[Helpful adjustment--helpless accommodation. Physicians and the administration of Lower Saxony during the extermination of psychiatric patients at the time of national socialism].

After a brief introduction describing the development and organisation of the National Socialist extermination programmes to eliminate patients suffering from mental diseases, a description is given of the way these programmes were translated into reality in the then province of Hannover. The provincial government implemented these programmes hesitatingly but nevertheless as ordered, whereas the administrative decrees were complied with in a widely different manner by the individual psychiatric hospitals. These differences in the daily routine on-the-spot realisation of the extermination programmes suggest raising the question of professional ethics in psychiatry, as outlined by the author.