In the historical research, the mentally ill represent a group of victims of the NS politics and its representatives, which was ignored for a long period of time. According to previous research, there were about 200.000 victims murdered in the medical field of psychiatry alone. Corresponding to the current state of research, there were more than 300.000 killed persons, who were declared mentally ill in the run-up to the killing. The so-called “Euthanasia-Action” alone claimed 70.000 handicapped or mentally ill victims. It can be proved, that 691 patients from the former asylum Weissenau were deported in buses to Grafeneck in the Swabian Alb to be gassed there.

Today, it is regarded as being proved, that the murder of the mentally ill by gas, which was planned in 1939 and some time later systematically carried out among others in Grafeneck in the Swabian Alb as well as in other five places in the central region of the Third Reich, was considered as a “pre-trial” to the planned murder of a far greater number of people in the following years. Apart from the chronology of the dreadful deeds in detail as well as administrative connections in the political and government circles, it is a proved fact, that the killing stuff from the six murder centers for the mentally ill had a remarkable high personnel continuity to the stuff of the so-called death camps represented by Auschwitz.

Both the City of Ravensburg and the Center for Psychiatry Südwürttemberg at the location of the former asylum Weissenau remember the victims with a monument opened officially in 2007. Today, the “Monument of the Grey Buses” based on the same model of the buses that drove the patients into death, in their original size and concrete form, blocks symbolically and practically the historical entrance gate of the hospital. At the same time, a mobile concrete copy of this bus should contribute to remembrance of these NS regime’s victims in the respective place of its stay.