Home education in Austria

The residential care in Austria is a system of alternative care . It is intended to ensure that children and young people are looked after and looked after outside of their own family or that of another family. Today it is acknowledged that children and young people suffered a lot of harm in this process.

In 1811 children were given the right to an education. Different types of homes developed, which with the beginning of the 20th century became increasingly biopoliticalInfluence stood, which also paved the way for National Socialist racial hygiene in the Second World War. After World War II, child welfare policy reverted almost seamlessly to a bio-political direction. In the shadow of the fascist image of man, the children were stigmatized for three decades as neglected, useless and criminal and were exposed to all kinds of violence, especially medical experiments and forced labor, in private, church and secular homes all over Austria. From 1969 onwards there were public protests, discussions and studies criticizing the practices, but conditions changed only slowly.

From the mid-1970s, the first large homes began to close slowly, and the last homes continued to be locked until the 2000s.

The full extent of the violence as well as the psychological and health consequences for those affected became known through the children's home scandal that began in 2010, after former children in the home went public and reported on the pain they had suffered. Some of them received financial compensation, which varied in amount depending on the paying agency and the severity of the case.

The development of welfare education until 1938

The Bubenburg in Fügen

The currently applicable regulations for childcare and remedial training in Austria originate in the Civil Code of 1811 and the non-contentious law by 1854. By then, were unprovided for children in orphanages or by the poor relief supplies where they were dependent on the goodwill of the commoners and their arms councils. In the ABGB children became a legal subject for the first time , they were granted the right to education and maintenance and it was stipulated that a guardian was to be appointed for children who were not under “paternal authority” . The Non-Disputes Act regulated the judicial procedure for guardianship. A second essential basis was the Heimatgesetz of 1863 , which stated that the welfare of the poor by the communities for children should not only include maintenance and care in the event of illness, but also education. The Reichsgesetzblatt of 1885, with its regulations on detention in forced labor or reformatory institutions, finally formed the basis for introducing "neglected or delinquent minors" to such institutions, from which the educational institutions later emerged. From the amendment to the ABGB in 1914, it was possible for heads of compulsory, corrective and welfare institutions, organs of public administration or associations for the protection of minors to assume guardianship for minors. A nationwide law that regulates the area of ​​youth welfare was aimed for during the First Republic , but could not be implemented. The Youth Court Act passed in 1928 was the basis for the establishment of closed homes for difficult- to-educate children and adolescents, such as the Federal Institute for the Needed in Kaiser-Ebersdorf.

Child transfer point in Vienna

In 1917 the municipal youth welfare offices were founded in Vienna (in the Ottakring workers' district as early as 1913, in Rudolfsheim in 1914), the other federal states followed in the following years, for example the Innsbruck youth welfare office was founded in 1918. The youth welfare offices were committed to protecting the child's best interests, but their actions were guided by biopolitical thinking in the interests of the respective government. Even Austromarxism in Red Vienna spoke of the upbringing of new people , which was de facto an adjustment of people to the Fordist mode of production. Not even Julius Tandler , who is known for major social reforms, did not mean children born on the margins of society with his programs. Rather, he considered productive and humanitarian welfare expenditures and took the view that although "ethical and humanitarian or falsely humanitarian reasons" speak against the destruction of life unworthy of life , the problem becomes more topical and important with knowledge of the numbers (costs) "The idea that one has to sacrifice life unworthy of life in order to keep it worth living, penetrates more and more into the popular consciousness".

“Neglect” had been a key term in curative education at least since the 1920s. Street children, for example (predominantly children of unskilled and casual workers, partly to be assigned to the so-called lumpenproletariat , who stayed in autonomous groups in the public space during the day) were seen as dangerous and violent little savages, as they would not form any educationally valuable communities. They should be made aware of their anti-social striving. From 1922 onwards, all children born out of wedlock were assigned a professional guardian (in Ottakring from 1912) - in 1925 this affected 16,000 children in Vienna - at the same time mandatory home visits were introduced, which provided an insight into the family and social milieu (“follow-up care”). In 1925, the linen package (a basic set of cloth diapers, rompers, etc.) and comprehensive controls of all households in which a child was born were introduced. If the household did not subjectively meet the expectations based on bourgeois norms, the children could be assigned to community care, mostly after further checks. Children of single parents were considered to be particularly “at risk of neglect”; The often only financial emergency was not resolved, but the children were simply taken with them and initially put in the central child transfer point , where they were usually under observation for three weeks without any possibility of visiting ( quarantine ). They were then assigned to other homes or care places, and only in rare cases did the children return to their parents' home. If no decision could be made yet, the children came to the central children's home for further observation or stayed for another three weeks in the children's home attached to the transfer point. The youth welfare office often only obtained the consent of the guardianship court on the grounds that there was a risk of delay after the child had been transferred to the child transfer center.

A differentiation of the children's homes (different special homes were created) as well as the screening of the children before they were admitted to a home go back to the curative teacher Franz Winkelmayer , who was the educational counselor for the city of Vienna in 1919 (later, in the Third Reich, he became the chief educational advisor of the Gau Youth Office and took over the provisional management of the youth welfare institution Am Spiegelgrund in 1943 ). The teacher and psychoanalyst August Aichhorn took over the educational counseling center in 1922 and held counseling hours in the youth welfare offices. Aichhorn saw himself as an understanding ally of the neglected, whom he saw under the wrong image of official pedagogy and assumed that children are not to blame for their neglect. He continued to talk and found corporal punishment both in the family and in homes to be counterproductive. In 1925, uniform clothing was abolished in the orphanages and supervisors were replaced by educators and a home mother; The arrest and flogging sentences were lifted in the educational institutions. In spite of this, the children tended to be labeled guilty in the correctional homes and the causes of their “neglect” were added to them. In addition, under the city councilor Julius Tandler there was a tendency towards the eugenic- medical paradigm and the like. a. by providing Aichhorn with two doctors as educational advisors in 1926.

In 1935 Hildegard Hetzer and Charlotte Bühler developed the Vienna Infantry Test , with which they standardized child development . Only then was it possible to differentiate between “normally” and “abnormally” developed children, which became a further justification for interventions in families of the lower, often disadvantaged classes. In the journal for children's research , Hetzer and Wilfried Zeller wrote that the test was a time-saving diagnostic tool for an efficient eugenic policy. You can also read:

“The entirety must be kept as free as possible from socially abnormal personalities. [...] The public is also interested in answering the question from the outset whether the measures are worthwhile in the given case, so that public funds are not wasted on hopeless efforts. "

The pedagogy in the Austro-Fascist corporate state was based on submission and reverence for God and fatherland. The approach advocated by the social researcher Marie Jahoda , to see the researched as collaborators in research, disappeared with Jahoda's expulsion in 1936.

Child welfare in the time of National Socialism

The entire staff of the youth welfare service, which was merged with health care in the spring of 1938, was sworn in to Hitler and adjusted to an anthropological, racist and racial hygiene perspective; Jewish welfare workers were dismissed. The existing social democratic, catholic, evangelical and private welfare schools were closed and replaced by the social women's school of the city of Vienna , which was subordinate to the health department and which now trained people's nurses . The youth welfare office, police and Gestapo intensified their cooperation and the youth welfare office took over the Juchgasse police youth home. The award of the laundry package was continued under National Socialism, but as a prerequisite was that the report had to be made before the birth of the child, which required an even more comprehensive control, u. a. Made information about all family members possible in advance. However, this was only part of a close-knit network of facilities for the observation, recording, evaluation, correction and selection of children and young people who did not correspond to the human image of efficient and adaptable national comrades. Those should be adjusted in auxiliary schools and educational institutions - also with the use of force.

For the hereditary biological inventory, data of all those people who came into contact with health or welfare institutions were systematically recorded in the hereditary file. In addition to medical histories, school reviews, employer reports and extracts from criminal records were also evaluated. In Vienna alone, the data was collected from over 700,000 Viennese. In addition, the National Socialist People's Welfare Association (NSV) set up a nationwide network of aid centers for mother and child , which in 1938 already consisted of 327 such party-official aid centers in Vienna alone and which was increased to 420 when the NSV moved into the mother counseling centers. By assessing whether a child would be educable and thus of “use” for the “national community”, the youth welfare offices participated in the selection process, which mostly had fatal consequences for the negatively assessed children.

With the regulation on youth welfare in the Ostmark of 1940, a comprehensive law on youth welfare came into force in Austria for the first time. It must be seen, however, that behind this “progress” there was the intention to influence education in the sense of National Socialist ideology. The Youth Welfare Act limited the possibilities for assuming guardianship - the youth welfare office became the sole legal representative. Youth arrest was introduced as one of the possible means of discipline ; However, this measure was only possible for “Aryan” young people whose personality, despite everything, indicated a “healthy” development (ie becoming capable of education and work). Those who did not fall into this category were mostly disposed of in youth concentration camps . In the two so-called “youth protection camps” Moringen and Uckermark , Vienna was the top priority for admissions. Even during the time of National Socialism, the children were initially taken to the child care center. There they were u. a. assessed using the Vienna infant test developed by Hildegard Hetzer. This first diagnosis was mostly decisive for the future of the children, as subsequent reports were only formulated differently on a regular basis. After the observation in the child transfer point, most of the children from Vienna came to the reform home on Spiegelgrund. Later they came directly to the Spiegelgrund without prior assessment at the child transfer point. A children's department was also attached to the reform home, in which "unworthy lives" were abused for medical experiments and killed. As a result, the children of the reformatory were also under constant threat of death.

