Wirth's successor at Hartheim,
Franz Stangl, later became commandant of Treblinka. Asked how he became inured to
killing people, Stangl explained that he had been trained by doctors in the
euthanasia program in 1940
Rosonoff later raises the question
whether or not eugenics itself smacks of "nazism and fascism" (p.
812), but concludes that the ethics of eugenics are "scientific"
rather than political in origin.
How many times have we heard White House Press Secretary, Jen Psaki, tell her audience that COVID was not political, but only a program to protect the American people? That they rely not on politics, but on the science.
Trying to give COVID of 2020 to 2021 a historical context, most people, most media, and pundits are framing its importance to the wrong event. Too many like to compare COVID to the Spanish Flu of 1918. The more accurate historical frame should be the WWII holocaust, mainly for the role that psychiatry and medical experts played in delivering so many Germans and Jews to their death. Check out what Peter R. Breggin wrote about the role played by psychiatry in that holocaust.
German psychiatrists proposed the
extermination of mental patients before Hitler came to power. Then in Nazi
Germany, organized psychiatry implemented involuntary eugenical sterilization
and euthanasia, ultimately killing up to 100,000 German mental patients. The six
psychiatric euthanasia centers utilized medical professionals, fake death
certificates, gas chambers disguised as showers, and the mass burning of
corpses. Psychiatrists from the euthanasia program also participated in the
first formalized murders in the concentration camps. Inmates were “diagnosed"
on euthanasia forms and sent to the psychiatric euthanasia centers. These
facilities late r provided the training, personnel, and technology for the large
r extermination camps. Medical observers from the United States and Germany at
the Nuremberg trials concluded that the holocaust might not have taken place
without psychiatry. This paper summarizes psychiatric participation in events
leading to the holocaust and analyzes the underlying psychiatric principles
that anticipated, encouraged, and paved the way for the Nazi extermination
program.
This was something.
The crematorium ovens had been
active up to the arrival of the American soldiers, with an admitted 350-400
cremations during the first 6 months of 1945. But unlike the extermination
camps, which shut down with the impending arrival of allied troops, the
psychiatrists had maintained their extermination program.
Abrams reported that a psychiatrist
who led him through the hospital showed no remorse. He was not a Nazi party
member, and believed that he had acted in the name of medicine. The nurses
belonged to religious orders. The psychiatric director of the institution
hanged himself in reaction to Abrams' arrival.
We've all heard of Nazi death and concentration camps in Poland and Germany during WWII, but how many of us have heard of psychiatric extermination centers? They were Hartheim [where 18,000 people were murdered], Hadamar, Sonncenstein, Grafeneck, Brandenburg, and Bernbcrg.
When one of the Berlin professors
approved euthanasia, the sentence was carried out. Chronicity and incapacity
for work were key criteria. The selected patients were then shipped to holding
facilities and then ultimately to one of the six psychiatric extermination
centers - Hartheim, Hadamar, Sonncnstein, Grafeneck, Brandenberg, and Bernbcrg
[5]. Up to 100000 German psychiatric inmates were killed before Hitler ended
the official program late in 1941 [6,7].
Aktion T4 was a campaign of mass murder by euthanasia.
The euthanasia centers were structured like medical schools. That's frightening.
In The Murderers Among Us [11],
Simon Wiesenthal observes that the psychiatric euthanasia centers were
structured like medical schools: Hartheim was organized like a medical school--except that the "students" were not taught to save human life but
to destroy it as efficiently as possible. The deaths of the victims were
clinically studied, precisely photographed, scientifically perfected.
That is something. Here's your COVID alert. Remember how the hospitals were fudging the COVID deaths to make the tally seem worse than it actually was to justify continued fear and further measures, like masks, extended lockdowns, and now vaccines? [check out the first video and the comments below for a refresher] The psychiatrists and doctors running the psychiatric extermination centers did exactly the same thing.
The presence of physicians and
other health professionals in the euthanasia centers gave a false security to
the victims who did not realize their fate until the very end. Faked death
certificates were intended to disguise the deaths as natural in origin in
order to hide an inmate's fate from his or her family and the public.
One question arises is, how was it that these psychiatric executioners were so hardened, what made them continue with their enterprise given what they were doing to their fellow citizens?
How had the perpetrators of the
holocaust become emotionally hardened to performing their grim tasks?
Machines
broke down, but the people handling them never did. How could it be that the
people operating the gas chambers and ovens were more reliable than the
machines? Had they been trained mechanically and psychologically to stand the
terrific strain? The question bothered me for years. All facts pointed toward
the conclusion that special cadres of technically skilled and emotionally
hardened executioners were trained somewhere. Castle Hartheim and the other
euthanasia centers were the answer. (p. 315)
Continue reading Breggin's "Psychiatry's Role in the Holocaust," 1993 . . .
A Sign for Cain: An Exploration of Human Violence, Fredric Wertham, 1966.
