[Psychiatric family care in the Tapiau/East Prussia Asylum (1907-1940)]

At the end of the so-called "Weimar Republic" in German between the two world wars, and during the time of the Nazi regime, the psychiatric hospital and asylum in Tapiau near Königsberg/Kaliningrad had the highest incidence of psychiatric patients being looked after on an out-patient basis by host families. Data on this type of psychiatric care by external families were repeatedly published in detail between 1930 and 1937 by Karl Knapp, a psychiatrist who was actively engaged there for many years. After sterilisation of mentally diseased patients had been legally enforced and finances were restricted, family care stagnated, promoting instead a type of family care that was independent of psychiatric hospitals and was carried out on a "district" basis. After 1940, when in the course of enforcement of euthanasia almost all the inmates of psychiatric hospitals and asylums in East Prussia were murdered, the traces of patients entrusted to host family care faded out.