→ Main article : Am Spiegelgrund

The time after National Socialism up to the 1970s

Legislation

After the official repeal of legal provisions of the German Reich on June 20, 1945, the regulation on youth welfare was retained, in a form cleared of obviously National Socialist ideas and those provisions that had allowed National Socialist organizations to exert influence; however, the biological and utilitarian concepts that once led to this thinking have not been questioned. The Allied Council introduced soon after the war, the demand to the National Council to adopt a law in the field of child welfare. However, since there was no family ministry as yet, no one felt responsible and, on the other hand, different political interests clashed. It was not until 1954 that an independent Youth Welfare Act (JWG) was passed as a Basic Law, although some text passages from the previous National Socialist text were incorporated into it. The JWG was largely co-authored by Karl Ourednik (see next section), and the explanations for it also come from Ourednik. According to Gertrude Czipke, “Ourednik was probably the only one in Austria who was qualified to work legally on such a law. He was probably able to put his own law together. ”In matters of guardianship, the JWG in 1954 came up with the rule that mothers and other family members could now also become the guardians of the children, although this required the caregiver's positive assessment after a home visit had taken place. Unmarried mothers were only granted guardianship over their children from 1989 onwards, without prior assessment and assessment by the youth welfare office. The possibility of institutional and club guardianship was reintroduced. In Vienna the “general guardianship” of the youth welfare office applied to all welfare children.

The Police Ordinance for the Protection of Young People of 10 June 1943 remained in force even longer than the ordinance on youth welfare until 1963. It was replaced by the youth protection laws.

Ideological continuities in personnel and managerial positions

Children's home on Wilhelminenberg

The home staff employed during the Nazi era was largely retained after the war or, due to a lack of staff, hired again after a short time. For the same reason and in order to save personnel costs, many unsuitable and often unsuccessful people were hired. They were first trained by older staff in the common practices in the respective home. Later they had to take six-week courses: the same courses that were designed to train future prison guards. Elfriede Haglmayer, home manager in Kramsach-Mariatal, stated in 1951 at a meeting of home managers and educators of Austrian welfare and care homes in Hartberg that many former Nazis, who were no longer able to practice their previous professions, had found the homes bitterly. Also Ute Bock tells of former SS members as colleagues in the home Biedermannsdorf . At the same time, the number of interned children rose in the late 1940s and 1950s - not least because the war had left many incomplete families behind. The educators continued to practice educational abuse: The children and adolescents experienced psychological, physical, social, sexualized and structural violence as well as sexual abuse and, like the children at Spiegelgrund, they were admitted to psychiatry if all the "goodness and strands" were not helped. In the majority of the homes, the violence was excessive and exceeded what the parents were entitled to according to the model of parental authority. Younger educators who started their job with more modern ideas about bringing up children were not able to implement them. They had to adapt to the existing structures, otherwise they would have put their income at risk. The organizational form of child welfare changed just as little compared to the Nazi era, and here, too, burdened staff were accepted.

Hans Krenek , until 1934 a socialist, after the Austro-Fascist putsch, a member of the Fatherland Front , during National Socialism a member of the NSDAP and educational-psychological director of the youth welfare institution Am Spiegelgrund, became a member of the SPÖ in 1946 and published an educational guide in which he was above all authoritarian, the child gave disregarding advice aimed at bringing up order. After the war he worked as a psychologist and curative teacher and in 1951 joined the Association of Socialist Academics . In 1954 Krenek took over the management of the department of the Viennese youth welfare institutions and from 1961 was head of the city's apprentice homes. In both cases, the selection of the staff for the city homes was one of his tasks.

Karl Ourednik was head of the youth welfare department in department 3, welfare and youth welfare during the Nazi era. This did not belong to the municipal administration, but was a staff unit of the NSDAP, whose task it was to reshape the youth welfare according to the party ideology. In 1951 Ourednik appears as the highest head of the Viennese professional guardianship, from 1952 he was responsible for legal matters of the municipal department 11, the Vienna Youth Welfare Office, and in 1956 he wrote a significant part of the Vienna Home Ordinance. From January 1st, 1963 to December 31st, 1967 Ourednik was head of the youth welfare office of the city of Vienna.

Marianne Estl headed the Liesing Welfare Office in Greater Vienna , which was also responsible for the youth welfare office. After the war she was an educational counselor, from 1973 to 1983 she was head of the educational counseling. In her dissertation, Intelligence Investigations on Sexually Depraved Young Girls , published in 1952, she is proud of her “years of follow-up care work in assessing milieu situations” and the assignment to the individual groups of “neglect” - years of practical experience that she acquired during National Socialism . In addition to her conviction of sexually abused girls, she also uses the language of National Socialism in her dissertation, for example she often uses the term “material”. Estl's remarks about the inferiority of girls do not reveal any reason why this “material” should continue to live, and she also makes human-economic calculations in order to prove the burden on society caused by these girls. She proposes the establishment of a welfare service for the endangered, in which "work-shy" young people and girls with an "immoral lifestyle" should be encouraged to do forced labor. Gertrude Czipke comes to the opinion that Estl tried to impose the methods of Nazi welfare on the youth welfare office and to obtain a legally secured authorization to impose preventive detention with forced labor.

Hermine Koller, who was born in 1928, began her professional career as a welfare worker at the youth welfare office in 1950 after completing the two-year welfare school of the City of Vienna, but her socialization took place under National Socialism and she represented the same ideas as Marianne Estl. Koller completed her psychology studies in 1962 with Sylvia Bayr-Klimpfinger with a dissertation on the problem of neglect of young women, taking into account their attitudes towards the various areas of life , and from 1964 she was employed in the psychological service (formerly educational counseling). Koller recognized neglect when a girl spent the night outside of her parents' home or changed employers, which she described as fleeing from work. Already in her dissertation, she wished for an expansion of the home system, specifically in the direction of work education : simple assembly lines were to be set up in closed homes , on which the inmates were to be trained to work in unpaid forced piecework. In all of her 25 case histories, flight from work is the reason for being sent to a closed home, which meant that the young people were forced to work under the National Socialist regime in the 1960s. In 1983 she succeeded Estl as head of the psychological service. In 1987 she was entrusted with editing part of the report 70 Years of the Vienna Youth Welfare Office , in which her intellectual character is also expressed.

Johanna Hauke wrote in her dissertation research on ethical terms Dilapidated 1951 by "observational" and put the examined girls not only "failure in the workplace", "up job" or about the desertion of the father to the load, but also "thrice gone through the mirror base." She made her observations in the “medical-educational-psychological research institute for children and adolescents in Perchtoldsdorf”, which existed from 1944 to 1945 and was directed by Sylvia Bayr-Klimpfinger. She later became a psychologist for child welfare in Lower Austria.

The racial psychologist Otto Tumlirz rose to the position of reviewer for the Styrian youth welfare office.

Alfred and Margarete Stellbogen have been running the Wimmersdorf children's home since 1924 . Both were registered members of the NSDAP, Margarete Stellbogen was also active in the Nazi women's group. Alfred Stellbogen was also mayor of the neighboring town of Johannesberg and cell leader from 1938 to 1945 . He made weapons and field exercises with the care pupils entrusted to him. Some children from Wimmersdorf were transferred to Spiegelgrund, three of them were murdered there. After the war, the Vienna Youth Welfare Office continued to supply the home with boys who had been raised in welfare. In the assessment according to Section 21 of the Prohibition Act, Margarete Stellbogen stated that registration for the party was due to concerns about the continued existence of the children's home. Only after a critical report in the ORF broadcast Teleobjektiv in 1980 was the contract terminated by the City of Vienna, which resulted in the home being closed in 1981. Research into the extent to which the Wimmersdorf children's home was directly related to child euthanasia has not yet been completed.

In the youth home of the state of Upper Austria at Leonstein Castle , there was a home manager with an extensive Nazi past: Eva Maria Meditz was active in the National Socialist Teachers' Association and passed the review by the American military authorities as a follower.

Well-known Austrofascists and Nazi partisans also took up leadership positions in the welfare system in Tyrol, such as Alfred Haindl , who had previously worked in the Nazi welfare apparatus and became head of the Tyrolean youth welfare office . As such, he also promoted the career of Maria Nowak-Vogl , who received her training during the Nazi era and later could not part with the ideas. In 1959 she asked the question

"Whether our public funds, our best workforce, our greatest concern should be directed towards those who fail in any way, but who never become fully-fledged people."

