Memorial to the patients of the Clermont psychiatric ward who died in 1940-1944

Monument pour les malades d l'hôpital psychiatrique de Clermont morts entre 1940-1944

Since 1999 a memorial at the cemetery of Clermont-de-l'Oise remembers the more than 3,000 patients of the local psychiatric ward who died as a consequence of neglect during the time of German occupation. In the future Clermont will be home to the central French memorial site to this long disregarded group of victims.

History

Clermont is a commune in the Picardy region, about 60 km north of Paris. A psychiatric ward existed there since the 19th century, temporarily it was one of the largest of its kind in Europe. In 1940, the year of the German attack on France, the hospital had 4,484 patients.
Already in the months before the care for the patients started to deteriorate since many pharmaceuticals and physicians were seconded to the French Army in the course of the mobilisation. During the hostilities about 750 patients were evacuated, hundreds of the hospital's employees fled. After the defeat of France and its occupation by the Germans the supply crisis took on a dramatic scale. The hospital was looted, the Wehrmacht seized medical equipment and beds. Soon thereafter the collaborating Vichy Régime introduced food rationing. The rations for the patients of psychiatric wards were set at a very low level and often not allocated at all. The result were widespread deaths in those institutions. Until the end of the German occupation in 1944 the majority of patients in Clermont had died, most of them of starvation.
Whether the German occupation authorities or the French administration actively pursued the killing of the mentally ill patients by hunger and neglect or just approved of it in silence remains controversial. At the same time while thousands of patients starved to death in French mental institutions, the National Socialists murdered hundreds of thousands of handicapped and mentally ill persons in the German Reich as well as in occupied regions of Eastern Europe.

Clermont-de-l'Oise, undated, Memorial at the cemetery, Musée Theillou

Victims

During the German occupation from 1940 to 1944, 3,063 patients of the Clermont psychiatric ward perished, most of them from malnutrition. Among the victims was the painter Séraphine Louis (also known as Séraphine de Senlis, 1864–1942) who had lived there since 1932. Researchers assume that up to 50,000 patients died from neglect in occupied France.

With the defeat of the French army in June 1940 the country came under German control. Northern France was governed by the German military administration, whilst the south was initially unoccupied. A government under German influence was established in the spa town of Vichy in the south of France. At the beginning of the Second World War, there were around 300,000 Jews living in France. The exact number is not known as there were no records of religious affiliation in France. The first anti-Jewish laws were passed in northern France at the end of 1940. The Jews were forced to register with the authorities, excluded from society and stripped of their possessions. These policies were followed by systematic arrests by the French police. Jews without a French passport were the main targets of the German SS and police as well as the French authorities. In an attempt to deter growing French resistance, the German military commander General Otto von Stülpnagel (1878–1948) started to have those not involved in the resistance shot and to have Jews in particular arrested. Those arrested were among the first to be deported to the death camps in occupied Poland from March 1942 onwards. A total of 75,000 people were deported to their deaths in the course of over seventy deportation operations. Most of the French Jews survived, mainly in hiding in the south of the country. Around 600,000 people died in France as a result of war and persecution, including 270,000 civilians. There continues to be little distinction drawn between the different groups of victims. However, since the late 1980s there has been increased research into the murder of patients of care homes and clinics. It is now estimated that around 50,000 people fell victim to these operations. Both northern and southern France experienced persecution, collaboration and resistance during the occupation. After the war, remembrance of both the campaign of the »Résistance« as an expression of French patriotism and the suffering associated with the »Déportation« provided a way of bridging the differences between the Gaullist conservatives and the Communists affiliated with Moscow. Consequently, many museums and memorial sites are dedicated to the resistance or remember the deportations, for example the »Mémorial des Martyrs de la Déportation« (Memorial to the Martyrs of the Deportation) in Paris, inaugurated in 1956, and the »Centre Européen du Résistant Déporté« (European Centre for Deported Resistance Fighters), which opened in 2005 at the memorial site at the former Natzweiler concentration camp. Since the early 1990s a number of sites of memory have been established, such as the Maison d’Izieu (Izieu Home) memorial near Lyon, which remembers the deportation of 44 Jewish children, the national memorial site at the former camp at Gurs as well as a memorial centre in Oradour sur Glane – a village destroyed by the SS in 1944. The central memorial site dedicated to the victims of the Holocaust is the »Mémorial de la Shoah« in the centre of Paris, which was opened in 2005. French presidents have since then acknowledged shared French responsibility for the Holocaust in France. The memorial site in Caen,commemorating the Normandy landings of 1944, was opened in 1988 and extended in 2002, is the most-visited memorial site outside Paris. The annual national commemorations marking the victory over Nazi Germany take place here. In addition, there are numerous regional museums in France, where the exhibitions focus on the themes of persecution, resistance and deportation.

Remembrance

The Clermont psychiatric ward still exists today. On the municipal cemetery a memorial to the 3,063 patients who died during the time of the German occupation and who were buried on the cemetery was dedicated on April 7, 1999. It was designed by the local artist Roger Guidi. Each year on April 7 a commemorative ceremony takes place at the memorial. In the hospital's »Musée Henri-Theillou« a separate chapter is devoted to the events of 1940-1944.
For decades the death of up to 50,000 patients of psychiatric wards was a non-issue to the French public. Only in the 1980s a book was published which dealt with their fates. Other publications and memorials followed, like the one on the Clermont cemetery. In 2013 the anthropologist Charles Gardou launched a petition to erect a »memorial in honour of the handicapped victims of the Nazi- and Vichy Régime«. More than 80,000 persons signed, among them many celebrities. In February of 2015 French president François Hollande announced his support for the project. The site for the new memorial site will be Clermont.
Meanwhile the debates on the responsibility of the Vichy Régime for the death of the psychiatric patients continue. Whilst some people say that there was a proactive policy of murder by neglect, others vehemently oppose the comparison with the »Euthanasia«-programme pursued by the Nazis in the German Reich.

Clermont-de-l'Oise, undated, The main building of the psychiatric ward today, Musée Theillou

No place given, undated, The painter Malerin Séraphine Louis (Séraphine de Senlis) who died 1942 in Clermont from malnutrition, public domain

Open

The cemetery is open daily from 8:30 a.m. to 4 p.m.

Contact

http://www.chi-clermont.fr

communication@chi-clermont.fr

+33 (0)3 447 765 27

Clermont-de-l'Oise, undated., Memorial plaque at the base of the memorial, Musée Theillou

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