The Office of the Public Prosecutor of Zurich is prompted by a letter written by a former «pupil» at the juvenile correctional labour facility in Uitikon to request a response to the allegations contained therein from the director of the facility, Fritz Gerber (1893-1974). The correspondence shows that certain official procedures are described quite differently by the various people involved.

The detainee’s version of events differs from that of the facility director. What reasons are typically adduced to explain this, and what evidence is there to support them?

 

Use of sources

We begin by looking into whether there are any other sources available concerning this «pupil». Has his case file has been preserved, for example? Such sources can potentially be useful for putting the facts cited in the case into context so that they can be better made sense of. Other expert evaluations or reports by the individuals concerned, the social welfare authorities, facility staff or psychiatrists, if they have been preserved, can help to confirm or disprove the occurrence of certain events. The Zurich State Archive has an extensive collection of documentation on the Uitikon Juvenile Correctional Labour Facility. Consulting other individual case files can shed light on whether other detainees had similar complaints or problems in their dealings with the authorities. The Archive also contains the records of an extensive investigation that was conducted in 1953/1954, and in which similar allegations against facility director Gerber are also to be found. The autobiographical novel by Arthur Honegger, «The Spirit Crushers» [Die Fertigmacher], provides useful background information for a better appreciation of the sources.

 

Literature on the Uitikon Juvenile Correctional Labour Facility

Historian Sonja Furgar has recently published a number of articles on the Uitikon Juvenile Correctional Labour Facility and its long-time director Fritz Gerber. She traces the history of the juvenile correctional labour facility from the date of its establishment in 1874, focusing, among other things, on the correction methods developed by Gerber from 1926 onwards.

 

Special remarks

The non-disclosure term for records containing sensitive personal information is regulated at the cantonal level. In the Canton of Zurich, the non-disclosure term for such records is 80 years. As a rule, IEC researchers are permitted only to manually transcribe documents that are subject to a non-disclosure term. For purposes of presentation on this website, however, redacted scans of the sources have been made available.

 

K. Heiniger/Translation

 

Archive collection

All of the sources here presented are preserved in the following archive collection:

Staatsarchiv Zürich (StAZH): Zöglingsakten Nr. 406 - Nr. 415.

Signature: P 1301.63, Dossier Nr. 411.