Elvira_Manthey_testimony part 1 of 3
given at the Foucault Tribunal, Berlin 1998
for more info: www.foucault.de

THE VERDICT:
These practices and ideology allowed the psychiatrists during the Nazi era to
go to the extreme of systematic mass murder of inmates under the pretext of "treatment”.
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Elvira Manthey was born in 1932 
to a poor family.
Under the Nazi laws the family was termed "antisocial" and Elivra and her three years old sister were taken to a psychiatric hospital 
in Magdeburg.
She was six years old.
Elvira Manthey:
“One morning we went to Magdeburg by train. They brought me to the Südenbürger hospital, where a unscrupulous man named Prof. Dr. Fünfgeld needed only a few minutes to find out that I was an idiot, constituting a public danger. It was not until the reunification that I received a copy of the file which said that I had to be brought to Urtspringe immediately to the lunatic asylum for treatment and - as it said - "for elimination". 

I met my younger sister there, the one whom we had seen in the nursery. She had already been there for a year. She had come there when she was two years old. Every day I saw children being taken away by the undertaker. I saw completely normal, healthy children going mad, simply because they came from a broken home like mine. They started crying. They were put into a strait-jacket, they thrown into padded cells and they cried. We tried to cover our ears with our hands but we heard it nevertheless. It was impossible to ignore it. Then there was silence. The children were dead. I didn't want to end that way. 

I always said: "I don't want to go mad. I don't want to end like the children here" and it was forbidden to leave the day-room. The only toys we had were the chamber-pots. So we sat down on them and turned around with the pots, playing merry-go-round. The room was very narrow. We had to stay there all day long. There was a window in the door and when the nurse passed by and saw a child that didn't sit in it's place, she beat it. At noon we had to lay our heads on the table. Then they put a white blanket over our heads. This was our afternoon nap. We were alone all day. They only opened the door at noon to control us. I didn't want to go mad. I didn't want the undertaker to take me away, but what could I do? I knew that if I had stayed inside, I would have gone mad. I didn't want to, so I thought: "now you take the floor-polishing brush and you start polishing the floor". And all the time I was afraid that a nurse might pass by and beat me. But I wasn't beaten, so I polished the hall every day.

Now I have to say that when I polished the hall, I opened all the doors and I often saw a nurse giving an injection to a child. The next morning this child was taken away by the undertaker. He put a blanket on the floor; laid the dead child on it; tied the ends of the blanket together and brought the child away.”