[Walter Creutz and "euthanasia" in the rhein province: between resistance and collaboration]. / Walter Creutz und die "Euthanasie" in der Rheinprovinz: Zwischen Resistenz und Kollaboration.

Over many decades Walter Creutz, medical officer in the provincial administration of Rhine Province from 1935 to 1945, was held to be one of the few psychiatrists who had actively opposed the Nazi "Euthanasia" program. In the famous "Euthanasia trial" in Düsseldorf from 1948 to 1950, Creutz was acquitted of complicity in murder; the court attested that he had done his best to sabotage the "Euthanasia" program and in so doing had saved up to 3,000 patients in the Rhineland. This rendering was circulated further in the history of science literature, so that the Rhine Province was considered to be a center of resistance to the "Euthanasia" program. Doubts about this portrayal have arisen since the 1980s. Various authors attempted to prove that Walter Creutz collaborated with the "Euthanasia" apparatus claiming there was no evidence of opposition or resistance or only to a very limited degree. However, this new perspective is based on an equally one-sided, at times grossly distorted analysis of the sources. The article provides building blocks for a more differentiated interpretation.

[Friedrich Mauz: T4 assessor and military psychiatrist]. / Friedrich Mauz - T4-Gutachter und Militärpsychiater.

Friedrich Mauz is one of the medical perpetrators of the second tier whose biography is difficult to comprehend. Autobiographies from three different political systems exist - Weimar Republic, the Third Reich, and postwar Germany in which he constantly reinvented himself. While after 1933 he suddenly emphasized his participation in the civil war turmoil during the early period of the Weimar Republic and his patriotism, he then depicted himself after 1945 as an apolitical person characterized by Württemberg pietism who inwardly rejected the Nazi State but had found himself prepared to accept "all sorts of humiliating concessions." He claimed that he had always remained true to his scientific code of conduct and had distanced himself from psychiatric genetics. In point of fact, Mauz was among those exonerated in the denazification trial in 1946 and was able to pursue his career in the Federal Republic of Germany. However, if the sources are read against the grain, a different picture emerges. Mauz's career stalled in the 1930s, not because he had been politically offensive, but because his scientific work was flimsy and considered lacking originality, particularly since he had chosen constitution research and psychotherapy as his main fields of interest, which were overshadowed by research in genetic psychiatry in the 1930s. Mauz tendered his services to the Nazi policy of genetic health, served as a medical assessor in proceedings based on the "Law for the Prevention of Genetically Diseased Offspring," permitted himself to be recruited for the T4 program as a medical expert, even participated in the deliberations on a future "Law on Euthanasia," and as a consulting psychiatrist for the German Armed Forces contributed to military medicine.

[Werner Villinger and National Socialist medical crimes]. / Zwischen vorauseilendem Gehorsam und halbherziger Verweigerung Werner Villinger und die nationalsozialistischen Medizinverbrechen.

The biography of the psychiatrist and neurologist Werner Villinger reflects the ambivalence of the history of German psychiatry during the first half of the twentieth century. Politically committed to the national conservatives, he was attracted by many elements of National Socialist (Nazi) ideology. Still, he joined the party rather late and reluctantly. Villinger was a eugenist by firm conviction. While he still argued against hasty legal regulation of eugenic sterilisations in the Weimar Republic, he strongly moved for translating the law on preventing hereditarily ill progeny into reality in the institution of von Bodelschwingh in Bethel. Since 1941, Villinger, who had become a professor for psychiatry and neurology in Breslau in the meantime, acted as an expert in the framework of the National Socialist "euthanasia" programme. At the same time, however, he supported the quiet diplomacy of Rev. von Bodelschwingh in his attempt to terminate the mass murder. Villinger was also involved in criminal experiments with human beings. After 1945, he successfully continued his career in the Federal Republic of Germany. He never confronted his past during the Third Reich.