Unseen Victims: The Nazi Racial Hierarchy and the Murder of Psychiatric Patients in Nazi-Occupied Europe.

This thesis comparatively examines the persecution of neurodiverse people in Nazi-occupied Poland, the USSR, France and the Netherlands, focussing specifically on the methods of extermination to argue that an intersectional analysis is needed to understand the experience of this group of victims. This approach acknowledges the peculiarities of persecutions while resisting the way that historical research on the Holocaust often categorises victims into groups separate from one another. As research into the persecution of gay men has shown, too many victims had intersecting identities under Nazi persecution, occupying more than one category of persecuted people. For example, a person with disabilities could also be queer, communist, or a Jehovah’s Witness, and also occupy different places in the Nazi racist taxonomies. The intersecting identities of disabled victims, particularly racial identity, in many cases, determined how they were treated under Nazi occupation, and how they were murdered. The existing historical research on the murder of people with mental illness in psychiatric care during the Holocaust has primarily focussed on Nazi Germany. Few historians have compared the treatment of psychiatric patients across Nazi occupied Europe, and even fewer have sought to understand the treatment of psychiatric patients based on their intersecting identities, persecuted because of their illnesses and because of their place on the Nazi racial hierarchy. This thesis will address this research gap by answering the following question: a) How did Nazi racial ideology, specifically the Nazi racial hierarchy, influence the manner in which patients were treated and ultimately killed? This thesis argues that the treatment of psychiatric patients in the target countries was ultimately inseparable from the Nazi racial hierarchy. By grouping victims by the method of murder - mass-shooting, gas, starvation and neglect - distinct patterns emerge proving that race and location had a powerful impact on the treatment of psychiatric patients by the Nazi occupiers. By exploring the pre-existing attitudes toward the mentally ill, and the public and medical reception of the pseudo-scientific theory of eugenics, this thesis argues that the tragic fate of psychiatric patients in the target countries was only decided once under Nazi occupation.