Beginning in 1934, German courts were able to commit defendants who were deemed not or diminishedly culpable due to mental illness or mental disability to sanatoria under paragraph 42b of the German Criminal Code. As inmates of these institutions, they were in danger of being killed in the National Socialist patient murders from 1940 onwards. This research project examines the history of such forensic sanatorium patients during the National Socialist era and thus studies a group of Nazi victims about whom only a few research studies are available to date. The central thesis of the project is that the victims were doubly stigmatized as »criminally insane« and stylized as a danger to the National Socialist »Volksgemeinschaft« due to the intertwining of criminal offenses and psychiatric diagnoses. The question is explored to what extent the position of this group between criminal justice, psychiatric evaluation, sanatoriums, and the administrative apparatus of »Aktion T4« culminated in specific persecution paths within the National Socialist patient murders and the deportation to concentration camps. These aspects will be researched, as well as professional discourses in psychiatry and criminology and the practice of compensation and legal processing after 1945.
