Am Spiegelgrund clinic

Grave-site of euthanasia children's victims from the Spiegelgrund clinic at Wien-Zentralfriedhof. The upper stone block reads (in German) "Never forgotten" and the lower stone block reads (in German) "In memory of the children and adolescents, who fell victim to NS euthanasia as "life unworthy of life" from 1940 to 1945 in the former children's hospital "Am Spiegelgrund". Dedicated by the City of Vienna in 2002".

Am Spiegelgrund was a children's clinic in Vienna during World War II, where 789 patients were murdered under child euthanasia in Nazi Germany. Between 1940 and 1945, the clinic operated as part of the psychiatric hospital Am Steinhof later known as the Otto Wagner Clinic within the Baumgartner Medical Center located in Penzing, the 14th district of Vienna.

Am Spiegelgrund was divided into a reform school and a children's ward, where sick and disabled adolescents were unwitting subjects of medical experiments and victims of nutritional and psychological abuse. Some died by lethal injection and gas poisoning; others by disease, starvation, exposure to the elements, and "accidents" relating to their conditions. The brains of up to 800 victims were preserved in jars and housed in the hospital for decades.[1]

The clinic has gained contemporary notoriety, due in part to the treatment of children by lead psychiatrist Heinrich Gross. Gross was responsible for the deaths of at least nine "defective" children, but may have played a major role in the killing of hundreds more, and preserved many dead children as medical specimens. Gross went unpunished for his actions after the end of World War II and became a court psychiatrist in Austria, with much of what he did only becoming public knowledge very late in his life. The clinic is also today known because of the children referred to it by Austrian psychiatrist Hans Asperger, whose possible role in the patient selection process in the Children's Ward came to light in the 2010s, making him a highly controversial figure in recent years.[2][3][4]

  1. ^ Kaelber, Lutz. "Am Spiegelgrund". University of Vermont. Retrieved 16 February 2017.
  2. ^ Czech, Herwig (19 April 2018). "Hans Asperger, National Socialism, and "race hygiene" in Nazi-era Vienna". Molecular Autism. 9: 29. doi:10.1186/s13229-018-0208-6. PMC 5907291. PMID 29713442.
  3. ^ Cite error: The named reference Sheffer was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  4. ^ Baron-Cohen, Simon (8 May 2018). "The truth about Hans Asperger's Nazi collusion". Nature. 557 (7705): 305–306. Bibcode:2018Natur.557..305B. doi:10.1038/d41586-018-05112-1. S2CID 13700224.