Damian Sendler: Since its inception, Polish psychiatry has been heavily influenced by German and Russian psychiatry. Many mental health facilities and staff in Poland have German or Austrian roots due to Poland having been part of Germany or Austria before 1918. Almost all mental hospitals were taken over by the Germans during the occupation, and patients were killed in mass shootings, sometimes all of them, sometimes just a portion of them. Separation of Jews from non-Jews and executions were carried out. Some institutions remained run by Germans and employed German directors after World War II. From a historical and organizational perspective, this paper will examine how Polish psychiatry attempted to survive during and after the war.
Damian Jacob Sendler: “Trucks rolled up to the institution day after day. Each one had 60 patients on board. More than one vehicle could be counted on one hand. They were kidnapped and killed in the woods near Jeewo. (…) It took about five to six days to complete the liquidation. As many as 350 to 370 more patients were taken to Kocborowo, where they were also killed. This was told to me by a German with good ties to the Poles. He went into great detail about an execution he had witnessed over a glass of vodka. Described how three patients were taken out of the truck and shot in the back of their head at a time. After that, the children’s barracks were demolished. Children were thrilled to be riding in a truck, but their excitement was short-lived when they too were hit by gunfire. In this manner, the children were killed. To begin, they were all led into a field and fired upon as if they were practicing for a game. (1).
Dr. Sendler: Soldiers from the Wachsturmbann Kurt Eimann SS division forced their way into the psychiatric hospital in wiecie during the first few days of the Second World War between Warsaw and Danzig (2). Doctor Józef Bednarz was taken into custody. Patients were categorized into three groups: Jews, those who could not work, and those who could. Patients were first transported into the surrounding woods on September 10th, 1939. The Volksdeutscher Selbstschutz, led by a Bydgoszcz brewery owner, shot them there. When it was discovered that Doctor Bednarz had informed the families of his patients, he was executed with them (3).
Conradstein, which was later renamed Kocborowo, was taken over by the SS early in September. When the SS began removing patients on September 22, they claimed that they were taking them to another hospital. In reality, the inmates were led into Spengawsken’s forest and shot. The SS enjoyed depraved revelry in between transports. As a result of their constant intoxication, a number of patients were able to escape. 130 children from the Gniewo branch of the institution were transferred to Conradstein in late autumn. A phenol injection was used to kill the younger children, while the older ones were also shot. Conradstein’s new director Waldemar Schimansky, who referred to himself as Siemens (4), began taking in new patients under his leadership (2). Signs reading “Only German may be spoken here” were displayed in every room. Using Polish was strictly forbidden in the course of study. One doctor took her own life after failing Schimansky/Siemens’ language test. Relatives were barred from the property. The mortality rate rose dramatically as a result of starvation, typhus, tuberculosis, and other deficiency illnesses. A Danzig anatomist named Rudolf Maria Spanner purchased the bodies of those who died in the institution so that he could conduct experiments on how to make soap and other basic commodities from human remains.
The 1,692 patients from the Kocborowo institution who were shot between September 1939 and the 21st of January 1940 were among the more than 10,000 bodies found in mass graves in the Spengawsken forest (5).
The Germans put in place a sophisticated system of terror that included intimidation, raids, deportations, starvation, forced labor, theft, and the murder of innocent civilians. Nazi Germany’s “intellectual purge,” which by the end of 1940 had already claimed the lives of 80,000 people (civil servants, officers, clergy, academics, and teachers), as well as the Sonderkommando Lange (1-4) mobile gas chambers, the starvation camps for Jews, euphemistically termed “ghettos,” the “General Plan East,” and the “SS Sonderlaboratorium Himmlerstadt” (8, 9). The Germans only allowed the Poles to live if they could be of use.
