Psychiatry And Political Influence In Nazi Germany

It is about time someone did a serious study of this quite frankly unbelievable happenings.

I found one which can be construed to be biased.
Auther is Rael D Strous raels@post.tau.ac.il
Author Affiliations:

Department of Psychiatry, Beer Yaakov Mental Health Center, Sackler Faculty of Medicine, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel

 

This is what he says as the background:

 

During the Nazi era, for the first time in history, psychiatrists sought to systematically exterminate their patients. It has been acknowledged that the medical profession was profoundly involved in crimes against humanity during this period, with various publications describing this malevolent period of medical history. It is less known, however, that psychiatrists were among the worst transgressors. At each stage of the descent of the profession into the depths of criminal and genocidal clinical practice lay a series of unethical decisions and immoral professional judgments. Furthermore, very little has been published on lessons that may be learned from this dark period in the history of psychiatry and on ethical principles that may be extrapolated for the future practice of clinical and research psychiatry and for inclusion in educational programs. This paper reviews the role of psychiatrists in the Nazi era and analyzes the underlying misconceptions that led to the aberrant behavior. Finally, some recommendations for inclusion of the study of this period in ethics training are presented
 

Here is the link to this publication. He has sited his own work, which the reader has to pay to read....bloody money grabbers init?  He goes on and on saying that the Nazi regime used psychiatrist to kill people, but does not show any proof. Right lets see what Wikipedia says on the subject.

Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring (In US)

Inacted in 14th July 1933, active in Jan 1934, this law of sterilisation has these basic provisions.

1) Any person suffering from a hereditary disease may be rendered incapable of procreation by means of a surgical operation (sterilization), if the experience of medical science shows that it is highly probable that his descendants would suffer from some serious physical or mental hereditary defect.

(2) For the purposes of this law, any person will be considered as hereditarily diseased who is suffering from any one of the following diseases: –

(1) Congenital Mental Deficiency,
(2) Schizophrenia,
(3) Manic-Depressive Insanity,
(4) Hereditary Epilepsy,
(5) Hereditary Chorea (Huntington’s),
(6) Hereditary Blindness,
(7) Hereditary Deafness,
(8) Any severe hereditary deformity.

(3) Any person suffering from severe alcoholism may be also rendered incapable of procreation.
 

And the article says this:

The law applied to anyone in the general population, making its scope significantly larger than the compulsory sterilisation laws in the United States, which generally were only applicable on people in psychiatric hospitals or prisons.

 Lots of other countries were doing the same. I am not saying that Nazi regime did not do it, but there were others who were at it. Now let us be sensible and see who are responsible for this kind of popular acts.

We have to go all the way to Charles Darwin, Joseph Fisher, Herbert Spencer,Thomas Malthus, and Francis Galton. Darwin published his major works on evolution.

In 1798, Thomas Malthus published An Essay on the Principle of Population, in which he wrote:

The power of population is so superior to the power of the earth to produce subsistence for man, that premature death must in some shape or other visit the human race. The vices of mankind are active and able ministers of depopulation. They are the precursors in the great army of destruction, and often finish the dreadful work themselves. But should they fail in this war of extermination, sickly seasons, epidemics, pestilence, and plague advance in terrific array, and sweep off their thousands and tens of thousands. Should success be still incomplete, gigantic inevitable famine stalks in the rear, and with one mighty blow levels the population with the food of the world.

—Malthus T.R. 1798. An essay on the principle of population. Chapter VII, p61[1]

The passion between the sexes has appeared in every age to be so nearly the same that it may always be considered, in algebraic language, as a given quantity. The great law of necessity which prevents population from increasing in any country beyond the food which it can either produce or acquire, is a law so open to our view...that we cannot for a moment doubt it. The different modes which nature takes to prevent or repress a redundant population do not appear, indeed, to us so certain and regular, but though we cannot always predict the mode we may with certainty predict the fact.

—Malthus, 1798, Chapter IV.

Although at that time people started to read this understood the problem and acted upon it, now UN has found that the population is decreasing and the food production is rising. You can read the article here.

