Psychiatrists & The Holocaust

"patently ridiculous, you know, that Psychiatrists Caused the Holocaust"

Nada Stotland: President of the American Psychiatric Association

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30 JAN. 1933: Adolf Hitler becomes Chancellor of the Reich. Ernst Rudin, professor of psychiatry, praises Hitler, saying it is thanks to him that "the dream we have cherished for more than thirty years of seeing racial hygiene converted into action has become reality."

1933: Dr. M. H. Goering, cousin of Marshal Hermann Goering, states that psychotherapists should make a serious scientific study of Hitler's Mein Kampf and recognize it as a basic work. This statement is published in Germany's Journal of Psychotherapy, of which Carl Jung is the editor.

1933: Madison Grant publishes Conquest of a Continent, a "racial history of the US." He sends copies to Mussolini, Nazi professor Dr. Eugen Fischer at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for the Study of Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics in Berlin, Dr. Alfred Rosenberg (Hitler's chief scientific advisor) and Nazi race hygienist Dr. Fritz Lenz at the University of Munich.

1933: German doctors harass Jewish doctors by having them beaten, subjected to the sounds of gunshots, etc.

1933: Himmler creates Dachau in Germany on 20 March, 1933 as a place to send Communists, Social Democrats, etc.

1933: Dr. Hyde's first psychiatric patient, Theodor Eicke, becomes commandant of Dachau and then overall inspector of concentration camps. Hyde is consulting neuropsychiatric expert for the Gestapo and conducts "psychiatric/neurologic and heredity research" on concentration camp inmates.

1933: Dr. M. H. Goring (relative of Hermann Goring, Nazi leader) founds the New German Society for psychotherapy. Jung assumes the presidency. The society officially adopts the Nazi viewpoint on race, mental hygiene and psychiatry. Their journal states, "This Society has the task of unifying all German physicians in the spirit of the National Socialistic government...particularly those physicians who are willing to practice psychiatry according to the 'Weltanschauung' of the National Socialists." Jung writes in the journal, "... The Jew, a cultural nomad, has never and probably will never create his own cultural forms because all his instincts and gifts depend on a more or less civilized host nation. The Aryan unconscious has a higher potential than the Jewish..." On June 21, 1933, Jung states on the Radio Berlin that, "Only the self-development of the individual, which I consider to be the supreme goal of all psychological endeavor, can produce consciously responsible spokesmen and leaders of the collective movement. As Hitler said recently, the leader must be able to be alone and must have the courage to go his own way."

14 JULY 1933: Hitler puts into law the Nazi Act for Averting Descendants Afflicted with Hereditary Disease, which is based on H. H. Laughlin's US Model Eugenical Sterilization Law of 1922. Laughin receives an honorary degree from a German University (major Nazi research center on race purification) for his contribution to eugenics. Some figures of people who were slated to be surgically sterilized:

Congenital feeblemindedness:	200,000
Schizophrenia:	80,000
Manic depressive:	20,000
Epilepsy:	60,000
Hereditary blindness:	4,000
Hereditary deafness:	16,000
Grave bodily malformation:	20,000
Hereditary alcoholism:	10,000

1933: Fritz Lenz suggests sterilizing people with only slight symptoms of "mental disease," which at that time included about 20% of the German population (about 20,000,000 people). Martin Borman instructs in a directive that the person's moral and political behavior be taken into account when determining whether sterilization should take place. Estimate of people eventually sterilized under this law: approximately 375,000.

Ed: How curious, that Today's Psych Dicta has 1 in 5 Americans, (20%) suffering from a 'Diagnosable Mental Disorder'.

1933-45: According to the Central Association of Sterilized Persons in Germany in 1945, the total number of people sterilized under Hitler between 1933 - 1945 is 2,000,000. (The Journal of American Medical Association stated, regarding Nazi sterilization methods, that America had a "more gradual evolution of practice and principals" where sterilization was concerned.)

1934: Rudolph Hess says "National Socialism is nothing more than applied biology."

1934: Dr. Lenz states "As things are now, it is only a minority of our fellow citizens who are so endowed that their unrestricted procreation is good for the race."

1934-1938: Mental hospitals in Germany are encouraged to neglect patients. Funds are reduced. Courses showing repulsive behavior of some inmates are given first to government officials and then to SS, party leaders, police, prison officials and the press. A PR campaign is run heavily to prepare for the upcoming mass killings. About 20,000 civilian and military personnel see indoctrinatory films and "case demonstrations."

