Lecture Series Lecture on Institutional Psychiatry: After Murdering Patients
Press Release No. 47/2025
15 May 2025
The situation in mental hospitals in the wake of the Second World War is a topic in the Ruperto Carola Lecture Series on the end of the war 80 years ago
Prof. Dr Maike Rotzoll, a historian of medicine at the University of Marburg, will give a lecture on the institutional psychiatry system at the end of the Second World War. In her talk, she will focus on how a system that the Nazi regime had perverted to murder large numbers of patients could continue to operate after the fall of the Third Reich. Her contribution is part of the Ruperto Carola Lecture Series “1945: Epochal Threshold and Experiential Space”, with which Heidelberg University wants to remember the end of the war in Europe 80 years ago, i.e. the historical turning point on 8 May 1945. The event entitled “After Murdering Patients: Psychiatry at the End of the Second World War and in the Post-War Period” is taking place on Monday, 19 May 2025, in the Great Hall of the Old University, starting at 6.15 pm.
During the rule of National Socialism, mental hospitals became places where numerous patients were murdered. Although these institutions had patently fallen short of their mission to provide mental health care, the system of institutional psychiatry remained substantially in place up until the reform of psychiatric treatment in the 1970s, as Prof. Rotzoll underlines. Under the heading “After Murdering Patients” she uses regional examples to describe the situation in psychiatric institutions in the immediate post-war period. Maike Rotzoll is Professor of the History of Pharmacy and Medicine at the University of Marburg. Her research includes topics relating to medicine in the early modern period and during the Nazi period. She has also worked extensively on the history of psychiatry in the 19th and 20th centuries.
The Ruperto Carola Lecture Series is part of an approach to focal themes. With it, Heidelberg University seeks to take socially relevant research questions to a broad public twice a year in differing formats. Under the heading “1945: Epochal Threshold and Experiential Space” the present series on the focal theme BACK & FORTH opens up two complementary perspectives – “a retrospective interpretation, which situates the end of the Second World War in the fractures and continuities of 20th century history, and a reconstruction of direct human experience and suffering”, explains historian Prof. Dr Manfred Berg, who designed the current lecture series.
The six remaining lectures – with the exception of the event on 26 May – will take place every Monday in the Great Hall of the Old University; they begin at 6.15 pm. Recordings will subsequently be accessible on heiONLINE, the central portal of Heidelberg University with lectures, panels and events in digital formats.