The fate of Jews hospitalized in mental hospitals in France during World War II

Abstract

The fate of Jewish psychiatric patients in occupied Europe during World War II is inseparable from the fate of the disabled and mentally ill, as planned by the Nazi regime. But Jews found themselves at the confluence of eugenics, Christian anti-Judaism and Nazi racist and anti-Semitic madness. They faced the twin promise of death – both as Jews and as mentally ill. They did not escape from the euthanasia programme and, if by a miracle they survived, they disappeared into the extermination camps. The modalities of annihilation of Jewish psychiatric patients are inseparable from the forms of German occupation, which differed from country to country. In this research we focus initially on various countries in occupied Europe, and then on France.

Bioethics and the Krankenmorde: Disability and Diversity

“…Less is known about the fate of patients in other occupied territories, such as France, where it is not agreed upon whether the estimated 48,588 patients who died of starvation in psychiatric hospitals between 1940 and 1944-half of all patients-was due to an intentional "euthanasia" policy or because of non-assistance due to the circumstances of war and Occupation(Hohendorf 2016;Mouchenik and Fau-Vincenti 2019; Lemoine and Stahl 2018).8 Bioethics and the Krankenmorde: Disability and Diversity…”