Jens Kolata

Research Fellow (10/2024 – 03/2025)

Forensic Institutional Patients in National Socialist Austria

The research project deals with forensic institutional patients as a group of victims in National Socialist Austria and investigates whether specific paths of persecution can be identified for them due to the intersectional intertwining of the persecution criteria criminal delinquency and psychiatric diagnosis. Defendants in criminal proceedings who were deemed to be not “sane” were committed to mental institutions. Many of these forensic patients were murdered during the National Socialist “Euthanasia” from 1940 onwards or deported to concentration camps in 1944, in particular to Mauthausen. The project reconstructs the paths of psychiatric patients through criminal justice, psychiatric assessment, everyday life in the hospital, the National Socialist “Euthanasia,” and imprisonment in concentration camps. The project will supplement a research project about forensic institutional patients in Nazi Germany with an in-depth study of the specific situation in National Socialist Austria between 1938 and 1945. The aim is to examine the particularities regarding the history of forensic institutional patients in a territory annexed to Germany. Patient files and databases from several Austrian archives and memorial sites will be consulted for this purpose.

Jens Kolata , M.A., studied history and sociology at the Universities of Tübingen and Groningen. From 2009 to 2015, he worked as a research assistant at the Institute for Ethics and History of Medicine at the University of Tübingen. In his doctoral project at Cologne University, he examined eugenic debates in the German medical press between 1911 and 1976. He has been a research associate at the Fritz Bauer Institute in Frankfurt am Main since 2019. Recently, he is working on the research project “Forensic Institutional Patients under National Socialism”. His research interests are the history of eugenics, medicine under National Socialism, and the Nazi persecution of the socially marginalised.

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