[The heart or the voice of reason: families of "euthanasia" victims in correspondence with institutions].

Between 1940 and 1945, some 250.000 institutionalized patients were murdered in Germany. This aspect of Nazi extermination policy involved a specific segment of the population in a special way: the victims' families. Only to a limited extent can their reactions can be historically analyzed in regard to the political question of assent, acquiescence, or resistance: although the families of institutional patients acted in a highly politicized context, this does not necessarily imply that they acted out of political motives. Family members' positions were mostly determined by their personal relationship to the patient and the situations in their own lives. The most important available source--the correspondence between family members and institutions--shows that situations in the family members' everyday lives were a crucial factor in actions that were potentially decisive for the life or death of a patient. Moral stances or critical estimations of Nazi mental health policy are rare, and still more rarely determined a course of action. Following this assessment, the article analyzes exemplary cases to offer a look at the range of family members' reactions.