The Nazi murder of psychiatric patients in Grossschweidnitz 1939–1945
The Memorial Site honours the memory of the more than 5,500 women, men, and children who were murdered at the Großschweidnitz State Institution (Landesanstalt) between 1939 and 1945.
Opened in 1902, the Großschweidnitz State Institution was a modern facility for the accommodation and treatment of people with learning disabilities and mental disorders in eastern Saxony. It was one of numerous new psychiatric hospitals that were established in the German Reich at the turn of the twentieth century.
This development also met with criticism. For one thing, the cost of running institutions of this kind was considered too high. For another, there were fears that people with such conditions might pass them on to their offspring. Therefore, particularly after the First World War, there were calls for “mentally defective” people to be sterilized.
The Nazis embraced these demands and made them the core of their health policy when they came to power in 1933. Their aim was to create a healthy German “Volksgemeinschaft” or “national community” based on ideas of race, ethnicity, and conventional social behaviour. People with intellectual disabilities or mental illness had no place in it. From 1934 onwards, hundreds of thousands of people who were classified as “hereditarily ill” were forcibly sterilized. The propaganda portrayed them as a danger and as “useless eaters.” In Saxony, as early as 1938, the Ministry of the Interior ordered the reduction of food rations for patients who were unable to work. For many of the residents at Großschweidnitz, hunger became part of everyday life.
The decision to murder psychiatric patients was made shortly after the start of the war in 1939. Adolf Hitler personally ordered the killing of people with learning disabilities and mental disorders. This led to the first wave of industrial-scale mass murder by the Nazis. Over 70,000 people died agonizing deaths in gas chambers at six central “killing centres”. One such centre was located at Pirna-Sonnenstein, starting in June 1940. Großschweidnitz served as a “transit institution”, with more than 2,300 people, mainly from Saxony, Silesia, and East Prussia, being transported from there to Pirna, where they were murdered. In August 1941, Hitler ordered the centralized murder of sick and disabled people to be discontinued. However, this did not mean that people stopped dying in German sanatoriums and nursing homes.
In the winter of 1940, the first murder of children from Katharinenhof Großhennersdorf (an institution for mentally handicapped children) took place in Großschweidnitz. As the war progressed, more and more people died here. Under the management of the director Alfred Schulz, doctors, nurses, and carers murdered the people entrusted to them by means of overdoses of sedatives, neglect, and starvation. Those affected were mainly people who were unable to work and required nursing care. The victims came from many parts of the German Reich, but people also died here who had been brought from occupied countries to work as forced labourers. Shortly before the end of the war, provision for the patients came to an almost
complete stop.
Many of the victims were buried in the hospital cemetery.