Discreet spiritual continuation of Nazi psychiatry

Clinical curative education and clinical psychiatry also continued to influence the homes. Anyone who was rebellious, restless, or bed-wetting, masturbated, or was accused of lying ran the risk of going to a children's medical or psychiatric ward and being subjected to medical attempts there. Thousands of children were abused for medical research in the Hoff Clinic , in the children's department of the Lainz Hospital , in the psychiatric children's ward of the Innsbruck University Hospital and the Maria Novak-Vogl children's observation station located there , or they received electric shocks from Erwin Ringel without anesthesia - as a punishment, like can be proven from the files. Anyone who came to the curative education department of the state hospital in Klagenfurt was in danger of being sexually abused by Franz Wurst , which he called "care therapy".

Until the 1970s, Hans Asperger , Heinrich Gross , Hans Hoff, Maria Novak-Vogl, Andreas Rett , Erwin Ringel and Walter Spiel mainly used the treacherous expressions “experimental material” or “experimental material”, but rarely found them to be human Terms like "children", which suggests that there was hardly any break with the Nazi era in Austrian psychiatry and curative education. The director of the Institute for the History of Medicine in Vienna, Michael Hubenstorf , describes what was done to thousands of children under the guise of medical assistance after 1945 as a “discreet spiritual continuation of Nazi psychiatry”.

Maria Nowak-Vogl

Almost all children who had behavioral problems in Tyrol, Vorarlberg and Salzburg between 1954 and 1987 fell into the hands of Maria Nowak-Vogl. She headed the child observation station of the child psychiatry Innsbruck, where she treated a total of 3,650 children. In addition, she was a court expert and psychiatric advisor for children's and youth homes. Bed-wetters had to sleep on mattresses with her that started to ring when it was damp, and anyone who wore their trousers that were wired to an electrical device during the day to set off the alarm also received electric shocks. The trousers, whose alarm could only be turned off in the house, also had to be worn outside the ward, for example during leisure activities outside the house or in church, which exposed the children not only in front of the group but also in public. Nowak-Vogl used Epiphysan (a hormone from the cattle pineal gland) against masturbation , even though she knew that this drug caused severe testicular damage. As she explained in a specialist journal in 1965, she decided to use the drug despite all concerns because the consequences of "excessive sexual activity" are serious. When the Innsbruck public prosecutor's office investigated Nowak-Vogl in 1980, Andreas Rett justified their use of Epiphysan on the grounds that he himself had tested the drug on 500 disabled people over a period of 17 years. Nowak-Vogl also used X-rays for “neglect” and “fits of anger”, which had no therapeutic value. Since professional journals have been warning unequivocally about cancer damage from X-rays since the 1950s, it is seen as deliberate serious bodily harm. Drugs for epilepsy and narcotics were also used to "calm down" the children. Particularly humiliating for the children was the use as demonstration objects in courses where they were presented in a derogatory way dressed or naked.

Andreas Rett

During his work as head of the children's department at Lainz Hospital (until 1975) and as head of the department for developmentally disordered children at the Rosenhügel Neurological Hospital in Vienna (1975 to 1989), Andreas Rett also mentioned other drug trials in addition to the 500 Epiphysan treatments mentioned above Children - including home children. These included, for example, oxazolidine , which is now only used as a lubricant due to its toxicity, and thalidomide : Although the thalidomide scandal was not a household name at the time of his experiments (1958 to 1961) , the drug also had other serious side effects that were frequent and occurred promptly. Andreas Rett also worked closely with Heinrich Gross at times.

Hans Hoff

What is particularly irritating is that Hans Hoff, who fled the Nazis in 1938 because of his Jewish descent, also abused patients for medical experiments after his return in 1949 and, moreover, had no qualms about the brains of those at Spiegelgrund under Gross' involvement, together with Heinrich Gross to research murdered children. In addition, Hoff carried out malaria tests until the mid-1970s - including on children in homes who had been illegally transferred. The psychiatrist Bernd Küfferle, who was employed at the Hoff Clinic from 1965, suspects that the aim was “to keep the malaria pathogen alive so that it could be available in the hospital”, because “it was already clear then that none meaningful treatment is ”.

Walter game

Walter Spiel, head of the University Clinic for Child and Adolescent Psychiatry in Vienna from 1975 to 1991 and psychiatric advisor at the Kaiser-Ebersdorf educational institution from 1953 to 1956, described a drug trial with reserpine on 72 children in 1957 , 8 of whom were home children. The children were referred to the University Children's Hospital because of performance problems at school or because they were “restless”, and one of them was also given electric shocks. - In his habilitation in 1961, Spiel describes numerous treatments with electric shocks, insulin shocks and “fever cure” (presumably this means “malaria therapy”) that he carried out at the Hoff Clinic.

Standards of childcare

Despite the change in political direction in the 1960s and 1970s (e.g. as a result of the Great Family Law Reform ) until the 1980s, the youth welfare offices applied that standard of the bourgeois family for their assessment , according to which illegitimate motherhood, unemployment of the husband or employment-related absence of the Mother was the first indicator of “neglect” and “endangerment”. Various studies have shown that illegitimate motherhood itself did not lead to abnormalities, but the fact that the mothers were to be found in the lowest wage brackets and this led to economic emergencies. Even with married parents, who often have many children, belonging to the poorest social classes was often the starting point, which ultimately led to a negative assessment by the youth welfare office and ultimately to child acceptance. The parents concerned could hardly afford childcare facilities in particular. In addition, the majority of the children came from densely built-up residential areas with apartments in need of renovation. “Neglect” was therefore primarily a term for a perceived class difference or the relative deviation of the family from the bourgeois model. In Tyrol, Yenish children were mostly taken from their parents and taken to homes.

Until the 1980s, terms such as “neglect”, “antisociality”, “dissociality” etc. can be found in the reports and expert opinions, and adjectives such as B. "Grenzdebil", "drive-bound", "primitive" or "morally degenerate" used to describe the children. New vocabulary such as “neglect in prosperity” or “lack of social adjustment” partly meant old content; the arguments were similar to those used against the Schlurfs , which opposed the ascetic-military educational goal of National Socialism . Alois Jalkotzy was of the opinion that a lack of social adjustment was “not really criminal”, but “an expression of a tendency aimed at increasing pleasure”. The neglected young person is "distinguished by an almost unbearable fear of work". The girls of the subculture are prostitutes, would overdo it with “masculine features, but with make-up and lipstick”, are sloppy, impure and careless, while the long hair of the boys would be “an expression of feminization”.

It was not until the 1980s that child welfare services no longer immediately criminalized the changing youth cultures . In spite of this, the commemorative publication “70 Years of the Vienna Youth Welfare Office” continues to read that the lack of social adjustment is “not really criminal”, but “legally hostile” and “an expression of a tendency aimed at increasing pleasure” (Koller). Neglect is establishing itself as a flexible term that can be adapted to the respective zeitgeist as a justification for the admission of children and adolescents in nursing homes and thus as a legitimation for exclusion from the open society. In the homes, which are often cut off from the outside world, their "community ability" should be established.

Training of the educational staff

For a long time there was no professional profile for educators or social workers. It was not until 1960 that the Federal Institute for Home Education was opened for teacher training in Braiten Castle in Baden near Vienna . Due to the great demand, instead of the planned five-year training, only one-year courses for high school graduates and two-year courses for applicants with school or professional training that went beyond compulsory schooling, as well as external courses and further training could be offered. Vienna followed this example in 1962 with the Institute for Home Education of the City of Vienna. In 1973 the educational institute for educators of the Archdiocese of Innsbruck was founded in Pfaffenhofen and closed in 1985 with the opening of a new institute in Zams . In 1980 a Lower Austrian training center was founded in St. Pölten and in 1990 a college for social education in Upper Austria.

At the beginning of the 1970s, around half of home educators were still untrained. According to the Vienna Home Study, 62% of the educators were trained in urban homes, while in private homes the same percentage of untrained educator staff was found. 58% had already worked in another profession before entering the nursing profession; when they switched to another profession, they were 37 years old on average. The reasons for taking up the teaching profession were rather irrelevant, especially in this group, the focus was on their own social security or social advancement: Half (Tyrol) to one third (Vienna) of the home-care workers were recruited from the workers and were happy to to embrace the norms and values ​​of the middle class they wanted to reach. "The daily dealings with adolescents coming from miserable living conditions could be seen as an unconscious threat, as they reflected the social situation that many of the educators hoped to escape."

