“Whereas Holocaust victims are commemorated by name, the situation for commemorating Nazi victims with mental and physical disabilities remains fragmented,” stated Paul Weindling.
The conference continued with a focus on Western and Eastern occupied Europe. The situation in the west was discussed using the examples of France and the Netherlands. While there was no centrally organised murder of psychiatric patients in the Netherlands, Cecile aan de Stegge pointed out the extremely high mortality rate in psychiatric hospitals - more than 10 % - while the mortality rate within the Dutch population at large reached only 2.5 % in the same time period between 1940 and 1945.
Jewish patients, doctors and medical staff were deported and most of them were murdered. A similar situation occurred in France where the mortality rate of psychiatric patients rose significantly due to starvation. But the intention to murder people with disabilities by starvation cannot be found, as Isabelle von Bueltzingsloewn explained.
An entirely different situation was to be seen in occupied territories in Eastern Europe as the presentations on Bohemia and Moravia, Poland and the Baltic states showed. Concerning Czechoslovakia, as Michal Simunek pointed out, the German occupiers made a distinction between inhabitants of German origin, who were included in the Action T4 and therefore murdered in Hartheim and Pirna-Sonnenstein, and people of Czech origin who were excluded.
Miejsce Pamięci Camp des Milles (Fotografie do artykułu: Fondation du Camp des Milles – Mémoire et Éducation)
All images in the article: IHRA