IMPORTANT FACTS

1. The prior influence of psychiatry is apparent in the racist views and radical religious fundamentalism of most terrorist groups.

2. As early as 1916, German psychiatrists waged a campaign to “purify the race” by the sterilization and castration of “unfit stock.”Eventually, those “selected” were gassed in concentration camps.

3. The “ethnic cleansing” of Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo was based on the same psychiatric theories of “racial hygiene” and racial superiority/inferiority that led to the Nazi Holocaust.

CHAPTER THREE Ideology Spawns Racial Hatred

Most terrorist groups today embrace extremist political views and hold racist positions that range from “white suprema- cism” and anti-Semitism to radical religious fundamentalism and anti-Westernism.

Research shows that psychiatry or psychology have influenced and even created such characteristics, spawning racial and political hatred that has resulted in the murder of millions.

Psychiatrists Create Nazism

In 1895, almost 40 years before the Nazi party came to power, Swiss-German psychiatrist Alfred Ploetz, a proponent of the eugenics movement, published a host of materialistic theories about racial inferiority in The Fitness of Our Race and the Protection of the Weak. He propagated the concept of destroying unworthy life as “purely a healing treatment,” and coined the word Rassenhygiene (racial hygiene).

In 1905, Ploetz co-founded the Society for Racial Hygiene. The Nazi regime later credited Ploetz and his cohorts with having helped provide the “biological foundations” for the Nazi racial state.

Psychiatrist Alfred Hoche’s 1920 book, Permission to Destroy Life Unworthy of Life, demanded that euthanasia be conducted on “mental defectives.” By 1932, psychiatry’s racial hygiene ideas had become scientific orthodoxy. It was taught in 26 separate courses in the medical faculties of most German universities—all before Hitler came to power in 1933.

Another psychiatrist, Ernst Rüdin, who helped orchestrate the 1933 Sterilization Laws of Nazi Germany, urged that psychiatry take a major role in purifying the race, which, he said, involved ensuring that genetically “defective” persons “shall not be able to propagate.”

It was these texts and theories that fired Adolf Hitler’s mania to eradicate “unworthy” or “inferior” life. Hitler had already had an encounter with psychiatry. Journalist Ron Rosenbaum related the details in The New Yorker. Hitler, blinded by a poison gas attack during the war, was admitted to a military hospital in 1918. There, psychiatrist Edmund Forster hypnotized him, placing him in a trance and suggestively implanted him with the idea that his beloved Germany needed him to recover his sight in order to serve the cause of national resurrection.

The first step in psychiatry’s eugenics master plan was the sterilization and castration of those deemed “biologically unsound,” such as the mentally ill, intellectually handicapped, homosexuals and “colored” people. Between 1934 and 1945, up to 350,000 people were sterilized. By 1940, “killing” centers using gas to exterminate mental patients were operating in German asylums. A year later, this euthanasia program was expanded into the concentration camps. “The killing in the concentration camps went along the same lines and with the same registration forms as in the insane asylums,” noted one proud German psychiatrist.

Both Ploetz and Rüdin were honored for their work. In 1934 Rüdin became the first member of the Nazi party to receive its Golden Medal of Honor (Goldene Ehrehzeichen). In 1943, Hitler himself bestowed Rüdin with the title “Pioneer of Racial Hygiene.” Rüdin was ecstatic: “Only through the Führer did our dream of over 30 years, that of applying racial hygiene to society, become a reality.”

Incredibly, only four out of dozens of guilty Nazi psychiatrists were prosecuted at the 1946 Nuremberg trials. Most escaped justice, and many returned to psychiatric practice after the war. Some even occupied government positions again.

Not until 1999 did German psychiatrists fully admit publicly that psychiatry had spawned “eugenics” and the racial “inferiority/superiority” ideology that had been poisoning the minds of the German people for almost three decades before the Nazis took power.

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