Violence used against the children

Some of the children and young people in the homes were subjected to severe attacks and abuse . In addition, for the purpose of smooth subordination, other processes and procedures were also common which, according to Erving Goffman, result in the destruction of the self . These include external measures such as locked gates, no ID cards and no money, which force you to stay and, encouraged by other measures, lead to disculturation (unlearning how to deal with the outside world). The disculturation process began with the removal of the child from their familiar surroundings, in which they had their traditional role, which they then lost. The effects were particularly extreme for children who had been in homes since birth and never had such a role. The use of the family name, which is common in several homes, even for children of primary school age, also contributed to the loss of personality, as there is still a high level of identification with the first name at this age. The following forms of violence mostly merged into one another:

Economic violence

If children are forcibly kept in poverty and shortage, they are deprived of an education appropriate to their talents, or if they have to perform for which they are not paid, we speak of economic violence . The personal clothing, which is an important protective factor, was removed from the children in almost all homes and replaced by the institution's own clothing, which was mostly worn, out of fashion and in some homes the same for all children. The internal and external de-individualization of children and young people is seen as a motive for this handling. Sometimes they were not assigned their own set of home clothes, even underpants were redistributed after washing and often the size of the clothes was also inappropriate. At the exits, the pupils were recognized outwardly as children in the home and thus stigmatized . Together with the ban on speaking to the population, it is seen as an attempt not to leak anything about the acts of violence in the homes. The affected children felt extremely inferior and marginalized because of home clothing and speaking bans, which was the opposite of rehabilitation - the declared aim of the welfare system. Within the nursing homes, a connection is seen between the uniforms and the willingness to use violence on the part of the parents: The institutional clothing symbolized an alleged social inferiority as well as the alleged collective and individual guilt of the children, whereby some home directors, educators and also domestic staff saw their conviction strengthened Using excessive force against the guilty and dangerous children to be entitled.

Gifts that the children received from relatives were “confiscated”. In some of the homes, the young people were not allowed to dispose of their money themselves; it was administered by the educators. In some cases, pocket money was never paid out. Apprentices had to pay their wages and only received between fifty and one hundred schillings a week . A third of the money was kept for the expenses of the home stay, the rest was put into an account. “[…] The form of compulsory saving […] shifted the normal relationship to the value of things that could otherwise be received for wages. It should come as no surprise that under these circumstances there were group thefts and sometimes shoplifting. "

The work that had to be done free of charge included cleaning, kitchen and other work in the home, which were often made particularly strenuous. This included, for example, polishing the floors or working in the home farm. The unpaid work also included services for the educators, such as the regular washing of their private vehicles. In addition, young people in some homes had to work for others, for which they also received little or no pay; this type of work is seen as forced labor.

Forced labor

The most famous case of forced labor took place in the St. Martin educational home in Tyrol. Instead of receiving vocational training as planned, the up to 110 school-aged girls between the ages of 15 and 18 who were housed there were brought in for various auxiliary services for external clients. The girls were not allowed to speak during the work; violations of this were punished with beating or cleaning toilets and hallways. The home's laundry room was mainly used for the armed forces: the uniforms of the Andreas Hofer barracks in Absam were washed and ironed. Other customers of the home laundry were the state vocational school for opticians, the state building administration, the state sports center , the Tyrolean aid organization , the Tirolia-Werke (stove manufacturer), the Schwaz sports club, the Volkshaus Schwaz, inns and the Schwaz hospital. In the late 1960s, the crystal company had Swarovski crystal bands made “at home”. The girls worked for the lamp manufacturer EGLO Leuchten both in the home and in the company's business, and the jam manufacturer Darbo also had home children work in its business. Wages are said to have been paid by the companies, but not to the young people themselves, but to the home management. Many girls have never seen any of the money. After the media coverage in 2012, the Darbo company paid the wages again, adjusted for value.

Federal institute for those in need of education in Kaiser-Ebersdorf

In the Kaiser-Ebersdorf educational home for male youths run by the Ministry of Justice, inmates had to stuff lighters for lighter companies - 1,800 to 2,500 pieces per day and person - for clothing companies "pluck pins", for a large Austrian office supply company they had to make cases for files or "brushes for Make sweepers for the municipality of Vienna and dismantle the water meter for the municipality of Vienna ”. In the federal institute for girls in need of education in Wiener Neudorf , which is also under the Ministry of Justice, but run by the Order of the Sisters of the Good Shepherd , the girls had to make fashion jewelry for the Zurek company or wash and iron clothes for private households and nuns until they went to bed. Remuneration for this was transferred to the home by the Ministry of Justice, but the nuns did not pay them to the girls, but stated that the money would be used for joint excursions (which were extremely rare).

In the Wegscheid Educational Home in Linz, the pupils had to do almost all of the auxiliary work when the building was added to the existing home, which saved around a million schillings in construction costs.

The pupils concerned were not covered by social insurance for their work until the 1990s because it was disputed whether the work in the homes was subject to compulsory insurance. As a result, they lack the relevant contribution years for the pension insurance, which leads to a worse position in the pension assessment. If those affected are not yet retired, they can now buy the years themselves.

education

The educational situation also left a lot to be desired and was therefore not suitable for providing the children with a basis for a self-determined life, as a result of which many career paths were blocked for them. This was especially true for girls who were still in women-specific jobs with miserable job prospects in the 1970s, such as B. white seamstress were trained. Marriage was still seen as the ultimate goal of upbringing for girls, which is supported by the fact that a girl's imminent marriage led to her being discharged from welfare education . The Vienna home report:

“You never seem to have heard of the need to 'earn extra' or the possibility of a marriage failing (every third early marriage is divorced). This, especially in combination with the social class from which the girls come, in which the money the man earns is rarely enough and in which the woman has to earn money regardless of whether she has children or not, means that for these girls the illusion of only housewife and mother will not work. Seen in this way, this education means that the already disadvantaged girls are deprived of opportunities for their lives. "

More than half of the homes for schoolchildren had their own home schools, whereby this concerned the half that also showed characteristics of total institutions in other areas, in particular the seclusion. The home schools were for the most part special schools . Internally run secondary schools only ran 2nd class trains. Only in a few homes with home school was it possible to attend external schools, but it was not welcomed in these either, as the children were more difficult to control due to different teaching times and other homework. In Vienna there was no possibility of attending another school in 10 out of 13 homes with home schools.

Workshops in the Lindenhof youth home in Eggenburg

In the homes of the Vienna Youth Welfare Association there were possible vocational training courses

• a welding course for boys and the following apprenticeships: baker, butcher, gardener, shoemaker, tailor, bricklayer, painter and house painter, plumber, electrician, car mechanic, body plumber, locksmith and lathe operator, hairdresser;
• for girls one- and two-year housekeeping schools, the apprenticeships women's dressmaker or hairdresser as well as apprenticeships as white seamstress, cartoner, laundress and ironer or for domestic work.

In the report on the motives for the Youth Welfare Act 1954 it is stated “that it is a question of training in a profession and not just the ability to earn income through an activity. For future use as unskilled workers, unskilled workers, agricultural unskilled workers, etc. There is no need for professional training. "

If young people are not allowed to pursue a job that corresponds to their wishes and talents, self-esteem, self-confidence and the ability to learn are systematically undermined. This indirect economic violence leads to a lack of intrinsic motivation and, as a result, to dropouts and frequent injuries. This led to considerable economic and social losses in the further life of the children in the home. In reports by psychologists and educators, the principle of downgrading is almost always evident in particularly intelligent and gifted children .

Structural violence

Anything that enables or promotes the violence exercised by the parent is called structural violence. These include laws, home regulations or the inadequate training opportunities as well as the internal structures and hierarchies of the homes. Particular emphasis is placed on the isolation of the homes - not only from the environment, but also from child welfare - which supported an abuse of power by educators against the children left to them around the clock. Those parts of the welfare system that “sent” children to the homes had no insight into the inner workings of these facilities.

The children's rituals of humility towards the staff, such as having to stand at attention and look into the eyes during a punishment sermon, are also part of structural violence. Humility rituals are a demonstration of the power of the educator against the powerlessness of the child. The frequently used Kapo system also belongs to this group. Violations of the intimate sphere occurred in many ways, for example through the censorship of letters or because there was no area in which the children could withdraw. Visits also took place in front of the group. Bedwettingers, who were often unable to keep their bodily functions under control for psychological or physical reasons, were exposed in front of their groups in various humiliating ways.

In several homes there was a real drill to queue up in rows of two, day in and day out, all journeys (e.g. to the toilet, in the garden or in the dining room) were covered in rows of two. Collective silence through bans on speaking, often for hours and under threat of severe corporal punishment, was common practice, as was the ban on using the toilet at certain times. Some of these measures were likely aimed at reducing the workload of staff and protecting breaks on duty from disruption.

If the children and adolescents showed natural defensive reactions in response to the violence inflicted on them (from resentment or failure to show reverence to fleeing), this was the reason for further punishment or transfer to the next worst home, a process called looping after Erving Goffman . In homes with internal training, the pupils were particularly affected.