1934: Dr. Fischer gives the first course on eugenics for SS Doctors at Kaiser Wilhelm Institute.

1934: A film is released called Tomorrow's Children, dramatizing the plight of a woman about to be involuntarily sterilized before marriage to prevent bad characteristics from being passed on to her children.

1934: American eugenics doctors tour the German Hygiene Museum in Dresden.

1934: California eugenics movement organizes an exhibition of the Nazi's eugenics program in Pasadena, California. Their newsletter describes the exhibition (called "The New Germany") as follows: "It portrays the general eugenics program of the Nazi government, giving special attention to the need for sterilization. Those who have seen this exhibit say it is the finest thing of the kind that has ever been produced. Take the opportunity to see this while in Los Angeles. Tell your friends about it."

1936-1965: Psychiatrist Franz J. Kallmann, born and educated in Germany, is a researcher at New York State Psychiatric Institute from '36 to '65, having worked for two years under the Nazis before coming to the U.S. in 1936. He is chief of psychiatric research at New York State Psychiatric beginning in 1952, when the CIA did LSD and Mescaline experiments there. Like Mengele, Kallmann is interested in twins and their genetic disposition. He focuses on this area concerning what he calls the "genetics of schizophrenia." Kallmann says in a lecture .".it is desirable to extend prevention of reproduction to relatives of schizophrenics who stand out because of minor anomalies and, above all, to define each of them as being undesirable from the eugenic point of view at the beginning of their reproductive years."

1935: Dr. Gerhardt Wagner, head physician of the Reich, discusses euthanasia with Hitler at the Nazi party congress in Nuremberg.

1935: Hitler first tells Gerhard Wagner (chief physician of the Reich) of his plans for the official euthanasia program. Wagner is regarded as the "godfather of the euthanasia program."

1935: Germans adopt a law requiring a medical examination before marriage and forbidding marriage between "Aryans" and Jews, Gypsies, Slavs, etc.

1935:The SS Race and Resettlement Bureau is given the authority to control the marriages of the entire German civilian population. Himmler predicts that in 120 years the entire German population will be pure-blooded Aryans.

1935: French-American Nobel Prize winner Dr. Alexis Carrel publishes "Man the Unknown" in which he advocates killing the "mentally ill and criminals" in "euthanasia" institutions. He writes, "Those who have murdered, robbed while armed...kidnapped children, despoiled the poor of their savings, misled the public in important matters, should be humanely and economically disposed of in small euthanasia institutions supplied with proper gases. A similar treatment could be advantageously applied to the insane, guilty of criminal acts."

1935: International Congress for Population Science in Berlin.

1936: Psychiatrist Dr. Ritter begins a "racial study" on Gypsies in Berlin.

1936: University of Heidelberg stages a 550 year jubilee and invites delegations from all over the world. Representatives from eight American universities attend. Harry H. Laughlin and Foster Kennedy are among the guests who are sympathetic toward Nazi sterilization methods. Germany is invited to send representatives to Harvard for its 200th anniversary celebration.

GERMAN RACIAL STERILIZATIONS BEGINS.

1936: In the first German sterilizations strictly on grounds of race, 500 children (the offspring of black soldiers) are sterilized.

1937: Harry H. Laughlin and Frederick Osborn, American scientists who played leading roles in the American eugenics movement and supported Nazi racial policies, establish the Pioneer Fund, the primary beneficiary of which is textile magnate Wickliffe Draper. The Fund's purposes include encouraging, among other things, increased reproduction on the part of "white persons who settled in the original thirteen colonies" and research on "race betterment." (Today, the Pioneer Fund continues to support research into eugenics, immigration, race and heredity.)

1937: All German "colored" children are ordered sterilized.

1937: Mengele publishes Racial-Morphological Examination of the Anterior Portion of the Lower Jaw in Four Racial Groups.

1937: Dr. Earnest Hooten, Harvard, is quoted in the New York times as saying "compulsory sterilization alone would serve in the case of the insane and mentally deficient, but it is very difficult to enforce such a measure in a democracy, unless it has been preceded by an educational campaign...a biological purge is the essential prerequisite for a social and spiritual salvation."

1937: Madison Grant's Conquest of a Continent ("Racial History of the US") is published in Berlin. It is greeted by Dr. Eugen Fisher with "No one has as much reason to note the work of this man with the keenest of attention as does a German of today--in a time when the racial idea has become one of the chief foundations of the National Socialist State's population policies."

