The paper stresses that in general, murdered psychiatric patients as a victim group are scarcely represented in regional or national remembrance culture. That this is also true for the Kocborowo/Konradstein victims may be for a number of different reasons, one of them being that the psychiatric files are written at least partly in German. In this regard, German historians can contribute to Polish research and Polish remembrance culture—for example, with a commemorative book and its online representation on the memorial portal www.gedenkort-t4.eu . The stories of murdered patients show the direct force of destruction which patients in the occupied former Polish territories were exposed to. All in all, around 15,000 patients had lived in Konradstein until the start of World War II in 1939. On the eve of war, the asylum was overbooked, housing as many as 2,100 patients in 1,600 beds. On September 22 the patients of Kocborowo, under the guise of transfer to another medical institution, began to be moved to the Szpęgawski Forest, where they were shot. This action lasted on and off until mid-January 1940, by which time approximately 1,692 patients were killed (854 women and 838 men). Beginning in 1940, a so-called Kinderfachabteilung—children’s special ward—was established in part of the asylum. Konradstein then became a part of the juvenile euthanasia program that was directed against children and young persons under the age of 16 who were mentally and/or physically disabled and carried out in over 30 centres in the Third Reich. The role of local and regional authorities was of utmost importance. They were the ones who decided to get rid of patients, and they provided the means to do it. They recognized windows of opportunity and used them in accordance with the general “annihilation frenzy” that was quite a common phenomenon in those formerly Polish lands.
Rotzoll et al. (Wed,) studied this question.