Psychiatry’s Reign of Terror

Emil Kraepelin (1856-1926), known as the “father of modern psychiatry” and original architect of what became the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), established the basic suppressive fundamentals of the Holocaust. The pattern was: Label someone with a false psychiatric diagnosis; Remove them from society; Put them into special camps or institutions; Destroy them.

Suppress: to put down by force or authority; to squash any attempt at betterment; an antisocial expression of antagonism toward life, living or attempts to do better in life.

Psychiatrists today, all over the world, use and apply the same basic suppressive fundamentals of Kraepelin in the mental health industry. Label someone with a false psychiatric diagnosis; Involuntarily commit them to a psychiatric facility, or put children into foster care, or put the elderly into a nursing home, or enforce psychiatric treatment on those incarcerated in prison; Forcibly give them harmful “treatments” such as psychiatric drugs, electric shock, or brain surgery which either cripples them or kills them.

A recently published article in the journal History of Psychiatry by three psychiatrists chronicles the Nazi’s use of electroshock treatment to eliminate mental patients and other “undesirables” from the population. The authors detail that in 1944 Dr. Emil Gelny, working at psychiatric hospitals in Gugging and Mauer-Öhling, Austria, began systematically killing patients with an ECT machine. Today, ECT is a big money-maker for the psychiatric industry.

The origin of psychiatric false data
In 1879, German psychologist Wilhelm Wundt (1832-1920) of Leipzig University provided the ultimate scientific “proof” for eugenics and racism, by arrogantly declaring that as man’s soul could not be measured with scientific instruments, it did not exist.

Kraepelin was a student of Wundt; in 1917 he founded the German Research Institute for Psychiatry in Munich (funded by the Rockefeller Foundation in 1924), which became the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Psychiatry during World War II, and after the War was renamed as the Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry. This institute’s mission was, and is, to prove that mental disorders are just biological, genetic brain disorders. German psychiatrist Alfred Erich Hoche (1865-1943) in 1920 endorsed exterminating “life unworthy of living.” Swiss psychiatrist Ernst Rüdin (1874-1952) worked under Kraepelin for 18 years, and was instrumental in designing The Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring in 1933 (the “sterilization law”) which provided the legal basis for compulsory sterilization, which ultimately led to the euthanasia (killing) of six million Jews during World War II.

There were hundreds of psychiatrists in Germany directing and carrying out the atrocities prior to and during the Holocaust. Dr. Schmuhl said, “In my opinion, you cannot say that there are only a few bad apples within psychiatry who did National Socialism’s groundwork, but it is a problem with the entire profession.”

It wasn’t just during the War that these atrocities were perpetrated. Long before in 1905, psychiatrist Rüdin and eugenicist Alfred Ploetz were among the founders of the German Society for Racial Hygiene, a euphemism for eradicating undesirable traits in the population by removing those “undesirables” with sterilization or murder. Starting in 1934 under the sterilization Law, the number of people who were involuntarily sterilized may be as high as 400,000, with up to 5,000 who died as a consequence. Another 275,000 psychiatric patients were murdered, including an estimated 100,000 who starved to death in German mental hospitals. Starting in 1938 the “child euthanasia” program killed over 5,000 babies and children in 31 “pediatric wards” by the psychiatrists in various psychiatric hospitals.

Then in 1939 the first gas chamber killings began in Fort VII concentration camp in Posen, Poland. In 1940-1941, over 70,000 mental patients were killed by poison gas in six psychiatric centers. From 1942-1945 another 250,000 mental patients in psychiatric hospitals were killed. This was only the beginning of the psychiatric atrocities.

For more information, watch the CCHR Documentary The Age of Fear – Psychiatry’s Reign of Terror, which contains shocking personal testimony and revealing inside footage that tell the true story of psychiatry, whose reliance on brutality and coercion has not changed since the moment it was born in Germany.

The Age of Fear education package is also provided free of charge to historians, professors and human rights activists who give lectures and group instruction, teach school or university classes or run community learning programs.

Previous CCHR STL blogs on this subject
https://www.cchrstl.org/wordpress/2017/06/11/the-racism-of-psychiatry/
https://www.cchrstl.org/wordpress/2017/05/22/racism-how-psychiatry-creates-and-perpetuates-it/
https://www.cchrstl.org/wordpress/2016/12/10/nazis-on-drugs/
https://www.cchrstl.org/wordpress/2016/03/25/holocaust-commemoration-in-london-details-hitlers-use-of-psychiatric-genocide-program/
https://www.cchrstl.org/wordpress/2012/11/10/the-age-of-fear-psychiatrys-reign-of-terror/
https://www.cchrstl.org/wordpress/2017/03/19/washington-university-in-st-louis-shocks-pregnant-women/

References
1. Psychiatrists-the Men Behind Hitler, by Dr. Thomas Röder and etc., Freedom Publishing, 1999.

2. Die Gesellschaft Deutscher Neurologen und Psychiater im Nationalsozialismus (The Society of German Neurologists and Psychiatrists in National Socialism), by Hans-Walter Schmuhl, Springer, 2015. Professor Schmuhl is a German historian who has published numerous history books, especially the history of euthanasia.

3. G Gazdag, GS Ungvari, and H Czech, “Mass killing under the guise of ECT: the darkest chapter in the history of biological psychiatry,” In History of Psychiatry, Sage Publications, 2017.

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