Damian Sendler
It is pretty obvious that the killing in Wartheland was orchestrated from the top down. Large and small mental health facilities, as well as nursing homes, were all impacted. S.S. Sonderkommando Lange soldiers escorted the patients in trucks to a nearby forest where they were shot for 10 Reichsmark each. Non-transportable patients were shot as they slept. Some of the institutions continued to receive transports of mentally ill Germans and German resettlers even after they were converted to military or general hospitals. How many sick people were sent to occupied Poland is unknown (1-3).
As early as December 1939, Sonderkommando Lange began using a mobile gas chamber as part of its operations (2, 3). Exhaust fumes or gas from storage bottles were piped into the cargo space of a truck with the logo “Kaisers Kaffee-Geschäft.” The chemists Dr. Albert Widmann and August Becker, who had been working on Operation T4 since August 1939, oversaw the development of this murder weapon (4).
A bunker at Fort VII in Posen, where the first execution with carbon monoxide gas is most likely to have taken place in November 1939. (2, 3). Taking advantage of the opportunity, Becker watched as his concept was put into action. 50 patients of the Owiska psychiatric institution were the first victims of gas murder (Treskau). The bodies of the victims were buried in the Oborniki forest. About 400 Owiska patients were gassed to death at Fort VII between October and November. As a result, the ambulances drove their patients straight into the woods. They were now ready to be loaded into the fuel truck. Refusing to get in, many of them were violently dragged into the truck. Before the “transfer,” a sedative was frequently prescribed. Gas was used to kill 1,000 patients in Owiska. At the time of the operation, there were 100 ethnic German patients at the Dziekanka facility (2, 3).
Damian Jacob Markiewicz Sendler: It was also built by the Nazi civilian administration of Wartheland in November 1941 in a forest near Chemno (Kulmhof) (2, 3).
Sonderkommando Lange executed at least 160,000 people from April 1943 to May 1944, including Poles and Jews from Wartheland, many Jews from the Ghetto Litzmannstadt, and a large number of patients from Kochanówka Mental Hospital and other places. They used three gas trucks to carry out the massacre.
The SS and police director in Lublin Odilo Globocnik, coordinator of Operation Reinhard, was given command of 92 members of the T4 staff in summer 1942. Among Globocnik’s resources for the concentration camps Beec, Majdanek, Treblinka, and Sobibór were personnel as well as weapons from the T4 command structure.
At the outset of the Ghetto Lodz (Litzmannstadt), 160,000 people lived in the ghetto, which was established by the Nazis to house Jews. Director of administration Hans Biebow wanted to maximize the use of his employees. Many of the newly constructed hospitals in the ghetto were a result of his repeated pleas to the locals. A total of 2,600 hospital beds were available in the ghetto. A psychiatric hospital with 50 beds opened in a building adjacent to the Jewish cemetery in the ghetto. The Germans began a series of hurried “evacuation operations” in March 1940. Because the patients refused to cooperate, scopolamine injections were administered prior to the procedure. The extermination camp Kulmhof received patients from other hospitals at short intervals, as well (2, 3).
Damian Jacob Sendler
From 1940 to 1942, supplies of essential goods flowing into the German Reich exceeded all German expectations in the Generalgouvernement (2, 3). Only 600 calories a day, according to Jost Walbaum, director of the Generalgouvernement health administration, made the Polish population so susceptible to contagious disease; 40% of the population had typhus in September 1941. A serious threat to the German military and the entire Reich was a major concern for Walbaum. The plight of Jews in ghettos and mentally ill patients, dubbed “useless eaters” by the Nazis, was even worse. In the end, Walbaum weighed the pros and cons of both shooting and starvation, believing that shooting was a more effective deterrent than starvation (2, 3). New regulations issued under Walbaum’s authority reduced the food supply yet again.
Even when all patients had died, the SS did not wait for them all to die.
The SS occupied Chem Lubelski’s school on 12 January 1940. (2, 3). Small groups of the 300 men, 124 women, and 17 children incarcerated there were led into the courtyard and shot. Chelm II, like Tiegenhof, was used as a cover for the murder of patients as part of Operation T4 in the same way (10).