Eating compulsion

The children were watched while they ate and had to adhere to precise rules. This went so far that a home manager prescribed the exact order in which the cabbage, dumplings and sausages were put on the fork. Various methods were used to force them to finish the food, which was often too fatty and not suitable for children, and had to eat vomit again - until the plate was empty. Brigitte Wanker, an assistant teacher from the St. Josefs Institute in Mils in Tyrol, described a form of compulsory eating in 1980:

St. Josefs Institute in Mils near Hall

“I hang laundry in the bathroom. The sister comes with Wolfgang, who again doesn't want to eat the rest of the meal (goulash). I'm supposed to force him to finish everything. He cries, looks at me despairingly and vomits. I drop everything, grab a scrap of dirty laundry and mop up with him. The nurse comes back, sees the rest on the plate and orders him to strip naked. Before she leaves the bathroom, she says: "I'll be right back" Wolfgang begins to undress; in between he tries again and again to choke down a bite. The nurse comes, yells at him, tells him to stand in the bathtub. She gives him a cold shower, Wolfgang tries to scoop water into his mouth with his hand to make the food easier to swallow. She forbids him and he is given a cold shower until he has swallowed everything. "

Physical violence

The extent of the violence varied from home to home and there were also individual forces who tried to protect the children from attacks or at least cared for those who had been beaten. However, the violent parents were seldom confronted and even less reported - neither by the home staff nor by the treating doctors, who must have been aware of the causes of many injuries.

Consequences of physical violence such as bruises, open wounds and the like have been covered up in many homes by being treated by the institution's own doctors or not at all or being presented in hospitals as sports, work, household or leisure accidents. Or, a priori methods were used that left no visible or treatment-requiring injury. For example, the children had to stand or kneel for hours at night with their legs bent and a blanket over their head or with books on the back of their hands with their outstretched arms. Such physical punishment or torture not only aimed to inflict physical pain, but also to maintain and increase the fear of further physical violence among children and adolescents (psychological violence). The resistance of the children often consisted of not showing their pain in order to take away the teachers' pleasure in the sadistic exercise of violence. It is assumed that this forced adaptation to violence decouples and dissociates inner experience, physical pain perception and expression .

A special form of physical-psychological violence in the homes were collective punishments imposed on the entire group, in which the individual lacks the opportunity to influence them through his behavior and to see a meaning or something like justice in it. Smaller children can only attribute such collective punishments to their own supposed “worthlessness” or look for their personal guilt. Getting used to this system leads to dullness and apathy. The only way the children could react was to hold the guilty party accountable within the group, for which some forms of violence demonstrated by the parents were adopted. This form of vigilante justice was not only tolerated by the educators, but also often provoked. Some educators were completely unpredictable in their use of excessive force, which created a feeling of powerlessness and being at the mercy of the children, as well as a permanent fear of the next, unavoidable use of force and thus falls under the terrorist regime.

Sexualized violence

Actions of the parents “on parts of the body of pupils, especially on the genitals, which cause physical pain, shame or degradation of the victims” are called sexual violence . They are "staged as an educational or sex-educational act" with ostensibly educational or punitive intent and often take place during the shower or bath ritual. Cleanliness controls took place both in homes for boys and in homes for girls with a preference in the intimate area and with derogatory sexual comments. "Such violence to the genitals seems to give the perpetrators a specific form of pleasure gain" and from a psychoanalytic point of view contains a sadistic element. In monastic homes “it seems reasonable to assume that the religiously heightened sexual anxiety of spiritual sisters is expressed in sexual aggression or in substitute sexual acts”.

Sexual violence took place regularly in most of the homes, for example the boys from Heim Hohe Warte had to line up naked in their foreheads to have their penises checked for masturbation and mistreated - with blows known as "tail chopping". In the Laxenburg home, the vulva of little girls was maltreated with a broomstick by a cross nurse.

Self-confidence, the ability to love and enjoy, as well as sexual identity are impaired in the long term by both sexual and sexual violence and have a detrimental effect on later intimate relationships.

Sexual violence

Sexual violence against the underage pupils was primarily carried out by the staff of the homes (home managers and educators as well as caretakers). Educators who knew about it tolerated them through their silence or even encouraged them.

But sexual violence also came from outside. Girls from the St. Martin home in Tyrol were raped by officers from the Andreas Hofer barracks . The girls, some of whom had not yet been informed, were sent to vacant rooms by a teacher who also ordered them to do what the men asked. Strange men regularly came to the Heim am Wilhelminenberg in Vienna and attacked the girls who were lying in their beds. It was no longer possible to clarify who allowed the men into the home.

After all, there was also sexual violence among the pupils, which was used against the weaker children, such as the “smear slavery” in the Wimmersdorf children's home . This forcing active as well as passive sexual acts was promoted by the established “culture” of excessive violence in the homes. Individual educators knew about it and tolerated or even encouraged it.

Social violence

The communication of the children and young people and thus their social ties were restricted to such an extent that the scientists speak of a violation of fundamental rights and freedoms, especially when the child was not accused of culpable behavior. These include, in particular, the blocking of contacts - the prohibition of contacting parents, siblings, grandparents, etc. This also applies to the censorship of letters and subsequent mobile phone bans, sometimes arbitrary exit bans and the prohibition of participating in family celebrations.

The isolation of the children within the homes, for example by being locked in dungeon-like rooms, also represents social violence. Bans on speaking at the table or in the dormitory deprived the children of the last chance to overcome their fears through communication. The final report of the Vienna Children's Homes states:

"[...] the perfidy of social violence consists in forcing the violation of the commandment (here the ban on speaking) in order to then legitimize the use of excessive physical violence with the violation."

Psychological violence

Psychological violence rarely occurred on its own, but was mostly associated with physical, sexual, sexual or social violence. Its goal and its long-term consequences that are difficult to treat are fear, humiliation, disdain, frustration, self-hatred and the destruction of self-love and the ability to bond.

According to a study on homes in Lower Austria, almost 60% of those affected report humiliation, insults, harassment, punishment, etc. Almost half of those questioned remember threats, intimidation, trivialization and cover-ups. A third were shielded and isolated from the outside world, just as many witnessed acts of violence against other children in the home. A quarter had to endure a road blockage ("correction cell"). Feelings of fear and helplessness were felt and also the fact that they could not escape control anywhere is psychological violence.

The worst homes

Caritas Children's Village St. Anton in Bruck an der Glocknerstrasse

In his investigation report “Tatort Kinderheim”, Hans Weiss treats 135 (80 secular and 55 religious) institutions and names the ten worst homes:

• Martinsbühel (Tyrol)
• St. Martin (Tyrol)
• Bubenburg in Fügen (Tyrol)
• Wimmersdorf (Lower Austria)
• Rohrbach (Lower Austria)
• Gleink (Upper Austria)
• Home of the City of Vienna, Wilhelminenberg Palace (Vienna)
• Kaiser-Ebersdorf (Vienna) including a branch in Kirchberg
• Child observation station from Dr. Nowak-Vogl (Tyrol)
• Caritas Children's Village St. Anton in Bruck (Salzburg)

See also: List of children's homes in Austria

Excursus: foster children

The rapidly increasing demand for home places in the post-war years (in Vienna alone the number rose from 2,500 in 1947 to 4,000 in 1966) encouraged the emergence of so-called large foster families with up to ten foster children. Most of them were farmers who couldn't reach the level of an average Viennese working-class family in terms of hygiene or culture and communication. The foster children had to work for the farmers from an early age. Their own children also had to do this, but unlike the foster children, they also had the prospect of becoming farmers themselves. According to an estimate by the social historian Michael John, around 150,000 children in Austria had to do free forced labor with farmers between 1945 and 1980 by order of the youth welfare office, who still received care allowance. John thinks it is possible that agriculture was deliberately subsidized in this way. In the absence of apprenticeships in these areas, the foster children often came back to the cities when they finished school, where they were at the bottom of the hierarchy in the apprentice homes due to years of neglect and speaking dialects that were perceived as strange, which resulted in violence and bullying.

Public protests and discussions

Individual children in the homes told their parents about the conditions in the homes on exits or, if they had run away, or they tried to report to the police. They were regularly not believed, they were portrayed as liars and taken back to the home. Nevertheless, the knowledge existed in the population, because many children of this time were threatened with the home in their families if they were not good and showed themselves to be insensitive to harmful violence. Public protests first took place in 1969.

Child uprising 1952

On November 19, 1952, as a result of an unsuccessful escape attempt by three young people, a pupil uprising broke out in the Federal Institute for the Needed in Kaiser-Ebersdorf, a so-called terminal home. This uprising, which was put down by the police with beating, led to partial changes in staff and the employment of psychologists in the institution, but otherwise went unnoticed.

Campaign "Open the homes!"

