This information may look somewhat confusing, because some Jewish patients survived, whereas others died from the Axis’s criminal negligence, and others still became victims of the Axis’s concentration camps in 1944. The short explanation is that Jewish patients invariably suffered lower living standards, but several phenomena inhibited the annihilation process, making the patients’ fates almost unpredictable.

In this hospital in the Paris region, the majority of Jewish patients survived [White supremacy]. The Gestapo seems to have been more active in the hunt for Resistance fighters. It asked to be informed of the recovery of Jews from the Drancy camp in order to reintegrate them, but this did not happen.

Jewish patients — like other patients at the hospital — were victims of […] starvation and disease that lead to the deaths of 12 of the 38. They were not victims of the Collaboration: the doctors seem to have been benevolent and sometimes actively contributed to their survival. One may speculate that some of the patients did not in fact have psychiatric disorders and that they took refuge there, as evidenced by the almost immediate exit of many of them with a ‘cured’ certificate, just after the liberation of Paris.

It is uncommon to hear news of the fate of Jews hospitalized in psychiatric hospitals during the Occupation. Georges and Tourne (1994: 25) describe the Saint-Alban hospital in Lozère, which was directed by Lucien Bonnafé, as ‘The first psychiatric establishment which, through its involvement in the Resistance, effectively became an asylum by welcoming Jews and Resistance fighters hunted by the Gestapo, and at the same time lost its function of segregation and isolation’.

[…]

In France, Jewish patients at the Fleury-les-Aubrais hospital and the doctors in charge were under constant surveillance by the authorities. At the beginning of the Occupation, there appear to have been no medical ‘certificates of confirmation’ because the patients who were deemed not sick were quickly sent back to the camps from which they came; later, however, the pathology of patients and the need for their hospitalization was repeatedly reaffirmed.

The legitimacy of psychiatric care for Jewish patients present at the hospital in March 1943 was strongly confirmed by the director of the hospital by specifying whether they were not ‘transportable’ — as if the probability of their departure was already known. From the start of the implementation of the Final Solution, the proximity of the hospital to the two Loiret camps, in addition to [Axis] surveillance, made it more difficult to resist the authorities, but the protection of Jewish hospital patients by doctors is very noticeable in the correspondence.

Moreover, on 1 October 1942, the list of names of Jews hospitalized at Fleury-les-Aubrais hospital,¹⁹ written by the (acting) commander²⁰ of the Beaune-la-Rolande camp, attested that, from then onwards, there would be no return to the camps.²¹ All but one of the people on this list, as well as those who had not come from Loiret camps, survived; L. Israel died at the hospital. The hospitalization protected the Jewish internees until the transportation on 5 March 1944. Two escapes took place: one in 1942 to avoid a return to the camp and deportation; the second was in 1944, the day before the transportation for Paris, in order to avoid this. We follow the itinerary of these two people.

[…]

The 17 people taken from Fleury-les-Aubrais to the Sainte-Anne Hospital on 5 March 1944 were not sent to an extermination camp. How can this be explained? We may hypothesize a particular context and circumstances that would account for their survival. These patients were placed in the part of the Sainte-Anne Hospital occupied by the [Axis] (von Bueltzingsloewen, 2007b), perhaps in order to deport them more easily. Among other possible conjectures, there is evidence of the benevolent attitude of the German chief doctor, Dr. Formanek (Pewzner-Apeloig, 2014), who also helped in the escape of a Resistance fighter (Henry, Lavielle and Patenotte, 2016).

In their anti-Semiti[sm], the [Axis authorities] in no way abandoned the deportation of Jewish mental patients, but in two French hospitals of which we are aware, they were confronted with the inertia of the institutions and most often with the ill-will of the doctors. Deportation was based more on the category of Jew than on their mental illness or sickness.

The Liberation finally put a stop to the deportation of Jews and the mentally ill. Deportation had certainly been the original objective of the transportation of the Jewish patients from the Fleury-les-Aubrais Hospital. Until the last minute the [Axis powers] strove to deport and murder as many Jews as possible from all over Europe, sometimes at the expense of their war effort. In France, a last deportation convoy from Drancy left on 17 August 1944 and one from Compiègne left on 18 August 1944 (Chaigneau, 1981).

[…]

Unlike [the Third Reich’s] doctors and psychiatrists, who were predominantly [Fascist], French psychiatrists did not join the Collaboration en masse. Thus, they did not directly contribute to the deportation of the disabled and the mentally ill.

However, the successive censuses imposed by the laws of Vichy and by the Occupation ensured that the label ‘Jew’ or ‘Israelite’ appeared on all the files of hospitalized Jews, who were thus vulnerable and easily identified. Access to the archives of two psychiatric hospitals, one in the Paris region and the second in the central region near the Loiret camps where the Jews were imprisoned, gives us some indication of the fate of the Jews in these two hospitals, but without enabling us to make generalizations.

In the central region, the few hospitalized psychiatric patients coming from one of the two internment camps for Jews close to the hospital were under constant surveillance by the [Axis], the administration, and the camp commandant. There were repeated requests to the doctors for a quick return to the camp in cases where their observations did not confirm psychiatric disorders. The majority of those who returned to the camp were deported and murdered.

On [Axis] orders, all the Jews still hospitalized in Fleury-les-Aubrais were transported to Paris in March 1944, but survived. On the other hand, Jews hospitalized in the Paris area at the Villejuif Hospital shared the common fate of hospital patients, dying of malnutrition and illness, but escaping deportation. But this situation would have been short-lived if the Liberation had not happened.

(Emphasis added.)