[Relationships. Art-affined physicians, gifted artist patients and the debate on art from a psychiatric context after 1945].

Background: In 1945 the artist and art collector J. Dubuffet coined the term Art brut for original works by psychiatric inmates that had been created outside of traditions and art movements. In the following decades these works were at the center of negotiation processes in which not only psychiatrists but also exhibition organizers, gallery owners etc.

[Clinical "Experience" as a Criterion of Evidence? Psychiatric Contributions to a Post-War Debate on a "Reform of Medicine" and the Development of Jürg Zutt's "Understanding Anthropology"].

At the Wiesbaden Internist Congress of 1949, Alexander Mitscherlich and Viktor von Weizsäcker called for an expansion of the scientific concept of causality to include the search for the meaning of illness in one's personal history. This called into question a traditional psychiatric paradigm which presumed somatic causes of mental illness. Additionally, common psychiatric evidence practices were put to the test.

[Murdering the sick in the name of progress? The Heidelberg psychiatrist Carl Schneider as a brain researcher and "therapeutic idealist"].

The biography of the Heidelberg Professor of Psychiatry Carl Schneider (1891-1946) represents a combination of a quest for psychiatric reform, pronounced interest in brain research, and commitment to the first systematic extermination of a minority during the Nazi era, the murder of psychiatric patients. Guided by a biological concept that included the individual and his environment and thus interpreting the interactive and social sphere from a purely biological viewpoint, Schneider considered cure and extermination as two sides of the same coin. Psychiatric patients should receive intensive "biological" therapy, but if they were incurable and could not be integrated into society, they lost their reason for existence also in the biological sense.

[Nazi action T4 euthanasia programme: historical research, individual life stories and the culture of remembrance].

The psychiatric patients killed under the disguise of euthanasia during World War II belong to the group of victims which are often forgotten in public remembrance. For German and Austrian psychiatry it is important to include them into the memory of the discipline as well as into European remembrance of the victims of Nazi annihilation policy. The patient files of the victims enable us to reconstruct the criterion of economic usefulness for deciding about life or death.

[The province of East Prussia and "euthanasia" during national socialism: the SS-"Aktion Lange" and "Aktion T4"].

During World War II, psychiatric patients hospitalized in asylums in Eastern Prussia became victims of two separate killing programmes: first, by the SS-special command Lange, second by the centrally (in Berlin) organized "euthanasia"-"Aktion T4". By an analysis of the patient files of the victims, the present paper shows that the historical actors responsible for the killings were communicating with each other. It is now also possible to reconstruct the exact dynamic in time and space of the killings.

[Victims of Nazi euthanasia, the so-called T4 action. First results of a project at the German Federal Archives to disclose records of killed patients].

In 1990, previously unknown documents dated from the Nazi era were found in Berlin. They had been preserved in the central archives of the Ministry for State Security (MfS), the secret service of the now former German Democratic Republic (GDR). Nearly 30,000 psychiatric patient files turned out to comprise the smaller part of the records of patients who had been murdered in the 1940/41 "T4 action".

[Hereditary psychological research in the context of "euthanasia": new documents and aspects on Carl Schneider, Julius Deussen and Ernst Rüdin].

Ernst Rüdin (1874-1952), director of the Deutsche Forschungsanstalt für Psychiatrie in Munich, was one of the leading psychiatrists in Nazi Germany. Prevailing historical research on Rüdin's relation to the systematic annihilation of psychiatric patients is dominated by the only hitherto available biographical account which suggests that Rüdin privately disapproved of the "euthanasia" program, but did not make this disapproval public. According to this account, neither Rüdin nor any of his co-scientists were in any way actively involved in the systematic killings.

[Innovation and extermination--psychiatric research and "euthanasia" at the Heidelberg Psychiatric Clinic 1939-1945].

The history of German psychiatry is characterized not only by innovative thought in the tradition of Kraepelin and Jaspers, but also by the "euthanasia" program that resulted in the killing of more than 100,000 psychiatric patients and mentally handicapped people. Exemplified by the Psychiatric Department at the University of Heidelberg, the relation between psychiatric research and the systematic killing of patients during the time of National Socialism is analysed. The first part of the paper summarizes the historical background of the general condition of German psychiatry in the 1930s and 1940s.