ABSTRACT
The chapter discusses a project which studied four mental hospitals in each of the Allied occupation zones directly after the end of World War II. During the war, these hospitals had been converted into centres for killing ‘useless mouths’ by the Nazi government. The author examines the dire situation found in these asylums by the Allies when they arrived to occupy Germany, and how it changed over the following years. First of all, starvation was still common in the immediate post-war years. Second, new forms of treatment, such as electroconvulsive therapy, psychotropic drugs and psychotherapy were gradually being adopted. Third, although patients diagnosed with ‘schizophrenia’ in its various forms still made up the largest patient group in the asylums, their numbers declined while the number of patients with psychiatric diseases related to old age increased in three of the four asylums under study. Fourth, the changes in the patient groups did not lead to major changes in the distribution of social classes across the asylums’ patient populations – class distribution was more or less the same as it was in the general population. By the early 1950s, changes in the four asylums reflected the ways in which they were trying to lose the stigma of having once been killing centres under the National Socialist rule.