1937: In America, the Eugenics Record Office and the Eugenics Research Association send a flier to 3,000 U.S. high schools, encouraging the screening of an English version of the Nazi propaganda film Erbkrank ("Hereditary Defective"). The film plays 28 times in 1937- 38.

c 1937: Leading government personnel and psychiatrists discuss elimination of the mentally ill (Germany). Leading psychiatrists Max de Crinis (professor and chairman of the department of psychiatry at Berlin University and later supervisor of killing center at Sonnenstein), Mau, Kihn, Pohlisch and Schneider get together with anthropologists and two directors of mental hospitals to draft a formal law concerning euthanasia.

1938: In the U.S., Harry H. Laughlin distributes numerous copies of the Nazi propaganda movie The Genetically Diseased to American schools, churches and clubs. In one scene preceding the image of a man facing the camera, the text reads, "55-year old Jew -cunning agitator."

1938: German born and educated US psychiatrist Franz Kallman calls for the "legal power" to sterilize "tainted children and siblings of schizophrenics" and to prevent marriages involving "schizoid eccentrics and borderline cases."

1939: Hitler asks Carl Brandt, his personal physician, to appoint an advisory board to devise a program for the killing of disabled children. The program is administered out of Hitler's private chancellory.

1939: An interview with psychiatrist Carl Jung is published in Hearst's International- Cosmopolitan. In it, he calls Mussolini a man of style and good taste who was "warm and human." About Hitler, he says, "There is no question but that Hitler belongs in the category of the truly mystic medicine man. As somebody commented about him at the last Nuremberg party congress, since the time of Mohammed nothing like it has been seen in this world. This markedly mystic characteristic of Hitler's is what makes him do things which seem to us illogical, inexplicable, curious and unreasonable...So you see, Hitler is a medicine man, a form of a spiritual vessel, a demi-deity or, even better, a myth."

JULY 1939: Most of the heads of psychiatry departments in German universities and almost all heads of German mental hospitals are formally briefed at the Chancellery in Berlin. They are instructed by the current head of the SS, Viktor Brack, that all insane people in Germany are to be killed by "euthanasia." Those in attendance are asked to participate and agree to do so, except for Professor Ewald of Gottingen. The general response of the psychiatrists present is recorded as: "Nobody mentioned any misgivings." Ten to fifteen doctors, with other SS personnel, organize the "National Group for Study of Sanatoria and Nursing Homes," the "Foundation of the Care of Institutions in the Public Interest," and the "Limited Company for the Transport of Invalids in the Public Interest" to begin execution of the killing program. Hitler's advisors calculate initially that out of 1,000 Germans, 10 are mentally ill. 5 will enter a psychiatric hospital and of these 5, one must die. The number calculated is between 65,000 and 70,000.

August 1939: Hitler's chancellory issues a statement saying children up to age 3 who are retarded or deformed must be registered by midwives or physicians. A questionnaire is to be filled out describing their disability. Three physicians decide the life or death of the child without examining them. At over 30 special clinics, selected children are killed by injection and starvation.



1 SEPT 1939: Hitler begins the second World War and backdates a letter concerning euthanasia to the same date. He writes, "Reichsleiter Bouhler and Dr. Brandt are entrusted with the responsibility of extending the rights of specially designated physicians, such that patients who are judged incurable after the most thorough review of their condition which is possible can be granted mercy killing." A panel of experts is appointed to review the death applications. The panel of at least 20 includes Drs. Heyde, Mauz, Nitsche (editor of the Journal of Mental Hygiene), Panse, Pohlisch, Reisch, Schneider (professor of psychiatry at University of Heidelberg and teacher of killing procedures to younger psychiatrists), Werner Villinger (professor of psychiatry at the University of Breslau) and Zucker —ALL PSYCHIATRISTS! They are paid a certain amount per application. There are 283,000 initial applications to be processed. At least 75,000 are marked for death.

Spring 1939: Hitler sets up the Reich Committee for Scientific Research of Heredity and Severe Constitutional Diseases for the purpose of selecting and killing children who are "mentally ill," "mentally deficient," and physically deformed. (Later, in 1948, the director of one institution was convicted of killing at least 120 children, some personally. He is sentenced to six years in prison, of which he serves two.) Fredric Wertham writes in his book, A Sign for Cain, "The children slated for death were sent to special 'children's divisions', first Goerden, then Eichberg, Idstein, Steinhof (near Vienna), and Eglfing. They were killed mostly by increasing doses of Luminal or other drugs either spoon-fed as medicine or mixed with their food. Their dying lasted for days, sometimes weeks. In actual practice, the indications for killing actually became wider and wider. Included were children who had 'badly modeled ears', who were bed wetters, or who were perfectly healthy but designated as 'difficult to educate'. The children coming under the Reich Commission were originally mostly infants. The age was then increased from three years to seventeen years..."

