"Euthanasia," human experiments, and psychiatry in Nazi-occupied Lithuania, 1941-1944

ENDuring World War II the Nazis sponsored the practice of “euthanasia” (the killing of medical patients) outside Germany as well as within the Reich. While responsibility for the starvation of psychiatric patients and other medical abuses in Lithuania resides primarily with the Reichskommissariat Ostland - the German civil administration in the Baltics - the 1,200 to 1,500 patients who died from malnutrition in Lithuania between 1941 and 1944 were simultaneously victims of Lithuanian health officials, physicians, and others. The author’s research demonstrates that many Lithuanian professionals not only condoned and helped to administer Nazi “euthanasia,” but that they also rendered their own significant contribution by conducting medical experiments on already starving patients.