JUSTIFYING MURDER Nazi Psychiatry�s Killing Films

In the 1930s, Nazi psychiatrists exploited Germany�s film industry to further their eugenics and racial hygiene agenda. Propaganda efforts were undertaken to garner public support for their programs that were offered as economic benefits while, in reality, they were investments in death.

Between 1895 and the 1920s, German psychiatrists devised the �scientific� justification for �mass killings,� first piloting the program on �mental defectives.� Indeed, psychiatrist Ernst R�din, who helped orchestrate Germany�s Sterilization Law in 1933 that destroyed the lives of hundreds of thousands of German citizens, boasted, �Only through the F�hrer did our dream of over 30 years, that of applying racial hygiene to society, become a reality.�

Two years before the Final Solution conference, which triggered the genocidal phase of the Holocaust, the first �killing tests� were conducted in psychiatric institutions; 18�20 people were murdered using gas, while psychiatrists and staff watched. Germany�s leading psychiatrists launched the �T4� euthanasia program�named after Tiergartenstrasse 4, the address of the program�s headquarters.

To achieve widespread acceptance of this murderous practice, T4 psychiatrists scripted propaganda movies. One film, �Dasein ohne Leben� (�Existence without Life�), was aimed at indoctrinating the population with the idea that care for the sick was much too expensive, that therapy for the �genetically diseased� was useless.

Another film, entitled simply, �Geisteskrank� (Mentally Ill), detailed how psychiatrists diligently examined the case histories and previous diagnoses of each patient to establish whether or not they were �incurable.� The cameraman filmed through the peephole into a gas chamber to show the killing. The script reads blandly: �� the patients are exposed to the effect of carbon monoxide gas. The gas that streams in is completely odorless, and initially robs the patients of their powers of judgment and subsequently of their consciousness.� And as the patient draws his last breath, an unseen commentator says, �Without pain or struggle, and completely unaware, the patient is liberated by death.�

As the war drew to a close, the Nazis destroyed several other equally explicit incriminating films. However, unedited footage was found that was part of one such film, �Victims of the Past.� Again scripted by psychiatrists, camera crews dressed as �doctors� and toured the country�s asylums to set up scenes that stigmatized disabled people. As reported, �The film, documentary in style, sets out a perverted version of Darwinian teaching. That only the fit and strong should live. �Everything that is weak in life will inevitably be destroyed by nature. In the last few decades, mankind has sinned terribly against the law of natural selection. We haven�t just maintained life unworthy of life. We have allowed it to multiply.� The script also required that the patients to be lit from below to depict them with �demonically mad faces.�

Supported by such unconscionable propaganda, psychiatrists murdered some 300,000�or more than 90% of the country�s mental patients� during a five-year period beginning in January 1940. More than 87,000 were children and young adults. Another 350,000 citizens were forcibly sterilized.

Ernst R�din Hadamar and other psychiatric facilities established killing centers to dispose of their patient populations. After killing them with gas, the bodies were incinerated in hospital ovens; the black smoke could be seen for miles around. Psychiatrists then exported their �successful� program into the concentration camps.

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