The War against 'the Inferior':
On the history of Nazi medicine in Vienna.
An exhibition by the Documentation Centre of Austrian Resistance in Vienna's Otto Wagner Hospital

The case of Dr. Heinrich Gross is symptomatic for the way Austria deals with Nazi medical crimes: the former doctor of the Spiegelgrund killing institution was allowed to continue his career and, not least due to his research on victims' brains, rose to be one of the most prominent psychiatrists in the country. The Spiegelgrund survivors, on the other hand, continued to be discriminated against for decades. Not until April 2002 were the mortal remains of 600 Spiegelgrund victims buried. The exhibition The War against 'the Inferior': On the history of Nazi medicine in Vienna is meant to contribute to the public discourse on the topic. Supported by new research, it offers a comprehensive overview going far beyond children's 'euthanasia'.

In the National Socialist system, medicine took over a new task: the 'weeding out' of people designated as 'inferior'. There was no room in the performance-orientated Volksgemeinschaft for the handicapped, the mentally sick, for members of social fringe groups and nonconformists. They were persecuted, imprisoned and abandoned to destruction. The Heil- und Pflegeanstalt Steinhof (today's Otto Wagner Hospital) developed in the years after the Anschluss of 1938 into the Viennese centre of National Socialist medical murder which was to take the lives of far more than 7,500 Steinhof patients: Between 1940 and 1945 a 'Children's Ward' called 'Am Spiegelgrund' existed on the Steinhof premises in which approximately 800 sick or handicapped children and young people perished.


  1. From Narrenturm to Steinhof: The development of Viennese 'care for the insane'.


  2. Racial delusion and the selective breeding of humans: Eugenics and racial hygiene as the foundations of Nazi ideology.


  3. The 'cleansing of the national body': Medicine in Germany between 1933 and 1938.


  4. Selection and public welfare: Vienna's Main Health Office and 'genetic and racial hygiene'.


  5. The nationalisation of reproduction: Forced sterilisations and marriage prohibitions.


  6. Persecution, expulsion and extermination of the Jews: The contribution made by medicine.


  7. The 'T4 Project': Mass murder of the handicapped and mentally ill.


  8. Diagnosis: useless. The murder of handicapped children in the Spiegelgrund clinic.


  9. 'Permanently unreformable': Nazi coercive education in the Reichsgau of Vienna.


  10. Opposition and resistance to Nazi euthanasia.


  11. Gemeinschaftsfremd: Nazi persecution of deviant behaviour.


  12. Murder by starvation: The mass killing at Steinhof 1940-45.


  13. The post-war years: Tacit amnesty for Nazi doctors and repression of the victims.


  14. The long shadow of Nazi psychiatry: The case of Dr. Heinrich Gross.
Exhibition site:
Pavilion V,
Otto Wagner-Spital,
1 Baumgartner Höhe,
1145 Vienna


Opening hours:
Wednesday + Thursday
10 a.m.-4 p.m.,
Friday 3-8 p.m.
On other days and during school holidays by appointment.


Internet:
www.gedenkstaettesteinhof.at


e-mail:
office@gedenkstaettesteinhof.at



Patients' ward
Patients' ward of the Heil- und Pflegeanstalt 'Am Steinhof', December 1938.


aerial photograph
The Heil- und Pflegeanstalt 'Am Steinhof' in the thirties (Photograph: media wien)


collection of brain specimens
The collection of brain specimens in the prosector's room of the former Steinhof hospital before the burial in April 2002. (Photograph: media wien)


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