History of Neuroscience Visit

History of Neuroscience Visit of the exhibition in Pavilion V of the Otto Wagner-Spital, 08.30- 11:30, Bus round trip included:

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.

In the National Socialist system, medicine took on a new task: the "weeding out" of people designated as "inferior." There was no room in the performance-orientated Volksgemeinschaft (people’s community) for the handicapped, the mentally sick, for members of social fringe groups, and nonconformists. They were persecuted, imprisoned, and abandoned to annihilation.

The Heil- und Pflegeanstalt "Am Steinhof" (today's Otto Wagner Hospital) developed in the years after the Anschluss of 1938 into the Viennese center of National Socialist medical murder that was to take the lives of far more than 7,500 Steinhof patients.

Remains of victims of the "Am Spiegelgrund" clinic were used in medical research until the 1980s. They were interred in an honorary grave at the Vienna Central Cemetery only in 2002. Additional Spiegelgrund preparations as well as remains of victims of the "decentralized euthanasia" at Steinhof were put to rest in May 2012.

Starting out from the occurrences at the Steinhof clinic compound, the exhibition in Pavilion V of the Otto Wagner-Spital in Vienna offers a comprehensive overview of the circumstances and consequences of Nazi medical crimes in Vienna.