany continued up to 1948/49, so that still
25,000 victims must be added to the number given by the Nuremberg Tribunal.

This
was also the case in Bernburg, where a psychiatric institution was established
in 1875. During the late summer of 1940 the “Gemeinnuetzige Stiftung
fuer Anstaltspflege” (“Non-profit Foundation for Institutional Care”),
was given a part of the grounds and there began the so-called “Euthanasia
of mentally ill patients”, a designation used by the National Socialists for
masking the murders, similar to the designation “final solution of the Jewish
question”.

In Bernburg is one of the two still existing gas chambers, in which
8,601 people went to their death during the “Aktion T4”.
After 1945 the systematic
murders continued in the institutions up to 1948 – the same personnel as in
1945 left the inmates to hunger to death by the withdrawing their meal rations.

The
psychiatric institution in Bernburg still exists today and is still in use.
A memorial site, a psychiatric hospital and a forensic ward (psychiatric prison)
are all on the same premises. In this building the former gas chamber and
the dissection area are in the cellar; in floors above are the offices of
the psychiatrists, who today limit themselves to locking people up and inflicting
bodily harm by coercive treatment with psycho-drugs and electrical shocks.
The psychiatric inmates look onto this building from their sleeping quarters
and could – if they were allowed to leave – make an edifying walk to the place
where, had they lived 65 years earlier, they would have been exterminated
for being “degenerated” („Entartete”) and “unworthy of living”
(“Lebensunwerte”). And the entrance to the work therapy can be fouind at the
foot of the chimney of the former cremation oven…

 

Further information
as well as pictures:
www.irren-offensive.de/bernburg.htm

http://www.death-camps.org/euthanasia/bernburg.html

home and imprint