1939: Nazi psychiatrist Herman Pfanmuller (a Sturmbannfuehrer (major) in the SS) develops a method of starving infants to death slowly, rather than killing them with medication.

1939: Inmates of mental hospitals are shot to make room for German troops. This practice continues until these hospitals are effectively cleaned out by 1941. Psychiatric extermination facilities are set up in Pomerania. People are killed by gas, shooting, drugs, injections and starvation.

1939: Werner Catel, professor of psychiatry at Leipzig clinic, Hans Heinze, Ernst Wentzler, pediatric psychiatrist and others form a committee to decide which children should be put to death. They emphasize putting newborns to sleep "as soon as possible." This project is referred to as the "Special Psychiatric Youth Department." Included in the category of children to be killed are "juvenile delinquents" and "minor Jewish-Aryan half-breeds." After the war, Dr. Catel works as professor of pediatrics and head of the pediatric clinic at the University of Kiel until the 1960s.

1939: Through the Reich Chancellery and the Ministry of the Interior, Hitler officially extends killing to adult mental patients, choosing prominent psychiatrists to run the program called T4. "T4" is the code name for the project located at 4 Tiergartenstrasse in Berlin. In May, the Committee for the Scientific Treatment of Severe and Genetically Determined Illness is formed at 4 Tiergartenstrasse to study how to set up a euthanasia program. Dr. Herbert Linden, commissioner of all the psychiatric institutions in Germany, represents the Ministry of the Interior. This program eventually involves virtually the entire German psychiatric community. Four categories are specified for killings:

Patients suffering from specified diseases...schizophrenia, epilepsy, senile diseases, therapy-resistant paralysis...feeblemindedness from any cause...other neurological conditions of a terminal nature. Patients who have been continually institutionalized for at least five years. Patients in custody as criminally insane. Patients who are not German citizens, or are not of German or kindred blood.

Six main killing centers are established, using converted nursing homes or hospitals. Hitler decides to use carbon monoxide on the advice of Dr. Werner Heyde, psychiatrist.

1939: Fourth International Congress for Racial Hygiene and Eugenics in Vienna.

NAZI GASSING OF MENTAL PATIENTS BEGINS

January 1940: Gassing of mental patients begins, using carbon monoxide gas in fake showers in a psychiatric hospital near Berlin. By Sept., 70,723 have died. A nurse involved in these proceedings testifies later that..."Herr Schwenninger was in charge of our convoys and kept lists of the names of patients who were to be transferred.... The patients we transferred were not the worst cases.... but very often in good physical condition....On the arrival of the patients at Grafeneck, they were taken to the huts there and briefly examined by Drs. Schumann and Baumhardt on the lines of the questionnaires. These two doctors gave the final decision whether a patient was to be gassed or not. In certain cases gassing was postponed. But the majority of the patients were killed within twenty-four hours of arriving at Grafeneck. I was there nearly a year and know of only a few cases in which patients were not gassed. As a rule they were given, before gassing, an injection of 2 c.c. of morphine and scopolamine. These injections were given by the doctor. The gassing was undertaken by certain picked men. Some of the corpses were dissected by Dr. Hennecke. Some idiotic children between 6 and 13 years old were also included in the program. After Grafeneck was closed I went to Hadamar and remained there until 1943....About seventy-five patients were killed daily. From Hadamar I was transferred to Irrsee, near Kaufbeuren, where I continued with this work...This program was carried on until the collapse of Germany." Horst Schumann headed the killing center at Grafeneck. He also assisted in extermination and experiments on Jewish prisoners at Auschwitz.

1940: Approximately 30,000 people are killed at Hartheim, Austria, one of the better-known killing centers. Simon Wiesenthal describes these kind of centers as "regular schools for mass murderers," producing "special cadres of technically skilled and emotionally hardened executioners." Of Hartheim, he writes, "Hartheim was organized like a medical school -- except that the 'students' were not taught to save human life but to destroy it as efficiently as possible. The deaths of the victims were clinically studied, precisely photographed, scientifically perfected. (At later trials in Germany it was proven that at the death camps of Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka special photographers also made pictures of people being killed.) Various mixtures of gasses were tried out to find the most effective one. Doctors with stopwatches would observe the dying patients through the peephole in the cellar door at Castle Hartheim, and the length of the death struggle was clocked to one tenth of a second. Victims' brains were photographed to see exactly when death had occurred.

