The patients of the Meseritz-Obrawalde institution were deported and murdered up to 1942. After that, people with mental illness from the entire German Reich were taken to this institution. The staff murdered most of them shortly after their arrival. The senior physician, Theophil Mootz (1872–1945), who was true to Nazi party principles, decided during his rounds which patients should be killed. In »isolation rooms«, nursing staff killed up to 15 people a day by overdosing them with sedatives. The number of victims is estimated to be 7,000–13,000. In 1945, a Russian investigative commission called Meseritz-Obrawalde a »national institution for the annihilation of the German population«.