Tapiau Provincial Sanatorium
The Tapiau Provincial Sanatorium and Nursing Home was a psychiatric hospital in Tapiau, East Prussia (Gwardeisk, Kaliningrad Oblast). It operated from 1902 to 1945.
history
The establishment of the sanatorium and nursing home goes back to the "Peasants and Supply House Tapiau" which was set up in Tapiau Castle in 1792 . In 1801 the facility, now known as the “Corrections and Besserungsanstalt Tapiau”, had 400 places; outside the premises of the institution, three buildings were built to accommodate non-local inmates, from which the later sanatorium and nursing home developed.
At the end of the 19th century, East Prussia had psychiatric clinics in Allenberg and Kortau , which no longer met the increasing demand. The provincial administration therefore decided "to free the institutions at Allenberg and Kortau from the most annoying and inconvenient third-class males" . In 1898 50 patients were transferred from these institutions to Tapiau, in 1904 68 patients were cared for.
In 1900 the East Prussian Provincial Association decided to build another sanatorium and nursing home, which was to take place on a part of the Tapiau reformatory outside the castle grounds. On December 15, 1902, this was opened with a capacity of 600 beds, until the outbreak of the First World War the number of beds was continuously increased up to 1200. Tapiau continued to serve to take in patients transferred from the Kortau and Allenberg institutions. When the Russian army marched into East Prussia in August 1914, the patients were transferred to Königsberg and to the state institution for the mentally ill Konradstein , and numerous buildings in the Tapiau institution were destroyed by fighting.
Between 1934 and 1941 Tapiau patients were forced to sterilize in accordance with the law for the prevention of genetically ill offspring in the Tapiau district hospital; exact numbers are not available. After the occupation of the Memelland in April 1939, the patients from the disbanded Bachmann psychiatric hospital (Paupiai) near Memel ( Klaipėda ) were transferred to Tapiau.
At the beginning of World War II, parts of the facility to accommodate a school and a hospital were cleared. As part of the T4 campaign , 465 patients were brought to the Teupitz state institution on August 12 and 13, 1941, and 210 to Altscherbitz . Of the patients who were transferred to Teupitz, 109 remained in the institution there, 93 of them died by the end of the war, and only 8 survived the immediate post-war period. The remaining patients transferred to Teupitz were deported between February 3 and July 27, 1942 to Altscherbitz, Pfafferode / Mühlhausen , Weilmünster , Eichberg and from there some were deported to the Hadamar killing center . Another 223 patients were transferred to Altscherbitz on August 20, 1941, and another 349 to Uchtspringe in February 1942 . By 1942, these transfers reduced the number of patients to 500.
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b c d e Boris Böhm, Hagen Markwardt, Ulrich Rottleb: "Will be transferred to a state sanatorium and nursing home in Saxony today" - The murder of East Prussian patients in the National Socialist killing center in Pirna-Sonnenstein in 1941 . Ed .: Leipziger Universitätsverlag. 2015, ISBN 978-3-86583-976-3 , pp. 31 ff .
- ^ Fritz Hoppe: The nursing home for mentally ill men at Tapiau. In: Psychiatrisch-Neurologische Wochenschrift, 1904, p. 103, quoted from Böhm, p. 32.
- ^ Sascha Topp, Petra Fuchs, Gerrit Hohendorf, Paul Richter, Maike Rotzoll: The Province of East Prussia and the National Socialist "Euthanasia": SS - "Aktion Lange" and "Aktion T4" (= Medical History Journal 43 ). 2008, p. 39 ff .