[Transfer rates of the Psychiatric and Neurological University Hospital in Frankfurt am Main during National Socialism].

During the era of National Socialism around 300,000 people were murdered in the "euthanasia" programs. The majority of those killings took place in asylums, whereas no killings in psychiatric and neurological university (PNU) hospitals have so far been identified. Furthermore, there were no deportations from these hospitals to the gassing asylums. Nevertheless, the PNUs took part in the "euthanasia" by transferring patients to asylums, where many of them were either killed or deported to gassing asylums. There are only a few studies that empirically describe these transfers. In this study the rates of transfers of the PNU Frankfurt am Main are reported for the first time, thus allowing a judgment of the involvement in the "euthanasia" programs. The rate of patients transferred to asylums dropped from 22-25% in the years before to around 16% in the years after knowledge about the mass killings in the asylums spread in the PNU Frankfurt. Of the patients transferred between 1940 and 1945, 53% died in the asylums before 1946. The high mortality rate of the transferred patients underlines that the role of the PNUs in the "euthanasia" programs should be examined in more detail.