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. The second part gives an outline of the biography and work of Carl Schneider (1891-1946), head of the Psychiatric Department at Heidelberg until 1945. It can be shown that the call for intensive therapy for those patients who were to be reintegrated into society was connected with the killing of those who were considered to be beyond reach of any active therapeutic approach. This is also the context of C.Schneider's research program concerning mentally handicapped children. The historical reconstruction of research activities, drawing on the patients' files and other documents, reveals that out of 52 children who had been examined, 20 were killed in the asylum of Eichberg in order that their brains might be examined in Heidelberg. The findings are discussed in view of the ongoing historiographical debate on the relationship between the politics of National Socialism and contemporary science.

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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". More than 70,000 patients of psychiatric asylums were killed by gas in this first campaign of extermination during Nazism, and their files were believed to have been lost. Based on a project to be funded by the German Research Association, this paper offers a brief survey of the developments in historical research about Nazi "euthanasia" and the theories interpreting historical information. The paper will also present a research project dedicated to the memory of the victims of the "T4 action" and to the rediscovered files now conserved in the German Federal Archives in Berlin. The aim is to offer a systematic analysis of 3,000 records in an effort to contribute to the perception of the victims as individuals. The analysis will also include an examination of the selection criteria stipulated by the Nazi psychiatrists (hereditary illness, incurability, and incapacity to work productively) to select patients for extermination. In this way, the decision-making process, criteria, and motives that led to the killing should become more clear. This empirical analysis will help to answer questions concerning the proportion of eugenic and economic motivations and the Nazi rationale behind the extermination campaigns. The project will build upon an earlier preliminary study of a nonrepresentative sample of 185 files. As a preliminary result, it can be said that most of the victims had been hospitalised over long terms and classified as schizophrenic or feeble-minded. A third of the patients killed were considered invalid and not working, and almost 50% were described as working "mechanically". Five per cent of the victims were working "productively".