Now this work which was written from 1798 to 1830 has been read by lots of people including psychiatrists in the west. Things get a bit murky around this time as to who said what and what the hell it means like. There was guy called Herbert Spencer who began advocating about natural selection in animals, and compatred it to the biology of nations. This is from Wikipedia pages

Herbert Spencer (27 April 1820 – 8 December 1903) was an English philosopher, biologist, sociologist, and prominent classical liberal political theorist of the Victorian era.

 

Spencer developed an all-embracing conception of evolution as the progressive development of the physical world, biological organisms, the human mind, and human culture and societies. He was "an enthusiastic exponent of evolution" and even "wrote about evolution before Darwin did." As a polymath, he contributed to a wide range of subjects, including ethics, religion, anthropology, economics, political theory, philosophy, biology, sociology, and psychology. During his lifetime he achieved tremendous authority, mainly in English-speaking academia. "The only other English philosopher to have achieved anything like such widespread popularity was Bertrand Russell, and that was in the 20th century." Spencer was "the single most famous European intellectual in the closing decades of the nineteenth century" but his influence declined sharply after 1900; "Who now reads Spencer?" asked Talcott Parsons in 1937.

 

Spencer is best known for coining the concept "survival of the fittest", which he did in Principles of Biology (1864), after reading Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species. This term strongly suggests natural selection, yet as Spencer extended evolution into realms of sociology and ethics, he also made use of Lamarckism.

Charles Darwin in the mean time published the well known book On the Origin of Species, and First Principles was printed in 1860. To muddy the waters further Darwin's cousin wrote a few books as well. His cousin Francis Galton, started on eugenics. He theorised in 1865 and 1869 that, social welfare institutions and insane asylums  were making it easier for the 'inferior' humans to survive and reproduce faster than the ''superors". Yeah I can see the argument (do not agree with it). So by and by we get a society of poor and idiots. So Darwin read his cousins work and discussed it in a whole section in his 'Descent of man' bit boring but excellant book.

I read this in Wikipedia and put it here for you to understand the basics. Here is the Link.

So this is not something which happened when the Nazi's took over Germany. Lets look at from the 20th century.

Would anyone beleave that Sr Winston Churchill was a rascist? No. I heard about this from my dad when I was a kid. But I had my doubts about it. As I grew older other people were of the same thought. We did not have any proof as it was a ling time ago, and the politicians and the governing hieracy of UK know how to supress adverse material. I have heard so many quotations by Churchill - bless his soul - but never have I seen this:

Quote from Churchill: “I do not agree that the dog in a manger has the final right to the manger even though he may have lain there for a very long time. I do not admit that right. I do not admit for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race, a more worldly wise race to put it that way, has come in and taken their place.”

(To the Peel Commission 1937)
 

And from this article:

“By the standards of today — and possibly even of his own time — Winston Churchill was a convinced racist. For all his public pronouncements on the ‘Brotherhood of Man’ he was an unrepentant white — not to say Anglo-Saxon — supremacist. For such a zealous child of the Empire, anything else would have been astonishing. Part of the British Empire’s raison d’ etre was its assumption of racial superiority. . . . Neither were Churchill’s assumptions about human worth confined to ethnicity. He dabbled in eugenics. . . .

“For Churchill, Negroes were ‘niggers,’ Chinese were ‘chinks’ or ‘pigtails,’ and other black races were ‘baboons’ or ‘Hottentots.’ Italians were ‘mere organ-grinders.’ and when an Egyptian crowd attempted to burn down Shepherd’s Hotel in 1952, he described them in a memorandum to [Anthony] Eden as ‘lower than the most degraded savages now known.’”

But even before that he was a bigot, rascist etc. etc. he proposed a bill of eugenics.


Abstract:

When he was Home Secretary (February 1910-October 1911) Churchill was in favor of the confinement, segregation, and sterilization of a class of persons contemporarily described as the "feeble minded." The most significant letter Churchill wrote in support of eugenics was not, however, deliberately left out of the official biography by Randolph Churchill for reasons of embarrassment, but simply through oversight. -Ted Hutchinson

 That is from all the psychiatric world ever thought at that time, of course there were exceptions. There are lots and lots of material in the internet which shows that before Nazi's extremely vile acts, other European country elites were in favour of them, but could not do it, due to the democratic pressure. But this is not all. US has been involved in the psychiatry world in a big way too.

eerrrrr

 

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