1. « Chères petites, laissez-moi sortir » : La mise à mort des patients de l’hôpital psychiatrique de Vinnitsa : sources judiciaires, mémoire locale et histoire psychiatrique

Résumé 0

At a trial held in Vinitsa, in July 1945, in a similar way to several cities in liberated Soviet territories, staff members of the Vinnitsa psychiatric hospital were sentenced to heavy penalties, and two of them executed, for the murder of most of the patients, including all of those identified as Jewish, on the orders of the German authorities. While the expeditious nature of the Stalinist justice system in the wake of WWII has been well established, the elements of the investigation uncovered by Soviet authorities (film recordings of the unearthing of mass graves, forensic autopsy reports, witness statements, and first-hand accounts) nevertheless offer a thorough description of this mass crime and a rich portray of the Soviet perpetrators.While the West German judges later failed to identify and punish the German officials responsible of the murder, despite the evidence sent by their Soviet counterparts at the end of the 1960s, local memory unveiled in the new post-Soviet context helps to understand the complex interaction between the city’ medical elites, partly named as collaborationist local authorities, and the German occupiers on the one hand, and some categories of patients on the other hand, especially the hospitalized Soviet prisoners of war. Moreover, newly accessible local archives help to fill another gap in the Soviet trial records by offering the possibility of a new patients-oriented narrative of the mass murder.