Public Records Office / Public Library
Research register
East Germany: disputed claims and a contested historical account
Süß (1998) found no systematic Soviet-style abuse but individual cases and psychiatrists as informers
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Account 1
Worldwide register by region (Batch 2) · Batch 2
- Country / period
- East Germany, 1949–89
- Mechanism
- Stasi use of psychiatry
- What is documented
- Süß (1998) found no systematic Soviet-style abuse but individual cases and psychiatrists as informers
- Finding or status
- Scholarly study on Stasi files
- Contrary evidence / limits
- Contrary to the common assumption that every bloc state copied the USSR
- Label
- DISPUTED / LEAD
Account 2
Worldwide register by region (Batch 2) · Batch 3
- Country / period
- East Germany, 1949–1989
- Mechanism
- Stasi and psychiatry
- What is documented
- Süß's 773-page study for the Stasi Records Agency found: psychiatrists serving as informers betrayed patient confidences; psychiatric patients were temporarily admitted around state holidays as potential "disruptors"; several cases of psychiatric misuse to discipline inconvenient people were proven; but no systematic Soviet- or Romanian-style instrument
- Finding or status
- Official-archive study (Bundesarchiv publication page); Saxony's Psychiatric Abuse Commission final report; a Leipzig researcher's 1972 Waldheim confinement ruled "not justified" in a 1992 rehabilitation (Ärzteblatt)
- Limits
- Critics (Eckstein; FU Berlin journal) argue Süß understated; Süß replied that corrective mechanisms inside GDR psychiatry worked in the cases examined
- Label
- DISPUTED (both sides opened)
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Reference and provenance
1998-DDR-SUESS