IMPORTANT FACTS

1. In 1895, Swiss-German psychiatrist Alfred Ploetz published his theories about eugenics and race inferiority, coining the word Rassenhygiene (racial hygiene) and providing the “biological foundations” for the Holocaust.

2. In 1920, German psychiatrist Alfred Hoche published a book, Permission to Destroy Life Unworthy of Life, wherein he demanded euthanasia be conducted on “mental defectives.”

3. The eugenics movement fueled the Ku Klux Klan’s resurrection in the early 1900s in the U.S.

4. South African psychiatrists and psychologists offered the government a “scientific” means by which to deny black South Africans employment and education and to tear apart their families.

5. Tens of thousands of black South Africans were incarcerated in psychiatric camps during the apartheid era, used for slave labor and allowed to die from untreated medical conditions.

CHAPTER TWO The Roots of Modern Genocide

Long before World War II, German psychiatrists had devised the “scientific” justification for euthanasia (“mercy killing”) based on “racial inferiority.”

Following the 1895 publication of his theories on eugenics, which he preferred to call “racial hygiene,” psychiatrist Alfred Ploetz, together with his fellow psychiatrist Ernst Rüdin, founded the German Society for Racial Hygiene in 1905. They promoted the idea that destroying the “unworthy” was “purely a healing treatment.”

In 1911—22 years before the Nazi party came to power—Rüdin had already preached that “All nations have to haul around with them an extraordinarily large number of inferiors, weaklings, sickly and cripples. … Through a wise legislation [sterilization] along this line ... we would also be able to pursue rationally the best avenues for breeding.”

In 1920, psychiatrist Alfred Hoche and Karl Binding, a lawyer who became Chief Justice of the Nazi Reich, published the book, Permission to Destroy Life Unworthy of Life, in which they demanded euthanasia be conducted on “mental defectives” and stated, “Their death will not be missed in the least except maybe in the hearts of their mother or guardian.” Hoche also claimed killing a dying individual with a medical drug was not “murder” but a “pure act of healing.”

German psychiatrist Eugen Fischer, co-author of The Principles of Human Heredity and Racial Hygiene (1921), also urged the annihilation of “Negro” children, theorizing that Blacks were devoid of value and useless for employment other than for “manual crafts.”

Fischer wrote, “He [the Negro] is not particularly intelligent in the proper sense of the term, and above all he is devoid of the power of mental creation, is poor in imagination, so that he has not developed any original art and has no elaborate folk sagas or folk myths. He is, however, clever with his hands … so that he can easily be trained in the manual crafts.”

In 1939, Fischer lectured students saying, “… I do not characterize every Jew as inferior, as Negroes are.”

Rüdin was the primary supporter of Germany’s Sterilization Act of 1933, which included the sterilization of all Jews and “colored” children. The law led to more than 350,000 “unfit” Germans being sterilized.

The first psychiatric “killing test” (gassing experiment) was conducted at Brandenburg institution in 1940—18 patients were murdered while psychiatrists and staff watched. Following the experiment’s “success,” the euthanasia program began.

Some 300,000 “mental defective” persons— 94% of all Germany’s “mentally ill”—met their deaths at the hands of psychiatrists. What followed was the Holocaust. Rüdin stated, “Only through the Führer did our dream of over thirty years, that of applying racial hygiene to society, become a reality.”

Even though Rüdin was the architect of the plan that made legalized mass murder a reality, incredibly in 1990, the U.S. National Alliance for Research on Schizophrenia and Depression (NARSAD) glorified Rüdin as the founder of “psychiatric genetics.”

Only a few Nazi psychiatrists were prosecuted during the Nuremberg Trials; most escaped justice and returned to psychiatric practice after the war.

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