Abstract:
The article deals with the professional biographies of the leading experts in psychiatry (and neurology) working at the University of Graz and the asylum at Feldhof/Graz in the period between the end of national socialist regime and the year 1970, as the approximate end of the post-war-period. A focus is laid upon the outstanding biography of Hans Bertha. A Styrian physician, NSDAP-member, SS-officer since 1937, NS-health politician, “T4-reviewer” 1940/41, and director of Austrias largest mental asylum in Vienna in the years 1944/45 – and in these functions responsible for the deaths of a large number of mental patients –, Bertha somehow managed to evade any serious consequence for his crimes after the end of the Nazi government; only being arrested for inquiry from April to December 1945 and again 1946/47. Strikingly, Bertha was re-awarded his lectureship at the University of Graz in 1953 and even appointed head of the psychiatric-neurological clinic in Graz later (1954 provisional, 1960 regular). Ascending even further and becoming dean of the medical faculty in 1963, Bertha died shortly after from injuries caused by a car accident that had occurred in Yugoslavia under not fully clarified circumstances.Apart from this exceptional negative example, the pre- and post-1945 careers of the other – provisional or definitive – heads of the psychiatric-neurological clinic in Graz within the stated period are dealt with, yet in shorter manner: Heinrich di Gaspero (1945/46), Wolfgang Holzer (1946–54), Erich Pakesch (1964–68), Herbert Reisner (1968–71), as well as those of the directors of the main statal mental asylum in Styria, Feldhof: Peter Korp (1945–54), Ernst Arlt (1954–59), Anton Oswald (1960) and Fritz Mayr (1961–69). Among these physicians, who may be regarded as the professional elite in psychiatry in the post-war province of Styria, there were several former National Socialists, too. Ideological opponents of the Nazi regime and particularly of its policy of mass murder of mental patients obviously were a minority among Styrian psychiatrists of these days. Still, three of the named post-war heads, Holzer, Pakesch and Arlt, have to be regarded as such. In addition Gerald Grinschgl has to be named, still a student of medicine before 1945, but lecturer for psychiatry and neurology from 1959 onwards.