1940: Himmler receives a report that 6,400 Germans and Polish mental patients have been shot in one extermination program.

June 1940: The first gassings of Jews takes place. 200 men, women and children are transported from a mental institution to a killing center.

June 1940: Dr. Jaspersen of Bethel tries to get the heads of departments of psychiatry in German universities to make a protest against euthanasia. He receives no support.

May 1940: 1,558 mental patients are gassed in vans in a two week period in Soldau. SS officers wear white coats and carry stethoscopes (a common practice to medicalize the slaughter.)

1940s: Approximately 40,000 mental patients in France starve to death. The French psychiatrists readily follow the German example of covert euthanasia without being ordered to do so.

1940: Lothrop Stoddard, American eugenicist and author of The Rising Tide of Color against White World Supremacy, praised by President Herbert Hoover, meets with Himmler and other top Nazi officials. He states that the "Jews problem" is "already settled in principle and soon to be settled in fact by the physical elimination of the Jews themselves from the Third Reich." He says the Nazis are "weeding out the worst strains in the Germanic stock in a scientific and truly humanitarian way."

Early 1941: German psychiatrists train the Nazi SS on mass murder techniques they learned from experimenting on mental patients. The program is extended to Dachau and other camps under the code name of 14f13. Himmler uses experienced psychiatrists to go to camps and eliminate "asocial elements" -"excess prisoners." This was officially called Operation 14f13. Physicians push for widespread extermination of inmates, while some concentration camp personnel try to keep people alive to help the war effort. Doctors have the responsibility for killing at the camps, using methods they perfected on mental patients. "Medicalization" legitimizes widespread extermination. Reich Interior Minister orders that all Jews in German mental hospitals be killed. Roving bands of T4 commissions select those too ill to work & Jews and Gypsies in camps and send them to gas chambers at the psychiatric hospitals.

1941: Hadamar (psychiatric killing institution) has a special celebration to commemorate the cremation of "mental patient" number 10,000. The entire staff participates and each receives a bottle of beer.

1941: Viktor Brack, one of the heads of the euthanasia program, sends a report to Himmler stating how X-Rays can be used to sterilize people.

1941: I.G. Farben Industries (manufacturer of synthetic oil and rubber) chooses a site near Auschwitz because of the accessibility of slave labor. The overall operation is known as I. G. Auschwitz. Other large firms follow suit. I.G. Farben controls the firm that produces gas used by medical personnel in the camps. This begins the use of gas for mass exterminations outside of psychiatric hospitals. I.G. Farben pays the SS a labor fee of 3 Reichsmarks a day for each inmate; 1 ½ Reichsmarks a day for children. By September, 1942, I.G. Farben is running its own concentration camp. At Auschwitz, gassing is initially tested on 600 Russian prisoners of war and 200 hospital patients. Labor camps are converted to killing centers. Gas chambers are dismantled and reassembled at these camps. T-4 personnel accompany them, their salaries paid by Hitler's private chancellory.

1941: 90,000 German psychiatric patients are murdered; 71,000 in hospital gas chambers

1941: Blowing up mental patients with explosives is tried. This method is abandoned as needing too much cleaning up.

1941: Rosenberg, Reichsfurher for the occupied eastern territories, invites T4 personnel to assist in the liquidation of Jews confined to Polish ghettos. He requests assistance in constructing gas chambers.

1941: Hitler officially orders the general euthanasia program terminated due to an outcry from churches and public, but it in fact increases, with more and older children being killed. Over 5,000 children are killed. Various psychiatric methods are used to "treat" children including beatings and electric shock for bed-wetting. In August, the killing of mental patients by gas stops and death by starvation, drugs and failure to treat infectious disease begins (covert euthanasia). Approximately 300,000 mental patients are eventually killed by gassing, injection and starvation under this official program. Many thousands were murdered previously by covert means. Many institutions in Germany (e.g., Berlin, Silesia, Baden, Saxony and Austria) are closed entirely, as all the patients are liquidated. Approximately 100,000 German mental patients starve to death after the "end" of the euthanasia program. No resistance is voiced to the killing program from the psychiatric community. A killing center is dismantled and reassembled in the East. The murder continues but more quietly, up until and even briefly after the German surrender.

