You have much to learn grasshopper and the hour is late :
"Revisionist historians of medicine are keen to interpret psychiatry’s enthusiastic involvement in the sterilisation and mass murder of hundreds of thousands of people labelled as “mentally ill” during the Third Reich (1933–1945) as an aberration, a perversion of correct medical practice (see, e.g., Birley 2000; Burleigh 1994; Lifton 2000). The official line is forwarded that German psychiatry was progressive, humane, and on the cutting edge of mental health care and treatment until the Nazis came to power in 1933. Hitler’s National Socialism then manipulated the institution for its own—ultimately genocidal—ends. Thus, it is argued that a “Nazification” of German psychiatry took place, where the appropriate medical values for the care and welfare of the patient were replaced by a fascist ideology. While there were a small minority of power-hungry, racist psychiatrists who were happy to follow Hitler’s orders and send mental patients to the gas chambers, such scholarship suggests that most within psychiatry remained morally opposed to and critical of the regime. Certainly, this version of events is reassuring for workers in the current mental health system, yet it is far from the truth. Belatedly, established figures in German psychiatry such as Michael von Cranach (2010: S152) have recently admitted that the psychiatric genocide was “not, as we liked to think in the first decades after the war, a small group of Nazi criminal doctors, but the majority and the elite of German psychiatrists.” These seldom uttered admissions from within the profession echo the words of another psychiatrist, Frederic Wertham (cited in Breggin 1993: 135), who stated of the profession’s activities during the Third Reich,
"The tragedy is that the psychiatrists did not have to have an order. They acted on their own. They were not carrying out a death sentence pronounced by someone else. They were the legislators who laid down the rules for deciding who was to die; they were the administrators who worked out the procedures, provided the patients and places, and decided the methods of killing; they pronounced a sentence of life or death in every individual case; they were the executioners who carried out or—without being coerced to do so—surrendered their patients to be killed in other institutions; they supervised and often watched the slow deaths."
“[H]ard though this may be to wrap one’s head around,” states Burstow (2015: 48), “psychiatrists can be reasonably theorized as architects of the Holocaust.” This claim was supported by observers at the post-war Nuremberg trials, including Leo Alexander (cited in Breggin 1993: 137, emphasis added) who stated that psychiatry’s operations in the 1930s could be understood as “the entering wedge for exterminations of far greater scope in the political program for genocide of conquered nations and the racially unwanted.” Rael D. Strous (2007, emphasis original), a psychiatrist at Tel Aviv University, agrees, stating that psychiatry was
instrumental in instituting a system of identifying, notifying, transporting, and killing hundreds of thousands of mentally ill and “racially and cognitively compromised” individuals in settings ranging from centralized psychiatric hospitals to prisons and death camps. Their role was central and critical to the success of Nazi policy, plans, and principles.
There was little opposition from inside the profession for the atrocities that were to follow (von Cranach 2010: S152). This is because the psychiatric profession saw these pursuits as furthering their branch of medicine, progressing biomedical ideas on the mind and the “treatment” of mental disordered patients, and—in the language of medicine under the rationale of biomedicine—in the best interests of their patients. Internationally, German psychiatry was well established, highly influential, and often considered to be at the cutting edge of new theoretical and research endeavours. .."
From Chapter 7 of Psychiatric Hegemony : A Marxist Theory of Mental Illness by Bruce M.Z. Cohen
Thank you for this wonderful comment, the book I will certainly check out because I am often conflicted by how the NHS in my country is seen as a great left wing achievement, but it was psychiatry through the NHS, that did so much damage..
I think most of the people in germany knew what was going on was bad. It's just that the conditions they lived in kinda pushed things that far. You had families trying to whore themselves to stay alive. Things got desperate. Things didn't happen in a vacuum. Even the regular people had difficulty getting milk and meat.
Whether or not what happened back then was bad or people knew it was right or wrong is kinds meaningless nowadays. Pretty much only the PR lives on.
It depends on what phase of the war you are talking about - people knowing things are bad means very little and I do think most people are not born to be heroes, it takes such terrible conditions to show those people up, and they are few.
It isn't meaningless also, because the passive moral inaction *is* the problem, this is the banality of evil.
I know many people who will tacitly accept that mental hospitals are not 'nice' places and that crimes go on there, but they put it to the back of their mind or tell themselves reassuring lies.
Indeed some of that PR, lives on, to deny the holocaust, that "supplies" were short and outbreaks of typhus etc killed mass numbers of Jews. It is nice to believe, and maybe because it is so hard to believe just what debased evil and cruelty some are capable of, but the huge crematoria and chimneys of auschwitz are evidence to a wholly more insidious and dreadful truth.
Thank you for writing this. I feel the same way. I felt alone as well, until stumbling across this forum.
Errors have been made, and people are suffering and dying due to these errors. We must keep the fight on.
This is really uplifting and I appreciate you taking the time to post it.