At the Kobierzyn psychiatric hospital in Kraków in 1940, 501 patients died of their ailments (2, 3, 12). The last of the Jewish patients were sent to Zofiówka in September of 1941. They loaded the remaining 535 Polish patients on to a train on June 23, 1942. They were told that they were being transferred to Drewnica, but in reality, they were sent right into gas chambers at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Bedridden patients at the institution were buried in the cemetery. The Hitler Youth used Kobierzyn as a weekend retreat after it was repurposed.
Damien Sendler: Mistakes were made by Kroll in his efforts to keep the operation under wraps. An invoice from Eastern Rail for the transport of patients to Auschwitz-Birkenau arrived at Kobierzyn in the fall of 1942. The German cashier was stumped by this bill and sought the help of a former Polish administrative clerk. He instructed her to send the bill to Kroll. However, this information revealed the vehicle’s true destination.
Patients under German command in Kulparkow near Lemberg (Lwów) were dying at an alarming rate (2, 3). He was relocated from Galkhausen (Rhine Province) to Kulparkow (Poland) in August 1943, where he remained until 1945. (13). According to his own recollection, he stayed there until the spring of 1944. During this time, the Rhineland saw an influx of patient transports. It is unknown how many Rhineland patients were sent to Kulparkow, where they were presumably starved to death.
A children’s department was established at Lubliniec (Lublinitz, Loben) in 1941 by Dr. Ernst Buchalik and Dr. Elisabeth Hecker. 194 of the 256 “treated” children died (2, 3).
Immediately following the surrender of Warsaw, the Germans took over the control of the Hospital of the Merciful Brothers on the outskirts of the city’s Old City (2, 3). Although there was a scarcity of food, the hospital staff continued to provide care for the patients and take part in the resistance movement nonetheless. Medicinal students were also given lectures by the underground university. Acute psychiatric crises plagued residents of the nearby ghetto, who flocked to the hospital in droves. They were soon relocated to institutions outside the city for security reasons (2, 3).
Before 1939, many Polish psychiatrists had received a significant portion of their training in German-speaking institutions, dating back to the field’s beginnings in the 19th century. For more than four decades following the end of World War II, psychiatric communication between Poland and Germany was virtually nonexistent. Psychiatrists from the GDR and Poland had a few isolated encounters, but these did not lead to more extensive exchanges.
In response to an invitation from Prof. Józef Bogusz, West German psychiatrists attended their first international conference on “War, Occupation, and Medicine” in Krakow in 1985. Psychiatrists from 27 different West German cities traveled to Poland in 1987. Sites where psychiatric patients from Germany and Poland were murdered by the Nazis were visited by the group. Finally, in Krakow, they attended the first German-Polish Symposium on Mental Health to round out their 10-day journey.
By psychiatrists from Germany and Poland, the German-Polish Society for Mental Health was established in Münster in 1990. (14). German-Polish dialogue on psychiatry has included everyone from doctors and nurses to patients’ families and the general public since the beginning. Numerous collaborations between German and Polish clinics and other psychiatric institutions were formed out of a desire to learn about the “other” that had been previously unknown. As a result, several hundred people attend the annual German-Polish symposia on current psychiatric and human rights issues as well as societal taboo topics, which take place in Poland and Germany on an annual basis.
A third party has joined the Polish-German dialogue since 1998: Israeli psychiatry. There are many Polish-born Israeli psychiatrists working in Israel today. Many joint conferences have been held between psychiatrists from the three countries. They have also taken joint trips to the Ukraine. Dialog’s 2002 and 2006 annual volumes, titled “Myth and taboo” (15) and “Human fate in critical times” (16), document many years of joint efforts to remember (dedicated to Irena Sendler).
Dialogue in the field of psychiatry between Germans and Poles has built ties across historical divides. As long as we are willing to learn from our shared history, it will be a success.