3 Sept 1941: Killing of Russian POWs by gas tried out for first time at Auschwitz.

10 Dec 1941: Himmler orders the Doctors involved in the euthanasia campaign to "comb out" prisoners in concentration camps for killing. Among those involved are psychiatrists Heyde, Nitsche and others.

1941: Dr. Ritter takes part in a conference discussing the killing of 30,000 Gypsies by sending them out to sea on ships and then bombing the ships.

1942: U.S. psychiatrist Foster Kennedy writes in the journal of the American Psychiatric Association that retarded and "utterly unfit" children should be killed to save money and emotional trauma for the parents.

1942: Psychiatrist Eberl is appointed as the head of Treblinka concentration camp.

1942: U.S. psychiatrists experiment with hypothermia or "refrigeration therapy" on mental patients, publishing their results in the Journal of Nervous and Mental Diseases. 16 people are placed in cabinets on a mattress covered with sheets for up to 120 hours (5 days), with their body temperature as low as 81.8 F. The authors describe the treatment results as, "...prolonged mental retardation and physical decay bordering on cachexia (general ill health, with emaciation) occurred in the survivors." Two deaths occurred from pneumonia. Another patient died 2 months after the treatment. These experiments pre-date the German ones cited in the Nuremberg trials.

Dec 1942: Psychiatrist Schneider runs a research ward where idiots and epileptics are marked for death and their brains studied.

1940s: Electroshock is given to mentally ill and non-mentally ill alike in German camps. Experiments are done on men, women and children, with some prisoner physicians assisting. Mengele performs experiments with twins, sometimes killing the children at the conclusion. Other medical experiments include: (from Nazi Doctors by Lifton) "artificially induced burns with phosphorous incendiary bombs; experiments on the effects of drinking sea water; experiments with various forms of poison, by ingestion as well as in bullets or arrows; widespread experiments on artificially induced typhus, as well as with epidemic hepatitis and with malaria; experiments in cold immersion ('in freezing water') to determine the body's reactions and susceptibilities; experiments with mustard gas in order to study the kinds of wounds it can cause; experiments in the regeneration of bone, muscle, nerve tissue, and on bone transplantation, involving removal of various bones, muscles, and nerves from healthy women."

14 Jan 1942: A team from the mental patient euthanasia program (20-30 people) move into the extermination site at Chelmno and activate a killing program for Polish Jews and Gypsies. Methods used in T4 and 14f13 euthanasia projects are extended to expand the genocide. The killing of the weak and diseased or mentally incompetent in camps is simply expanded to include anyone viewed as undesirable, setting the stage for the "final solution" in an attempt to eliminate all Jews and other "non-Aryans." Interestingly, suicide in these camps is forbidden and considered a serious breach of discipline.

1942: Approximately 1,000 prisoners in Germany are subjected to X-ray castrations.

May 1942: The policy of exterminating people unable to work begins with an order from the camp physician of Auschwitz.

1942: First autopsy report of brain damage from ECT.

1942: Bini suggests the repetition of ECT many times a day, naming the method "annihilation therapy."

1943: At least fifteen to twenty healthy girls, half-Jewish, are brought to Hadamar. They are all killed by injection.

1943: Nazi Dr. Schneider requests permission to kill mental patients from his research ward for study.

1943: Greenburg and Spiegal use sodium pentothal on North African pilots and call it "narcosynthesis."

1943: Albert Hoffman, a Swiss chemist, develops LSD, lauded by many psychiatrists as being useful in understanding psychosis. (Later, in the 1980s, many psychiatrists will view the drug "ecstasy" in the same light).

1943: Nazi psychiatrist Pfannmuller establishes two starvation houses for adults.

August 1943: 4,000 Jews are selected out and killed at the camp at which Mengele is the chief physician.

1944: Dr. Gelny, director of the Mauer-Ohling institution in Austria, kills many mental patients with electroshock, including one at a demonstration at a psychiatric congress.

1945: Lancet, a major British medical journal, publishes "Sterilization of the Insane in the USA." The article, based on information from the Journal of the American Medical Association, cites roughly 42,000 cases of sterilization between 1941 - 1943. California leads all states with 10,000. Among the victims: "Insane" - 20,600; "Feeble Minded" - 20,453. 1945 To date, at least 400,000 Germans have been sterilized.

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"patently ridiculous, you know, that Psychiatrists caused the Holocaust"

NADA STOTLAND: President of the American Psychiatric Association


US Holocaust Memorial Museum