In 1969, a group of left-wing students in Vienna around Michael Genner expressed their solidarity with welfare children who had become homeless after the closure of the Caritas home in Geblergasse. They bivouacked in the Rathauspark , started a hunger strike in the tower parlor of St. Stephen's Cathedral and occupied an empty tiger cage in the Schönbrunn Zoo ; each of the actions was stopped by the police. That was the start of the Open the Homes! the group that was now called Spartacus and had grown to include apprentices, residents, former residents or residents in hiding and juveniles who had committed criminal offenses. They gave shelter to those who had fled, negotiated with their parents and in 1970 they presented 20-page documentation in which they reported on the intolerable conditions in the homes and demanded that the homes be opened. They demonstrated in front of the transit home Im Werd in the 2nd district of Vienna and in front of the Federal Institute for those in need of education in Kaiser-Ebersdorf for the opening of the homes and tried to occupy the youth home in Linz-Wegscheid. Her demands also included the establishment of youth commissions, the judicial and disciplinary prosecution of those responsible for the abuse at all levels and the appointment of students from the relevant institutes as interns in the homes.

The Spartakus members were not invited to the Heim-Enquete (see below). However, Jakob Mytteis, Willi Stelzhammer and Michael Genner, together with the children from the home, got in and spoke. Abuses were pointed out, protocols about beating educators were read out and the psychiatrist Walter Spiel, in particular, attacked, who, as an expert participating in the study, was responsible for introducing pupils to the penal group in Kaiser-Ebersdorf and its notorious branch in Kirchberg. The following was read from the minutes of an assistant game:

“The pupil is shown to the psychiatrist Spiel. He listens to the pupil for two minutes and pretends to be friendly. Then he dictated to his secretary: 'anti-social psychopath, a complete idiot - two months in Kirchberg.' "

Finally the Spartakists were carried out one by one by the town hall guard. Walter Spiel never denied the allegations made against him.

ORF contributions

In 1970, Kurt Tozzer addressed the dreary situation in some reform homes in the program Horizonte , followed in 1971 by a detailed ORF report entitled The Affected . Statements from home managers were compared with those of their pupils. The program was broadcast on January 10th, a few days before the Vienna Heim-Enquete.

Home inquiry and Viennese home commission

The home inquiry took place on January 20 and 21, 1971 in the Vienna City Hall and led to the formation of the Vienna Home Commission, which set itself the task of “providing a kind of guide or compendium for the responsible bodies of all the measures that make home education more effective and should make it more targeted ”, and met for this purpose from March to November 1971. The chair was chaired by Walter Spiel, which is seen as a sign of the high level of trust that local politics have placed in psychiatry and education. In addition to play, Marian Heitger from the Institute for Education at the University of Vienna, Willy Strzelewicz from the Hanover University of Education and Otto Wilfert from the Vienna Youth Court Assistance took part as experts. The goals recommended by the home commission were:

• The abolition of the separation by age and gender - instead, the groups should be co-educational and with as wide an age range as possible. The diagnosis, which until now has only been used for administrative categorization and typing, should be supplemented by therapeutic suggestions. Spiel, however, spoke out in favor of separating the children after mental disorders.
• Institutional structure, training situation: In addition to the homes for long-term accommodation, homes for shorter-term stays with intensive care should be created. Furthermore, special homes and relatively open-run dormitories that should take on various special tasks. Large homes should be completely abolished and replaced by family-like groups of 8 to 15 pupils. Internal schools should be opened to external students, with external schooling being preferable. When choosing a career, the young people should be able to achieve maximum self-realization. Close cooperation with all outpatient stations and special outpatient facilities was recommended (as examples, curative educational and neuropsychiatric outpatient clinics were cited), but also cooperation with the parents of the children, since the aim is to reintegrate the pupil into the family, which in the sense of general family care in to renovate their entirety. In order to achieve this goal, systematic parenting meetings and home visits by educators should also take place and the visiting times should be flexible.
• Opening up the homes, therapy, reward-punishment system: Homes should be integrated into their local environment and the children should be able to come into contact with others, for example through the creation of youth groups in the homes that can also be visited by young people from outside the home. Practical training in life should prepare the youngsters for the world outside the home (examples given were traffic education, clothing care, cooking simple meals and cash payments). Psychotherapies were also called for and punishments were generally recognized as an unsuitable means of achieving free and critical insight, but they would "sometimes be necessary as a last resort to prevent terror and disorder or the non-acceptance of a well-intended educational dialogue".
• Classes and leisure activities: The aim of internal training should be to reach the level of external training. For this purpose, the lessons should be designed so flexibly that the needs of individual children can be addressed. Hobby groups should be offered for leisure time, but leisure time should not be organized.
• Privacy, home democracy: Interventions in the privacy such as letter censorship or reading diaries should be rejected and should only take place where they are “unavoidable to ensure pedagogical success or cannot be avoided for sanitary reasons”. Educators should not only see sexuality as a disciplinary problem, but should recognize sexual expressions as an important value for the development of personality. "Sexual misconduct should not be a reason for penal sanctions." The democratization of the homes requires a certain willingness to take risks on the part of home managers and educators, problems in the group should be solved through socially integrative behavior instead of authoritarian measures.

Vienna Home Study "Managed Children"

In 1974 the Vienna Home Study by Irmtraut Leirer , Rosemarie Fischer and Claudia Halletz was published. The authors carried out investigations based on the files as well as observations and surveys in 34 municipal and private contract homes of the municipality of Vienna. In 1976 the study was published as a book under the title Managed Children. A sociological analysis of children's and youth homes in the city of Vienna . However, neither the homes examined nor their managers were allowed to be named by name, the municipality of Vienna, as the client, demanded that they be anonymized. In terms of content, the authors initially responded to the recommendations of the home commission and stated:

"Although these recommendations and objectives are contradicting themselves and, from our point of view, doubtful in some ways, they nevertheless represent the most progressive social education that social education has to offer in this country."

They also found that at the time of the investigation, only 11 homes met the principles drawn up by the home commission. The majority of the homes were total institutions and the methods of education could be described as total education .

The study received attention in national and international media. The profile wrote about the summer of 1976 under the title Total managed children :

"The conditions in the homes are largely subject to criticism."

Wiener Illustrierte Stern

Günther Schweitzer, author of the Wiener Illustrierte Stern , criticized in a report on Viennese children's homes in 1974 that changes that had taken place so far due to the highly acclaimed Viennese home inquiry were only cosmetic operations. The staff remained frozen in their practice, and some young people were disgusted within months. Conditions prevailed that were in no way inferior to those of a prison.

"With the difference, however, that a prison officer in Stein could hardly afford to hit a prisoner."

Schweitzer also mentioned the names of teachers who flogged. Even the complaint in a specific case with the head of the Vienna Youth Welfare Organization came to nothing.

Without a muzzle

The program without a muzzle brought in 1975 under the title Nationalized Children a contribution that dealt primarily with the fact that home children have no future. An unspecified doctor (presumably a psychiatrist) said during a break, during which she said the microphone was switched off, about the nursing homes:

"It's like a mill, where you then grind [...], scrap it and come out in pieces."

Trade journals

The critical journals concerns: Social work and education today reported regularly from 1975 on abuses in homes.

Tyrolean working group for home education and broadcast telephoto lens

The Tyrolean home education working group founded in 1978 dealt with the home problems in Tyrol as a whole and also with the medical experiments with Epiphysan in the Maria Nowak-Vogl child observation station . In 1980, together with Kurt Langbein , there was a contribution to the ORF program Teleobjektiv , in which not only the surveillance with video cameras and bell mattresses for bed-wetting people came up, but also the Epiphysan syringes used against masturbation. Two days after the program was broadcast, Fritz Prior requested that the program be canceled. Subsequently, there was a criminal complaint against Maria Nowak-Vogl, which however did not lead to a conviction due to the discharge by Andreas Rett. Nowak-Vogl was able to continue operating her observation station until she retired in 1987.

In the end, however, the Tyrolean home education working group succeeded in pushing ahead with some reforms in Tyrolean homes. The prison in St. Martin was canceled and the pay for the work of the young people improved. In addition, a self-administration group was established, which was a first step towards opening up the home. When the home in Kleinvolderberg was opened a few years earlier, the qualification level of vocational training for the boys housed there was raised, but the dungeon system still persisted. Some time later, attempts were made to establish shared apartments within the home. The state educational home in Schwaz was rebuilt and restructured; Small living groups were created for ten young people each with two to three-bed rooms instead of dormitories, and an attempt was made to implement the new, but also problematic, educational concept according to Andreas Mehringer . - Both the attempts in Kleinvolderberg and in Schwaz failed due to the inadequate qualification of the staff and the fact that large homes were not suitable.

Brigitte Wanker

Brigitte Wanker, who took a position as an assistant nurse at the St. Josefs Institute in Mils near Hall around the turn of the year 1979/1980, could not see the conditions in the home. She contacted her predecessor Maria Zipperle, from whom she learned that she had already tried in vain to complain to a welfare worker at the youth welfare office. Wanker then went to the head of the Innsbruck Youth Welfare Office, Hermann Schweizer, with her diary and told him how shocked she was. Schweizer asked her to burn her notes immediately and to quit because she was too sensitive for the job. Wanker resigned after five months of service, frustrated not being able to change anything. With the help of Volker Schönwiese, Wanker and Zipperle made contact with Kurt Langbein and Claus Gatterer, who thereupon also filmed a report on the St. Josefs Institute for the tele lens program (see Tyrolean home education group); Wanker and Zipperle testified in it. After the program was broadcast, the church, politics and the press in Tyrol were outraged not by the conditions shown, but by Wanker's statement.

