Psychiatry Under National Socialism: Actors, Not Victims

Decades passed before the German psychiatric community openly acknowledged the role of its predecessors during the Nazi era, said Frank Schneider, M.D., Ph.D., today at APA's 2015 annual meeting in Toronto.

“Psychiatrists and psychiatry were not victims; they were actors,” said Schneider, a professor of psychiatry, psychotherapy, and psychosomatics at Aachen University in Germany. They took part in identifying Germans with severe mental, neurological, and physical illnesses under a 1933 law for the “Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring.” Nearly 400,000 of those people were forcibly sterilized, and 300,000 were murdered in designated killing centers by the Nazi regime, a prelude to the mass killings that were to follow during World War II.

Those victims were not recognized as such until long after the war. “It was treated as a side issue or a minor problem,” said Schneider. “No one wanted to hear the story.”

Many of the physicians who participated went back to civilian life without facing any consequences. Two even became president of the post-war German Psychiatric Association (DGPPN).

“In the 1960s and 1970s, psychiatrists saw themselves as victims, and only beginning in the 1980s was there an attempt to examine the past,” said Schneider. Those efforts grew stronger over the years, and in 2009 the DGPPN commissioned an international group of researchers to study the period. One result was the production of an exhibition called “Registered, Persecuted, Annihilated” that was displayed in the German Parliament and is now traveling to numerous cities around the country.

“This was a dark chapter in German psychiatry, but it is still important to learn from it,” said Schneider.