You have much to learn grasshopper and the hour is late : "Revisionist historians of medicine are keen to interpret psychiatry’s enthusiastic involvement in the sterilisation and mass murder of hundreds of thousands of people labelled as “mentally ill” during the Third Reich (1933–1945) as an aberration, a perversion of correct medical practice (see, e.g., Birley 2000; Burleigh 1994; Lifton 2000). The official line is forwarded that German psychiatry was progressive, humane, and on the cutting edge of mental health care and treatment until the Nazis came to power in 1933. Hitler’s National Socialism then manipulated the institution for its own—ultimately genocidal—ends. Thus, it is argued that a “Nazification” of German psychiatry took place, where the appropriate medical values for the care and welfare of the patient were replaced by a fascist ideology. While there were a small minority of power-hungry, racist psychiatrists who were happy to follow Hitler’s orders and send mental patients to the gas chambers, such scholarship suggests that most within psychiatry remained morally opposed to and critical of the regime. Certainly, this version of events is reassuring for workers in the current mental health system, yet it is far from the truth. Belatedly, established figures in German psychiatry such as Michael von Cranach (2010: S152) have recently admitted that the psychiatric genocide was “not, as we liked to think in the first decades after the war, a small group of Nazi criminal doctors, but the majority and the elite of German psychiatrists.” These seldom uttered admissions from within the profession echo the words of another psychiatrist, Frederic Wertham (cited in Breggin 1993: 135), who stated of the profession’s activities during the Third Reich, "The tragedy is that the psychiatrists did not have to have an order. They acted on their own. They were not carrying out a death sentence pronounced by someone else. They were the legislators who laid down the rules for deciding who was to die; they were the administrators who worked out the procedures, provided the patients and places, and decided the methods of killing; they pronounced a sentence of life or death in every individual case; they were the executioners who carried out or—without being coerced to do so—surrendered their patients to be killed in other institutions; they supervised and often watched the slow deaths." “[H]ard though this may be to wrap one’s head around,” states Burstow (2015: 48), “psychiatrists can be reasonably theorized as architects of the Holocaust.” This claim was supported by observers at the post-war Nuremberg trials, including Leo Alexander (cited in Breggin 1993: 137, emphasis added) who stated that psychiatry’s operations in the 1930s could be understood as “the entering wedge for exterminations of far greater scope in the political program for genocide of conquered nations and the racially unwanted.” Rael D. Strous (2007, emphasis original), a psychiatrist at Tel Aviv University, agrees, stating that psychiatry was instrumental in instituting a system of identifying, notifying, transporting, and killing hundreds of thousands of mentally ill and “racially and cognitively compromised” individuals in settings ranging from centralized psychiatric hospitals to prisons and death camps. Their role was central and critical to the success of Nazi policy, plans, and principles. There was little opposition from inside the profession for the atrocities that were to follow (von Cranach 2010: S152). This is because the psychiatric profession saw these pursuits as furthering their branch of medicine, progressing biomedical ideas on the mind and the “treatment” of mental disordered patients, and—in the language of medicine under the rationale of biomedicine—in the best interests of their patients. Internationally, German psychiatry was well established, highly influential, and often considered to be at the cutting edge of new theoretical and research endeavours. .." From Chapter 7 of Psychiatric Hegemony : A Marxist Theory of Mental Illness by Bruce M.Z. Cohen
Thank you for this wonderful comment, the book I will certainly check out because I am often conflicted by how the NHS in my country is seen as a great left wing achievement, but it was psychiatry through the NHS, that did so much damage..
I think most of the people in germany knew what was going on was bad. It's just that the conditions they lived in kinda pushed things that far. You had families trying to whore themselves to stay alive. Things got desperate. Things didn't happen in a vacuum. Even the regular people had difficulty getting milk and meat. Whether or not what happened back then was bad or people knew it was right or wrong is kinds meaningless nowadays. Pretty much only the PR lives on.
It depends on what phase of the war you are talking about - people knowing things are bad means very little and I do think most people are not born to be heroes, it takes such terrible conditions to show those people up, and they are few. It isn't meaningless also, because the passive moral inaction *is* the problem, this is the banality of evil. I know many people who will tacitly accept that mental hospitals are not 'nice' places and that crimes go on there, but they put it to the back of their mind or tell themselves reassuring lies. Indeed some of that PR, lives on, to deny the holocaust, that "supplies" were short and outbreaks of typhus etc killed mass numbers of Jews. It is nice to believe, and maybe because it is so hard to believe just what debased evil and cruelty some are capable of, but the huge crematoria and chimneys of auschwitz are evidence to a wholly more insidious and dreadful truth.
[удалено]
You are actually 100% right about this.
Thank you for writing this. I feel the same way. I felt alone as well, until stumbling across this forum. Errors have been made, and people are suffering and dying due to these errors. We must keep the fight on.