Fritz Prior called Wanker and Zipperle into his office, where he threatened them. He told Wanker that as long as he was alive he would make sure that she never got a job in the state. The dean of Hall, Bernhard Praxmarer, held against Wanker for being a victim of communism and the left wing as well as a left emanze and she had received money for the show. Wanker also received threatening letters. When she wanted to apply for an apprenticeship at the Pfaffenhofen Educational School, the answer was that she didn't even need to apply. Wanker finally emigrated to Vienna and trained as a social pedagogue before returning to Tyrol ten years later. For years, Zipperle only received temporary employment contracts. Legal inquiries into the inhumane conditions in Mils were quickly stopped. Former home children are now demanding the social honorary mark of the state of Tyrol for Brigitte Wanker.

Mothballed exhibition

The Linz social researcher Michael John , on behalf of the (new) director of the youth hostel Wegscheid, Alois Brandstätter, financed by the state government, the youth welfare and Upper Austrian social councilor Josef Ackerl , researched the history of the state welfare homes for a traveling exhibition. John reported about flogging, about young people locked naked in the correction cell, about the ban on speaking and the Kapo system, and last but not least about educators with a Nazi past. The traveling exhibition was opened in June 2006 in the youth home Linz-Wegscheid.

Thereupon the former director of the home Siegfried R. and the educator Johann A., who are said to have led a particularly strict regime and were former NSDAP members, sued for defamation. Although the complaints were dismissed, the country still did not allow the traveling exhibition to move on, it was mothballed. Furthermore, John found out that Johann A. was sentenced to a fine in 1971 for beating a pupil until he was bloody with strong fist blows and a bunch of keys. In 1988 four youths tried to draw attention to beatings and verbal abuse in the home with an open letter. At the end of May 2010 Johann A. and Siegfried R. were honored with the Medal of Merit of the Province of Upper Austria.

City of the child

Alternative pioneers

In addition to Tyrol, alternative models and projects emerged in the rest of Austria, such as the City of the Child , which, as Vienna's much-noticed showcase project, also failed because it was designed as a large home (260 children). The Spattstrasse Center in Linz was founded in 1963. Between 1966 and 1975 three shared apartments were added to the five groups, each with 6 to 9 girls. However, in 1976 a closed group was introduced, which caused great disappointment among the critical home educators.

In 1974, in Salzburg, a federal state that had not yet had its own educational home, the “Pongauer Jugendhilfe” initiative was launched in St. Johann im Pongau , with the aim of establishing shared apartments and other open solutions for the substitute education of young people. The first shared apartment became a showcase project for seven years, despite financial and spatial problems. Subsequently, the project failed because of the population, who saw it as an eyesore in their tourist resort, and because of the state councilor Oberkirchner , who had other plans. Nevertheless, the project was able to ensure that the state refrained from building its own reform home in 1976.

Change of course in childcare

Since the reform of the Youth Welfare Act in 1989, mothers have been granted guardianship over their illegitimate children without an expert opinion, and welfare acts on the principle of subsidiary empowerment for young mothers and married couples. Child acceptance and thus the need for home education are pushed into the background. The Youth Welfare Act of 1989 also broke with the closed accommodation system. Nevertheless, it was not until the 2000s that the last large homes were closed and smaller care units emerged across the board.

In 2008 there were 60 shared apartments with eight children each in Vienna. Disadvantages complained about by the parents are the isolation of the children, caused by hostile neighbors, for example, as well as the so-called "swing door children": These are children who are released too early to a still desolate home and usually move to a different shared apartment when they are newly admitted.

Child and youth advocates criticize the still prevailing practice of sending children to accommodations far away from their parents' home - not just, as was common in the past, across all federal states (in 2012, according to an Ö1 report, almost 1,000 children were housed in other federal states , Top runners were Vienna with 299 and Styria with 273 children), but also abroad. In 2012 Upper Austria had 5, Salzburg 17, Tyrol 38 and Vorarlberg 10 children in Germany. 5 children from Carinthia were divided between France, Spain, Portugal, Italy and Germany. In 2011, Styria had 9 children in Germany, Greece, Namibia, Spain and Poland. It is feared that the children will be completely uprooted, and it is also impossible for the Austrian authorities to control the foreign homes.

Work-up

Memorial plaque to the victims of the Viennese youth welfare at the Julius Tandler family center

In August 2011 Jenö Alpar Molnar, a former foster child, sued the state of Upper Austria for violations of human rights and institutionalized injustice for € 1.6 million in damages. In the fall of 2013 there was a "trend-setting report" in the case, so the case is not time barred.

In October 2011, former pupils of the Schloss Wilhelminenberg children's home made serious allegations of systematic physical abuse and serial rapes.

In July 2012, the report, proposed by the City of Vienna , was published on violence against children in the City of Vienna's reform centers.

See also

• Home education in Germany
• Home education in the German Democratic Republic
• Home education in Switzerland

literature

Books from former home children

• Jenö Alpár Molnár: We were just children ...: Story of a stolen childhood . 2nd Edition. August von Goethe Literaturverlag, Frankfurt 2008, ISBN 978-3-8372-0296-0 , p. 331 .
• Ludwig Brantner: Once down the valley and back. A life story . Skarabaeus, Innsbruck 2008, ISBN 978-3-7082-3236-2 , p. 180 .
• Franz Josef Stangl: The bastard. The welfare child . Verlag Bibliothek der Provinz, Weitra 2008, ISBN 978-3-85252-909-7 , p. 250 .
• Franz Josef Stangl: The monastery pupil. The bastard's youth . Verlag Bibliothek der Provinz, Weitra 2010, ISBN 978-3-85252-381-1 , p. 248 .
• Helmut Oberhauser: The blue ceiling: execution of a child's soul . novum pro, Neckenmarkt 2011, ISBN 978-3-99003-628-0 , p. 744 .
• Hermine Reisinger: Dead child's soul. My way back to life . Wieser Verlag, Stuttgart 2011, ISBN 978-3-85129-921-2 , p. 158 .

Web links

Commons : Children's homes in Austria  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b c d e f} Michaela Ralser, Anneliese Bechter, Flavia Guerrini, Carmen Sulzenbacher: History of the Tyrolean and Vorarlberg educational homes and welfare education regime of the 2nd republic - a preliminary study . Ed .: Institute for Educational Science on behalf of the states of Tyrol and Vorarlberg. Innsbruck 2012, p. 128– on the Youth Welfare Act: S 132–134 ( uibk.ac.at [PDF]).
2. ^ Youth Court Act 1928. Austrian National Library, accessed on March 19, 2014 . 
3. ↑ ^{a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u} Reinhard Sieder, Andrea Smioski: Violence against children in educational institutions of the City of Vienna. Final report . Vienna 2012 ( wien.gv.at [PDF] quotation Hetzer p. 43; diagnosis neglect as perceived class difference p. 25, 43; educational situation: p. 45; quotations from Jalkotzy p. 73–74; Stellbogen: p. 353–354; sexual and sexual violence: pp. 497–499; economic violence, institutional clothing p. 510; foster children: pp. 71–72, 434, 515; knowledge in the population: pp. 7–8).
4. ^ ^{A b} Gudrun Exner: Population science in Austria in the interwar period (1918–1938): people, institutions, discourses (=  writings of the Institute for Demography of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, Institute for Demography . Volume 18 ). Böhlau Verlag, Vienna 2004, ISBN 3-205-77180-X , p. 49–50 ( Google preview ).
5. ↑ ^{a b c d e f g h i} Georg Hönigsberger, Irmtraut Karlsson : Managed Childhood. The Austrian home scandal . Kral Verlag, Berndorf 2013, ISBN 978-3-99024-189-9 (Education and origin of the educators: pp. 38–46; citation forced saving: p. 68; citation on compulsory eating: p. 73; forced labor: pp. 169–176 ; Jahoda and Pedagogy in Austrofascism: pp. 188–190; ORF-Horizonte: pp. 226–227 including footnote; Günther Schweitzer, Without Muzzle: pp. 227–228; Wiener Heimstudie, profile: p. 234; Alternative Vorreiter: p 235-241).
6. ↑ Herwig Czech: Birth War and Race War. Medicine, "Racial Hygiene" and selective population policy in Vienna 1938 to 1945. (PDF) In: Jahrbuch 2005. DÖW , pp. 59–60 , accessed on February 4, 2014 .  
7. ↑ Herwig Czech: Research without scruples. The scientific evaluation of victims of the Nazi psychiatric murders in Vienna . In: Eberhard Gabriel, Wolfgang Neubauer (ed.): On the history of Nazi euthanasia in Vienna: From forced sterilization to murder . Böhlau Verlag, Vienna 2002, ISBN 3-205-99325-X , p. 147–187 ( Google preview ).
8. ↑ "Remember Unreformable" Nazi forced education in Reichsgau Vienna. In: The war against the "inferior". Steinhof Memorial. On the history of Nazi medicine in Vienna. Documentation archive of the Austrian resistance, accessed on January 24, 2014 . 
9. ↑ ^{a b c d e} Gertrude Czipke: The typewriter perpetrators . The Vienna Youth Welfare Service from 1945 to 1970 and its contribution to the implementation of a gender system directed against girls, women, “illegitimate” mothers and their children . Vienna 2013 ( othes.univie.ac.at [PDF; accessed on May 17, 2014] Diploma thesis: Ourednik, WJwG: p. 89–92, Czipke about Ourednik p. 187, Estl p. 166–, p. 167 ).
10. ↑ ^{a b c} Günther Sperk (Chairman), Elisabeth Dietrich-Daum, Michaela Ralser, Horst Schreiber, Patricia Gerstgrasser, Anna Katharina Purtscher-Penz, Ernst Berger, Daniela Laichner, Barbara Hoffmann, Isabelle Stummvoll: Report of the Medical-Historical Expert Commission: The Child observation station by Maria Nowak-Vogl . Ed .: Innsbruck Medical University. Innsbruck 2013 ( i-med.ac.at [PDF] on Nazi personnel and Nazi text passages in the JWG: pp. 110–112).
11. ^ Youth Welfare Act 1954. (PDF) In: Federal Law Gazette for the Republic of Austria. Federal Chancellery, May 18, 1954, accessed on March 22, 2014 . 
12. ^ Christa Zöchling: Wilhelminenberg Children's Home: Horror too late. profil online, June 17, 2013, accessed July 30, 2014 . 
13. ↑ ^{a b c d e} Horst Schreiber, Steffen Arora, Sascha Plangger, Oliver Seifert, Hannes Schlosser, Volker Schönwiese: In the name of order. Home education in Tyrol . Ed .: Horst Schreiber . Studienverlag, Innsbruck 2010, ISBN 978-3-7065-4997-4 (about Haglmayer: p. 69; Nazis as educators, educator training: pp. 69–72 Quote Nowak-Vogl: p. 303; Brigitte Wanker: p. 319 - 326).
14. ↑ Tobias Müller: "Home mother" Ute Bock: No training and "SSler as an educator". In: derStandard.at. October 19, 2011, accessed September 29, 2014 . 
15. ↑ Peter Malina: In the safety net of the Nazi "education". Child and youth “welfare” on the “Spiegelgrund” 1940–1945 . In: Eberhard Gabriel, Wolfgang Neubauer (ed.): On the history of Nazi euthanasia in Vienna: From forced sterilization to murder . Böhlau Verlag, Vienna 2002, ISBN 3-205-99325-X , p. 84-97 ( Google preview ).
16. ↑ Christa Zöchling: Education camp thinking . Viennese home scandal: Former Nazi educators made careers in youth welfare after 1945. In: profile online. November 15, 2011, accessed January 4, 2014 . 
17. ^ Constitutional Act of May 8, 1945 on the prohibition of the NSDAP (Prohibition Act). (PDF) StGBl. No. 13/1945. Republic of Austria, June 6, 1945, accessed July 23, 2014 . 
18. ^ First independent and private interim report on the Wimmersdorf Children's Home. Chapter 1: The Structure. The core group of the former Wimmersdorf pupils, 2013, accessed on July 23, 2014 . 
19. ^ Karl Cervik: Child murder in the Ostmark. Child euthanasia under National Socialism 1938-1945 (=  adaptation - self-assertion - resistance, volume 18 ). 2nd Edition. Lit Verlag, Münster 2004, ISBN 3-8258-5551-1 , p. 28-29 .
20. ↑ Hannes Fehringer: Leonstein: Former Nazis were allowed to continue to supervise children in homes. In: nachrichten.at. April 22, 2010, pp. 78-80 , accessed October 5, 2014 . 
21. ↑ ^{a b c d e f g h i j} Hans Weiss: Tatort children's home. An investigation report . Deuticke in Paul Zsolnay Verlag, Vienna 2012, ISBN 978-3-552-06198-9 ( Google preview - The worst homes: p. 11; quote from Michael Hubenstorf: p. 59; medical experiments: p. 59–87; foster children : P. 95).
22. ↑ Volker Schönwiese: Individualizing.Eugenics - To the practice of Andreas Rett. (PDF) In: Worth unworthy life. BIZEPS - Center for Self-Determined Living, 2012, pp. 69–73 , accessed on July 27, 2014 .  
23. ↑ ^{a b c d e} Irmtraut Leirer , Rosemarie Fischer, Claudia Halletz: Administrated children. A sociological analysis of children's and youth homes in the city of Vienna . Ed .: Institute for Urban Research. Jugend und Volk Verlagsges. mbH., Vienna 1976, ISBN 3-7141-7811-2 (on the section “Heim-Enquete und Wiener Heimkommission”: pp. 5–14; on the employment of parents and unmarried mothers: pp. 35–37; quotation on the educational situation of Girls: p. 136).
24. ^ The Yeniche: persecuted and discriminated against, but not broken. Remember.at, 2012, accessed on October 5, 2014 . 
25. ↑ Georg Hönigsberger: Tyrol let home children toil for themselves. Courier, September 16, 2012, accessed April 21, 2014 . 
26. ↑ Brigitte Wanker: Walls everywhere . In: Rudolf Forster, Volker Schönewiese (Hrsg.): DISABLED EVERYDAY LIFE - how to become disabled . Jugend und Volk, Vienna 1982, p. 21–34 ( uibk.ac.at [accessed October 7, 2014]).
27. ↑ Brigitte Lueger-Schuster, Dina Weindl, Viktoria Kantor, Matthias Knefel, Reinhold Jagsch, Asisa Butollo: Psychotraumatological questions on sexual abuse and violence in institutions in the state of Lower Austria . Ed .: University of Vienna. Vienna 2013, psychological violence, p. 35 ( klin-psy.univie.ac.at ). Klin-psy.univie.ac.at ( Memento of the original from October 31, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  
28. ↑ Michael Genner: Induction to revolt . Mandelbaum, Vienna 2012, ISBN 978-3-85476-616-2 , p. 47-66 .
29. ↑ Bärbel Danneberg, Fritz Keller a. a .: the 68s - a generation and their legacy . Döcker Verlag, Vienna 1998, ISBN 3-85115-253-0 , p. 286 .
30. ↑ Robert Foltin: And yet we move. Social movements in Austria . edition grundrisse, Vienna 2004, ISBN 3-9501925-0-6 , p. 78–80 ( Besetzungarchiv.org [PDF]).
31. ^ Kurt Langbein: Problem children. In: telephoto lens. ORF, September 16, 1980, accessed on September 29, 2014 . 
32. ^ Georg Hönigsberger: The traitor. Courier, July 13, 2013, accessed October 9, 2014 . 
33. ↑ Michael John: "If you are not good, come to the home". Wegscheid: From correction barracks to socio-educational youth hostel . ( eduhi.at [PDF]).
34. ↑ Hannes Fehringer: Exhibition about children's homes was mothballed. nachricht.at, May 14, 2010, accessed on November 11, 2014 . 
35. ↑ State correspondence No. 142: LH Pühringer presented state awards. State of Upper Austria, June 24, 2010, accessed on November 11, 2014 . 
36. ^ Mathias Christler: Beatings for the pupils, medals for the educators . In: Tyrolean daily newspaper . 29 August 2010, p. 2 ( heimerbildung.at [PDF; accessed on November 9, 2014]). 2012 ( heimerbildung.at PDF, p. 3).
37. ↑ Stefan Apfl: A child from family 9. Falter , 2008, accessed on October 4, 2014 . 
38. ↑ Bernt Koschuh: Children in care are often housed abroad. Criticism from child and youth lawyers. ORF, Ö1, March 27, 2012, accessed on October 5, 2014 . 
39. ↑ Humanistic press service ( online )
40. ^ Kurier: Expert opinion confirms ex-home child amnesia ; accessed on Jan 2. 2014
41. ↑ City of Vienna (ed.): Violence against children in educational homes of the city of Vienna . pdf wien.gv.at ( Memento of the original from March 11, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (PDF; 2.7 MB) 

Remarks

1. ↑ In 1971, 87.1% of the fathers of the children's homes in Vienna were workers (skilled, unskilled and semi-skilled workers) and 9.4% were employees or civil servants. Overall, however, 39.2% of the male population in Vienna were workers and 50.2% were salaried or civil servants. Among the mothers of the children in the home, 50.5% were employed, 90% of them as workers and 8.1% as employees or civil servants. A total of 37% of employed women in Vienna were workers and 56.1% were salaried employees or civil servants.