gins of the mass murder of the s.
The Nuremberg Trials convicted a number of psychiatrists who held key positions in Nazi regimes" -- Reference Lapon, Lenny (1986). Mass Murderers in White Coats : Psychiatric Genocide in Nazi Germany and the United States. The tie between Hitler and the eugenic psychiatrists
was so close that much of Mein Kampf is literally indistinguishable in language and intone from the major international journals and psychiatric textbooks of the time. To quote from a few of many such passages in
Mein Kampf: To demand that defective people be prevented from propagating equally defective offspring is a demand
for the clearest reason and, if systematically executed, represents the most humane act of mankind ..." Those who are physically and mentally unhealthy and unworthy must not perpetuate their suffering in the bodies of their children ..." A prevention of the faculty and opportunity to procreate on the part of the physically degenerate and the mentally sick ... would not only free humanity from an immeasurable misfortune but would lead to a recovery which today seems scarcely conceivable."
Hitler received support from psychiatrists and social scientists around the world after he took power. Many articles in the world's leading medical journals monitored and heaped praise on Hitler's eugenic legislation and policies. Records uncovered by Abrams at the hospital confirm that the extermination had begun as apart of a national psychiatric program before Hitler took on the systematic murder of the Jews. Hundreds of patients had been shipped off to psychiatric extermination centers prior to the end of 1941, when the national program was largely abandoned and local state mental hospitals took over "the action" on their own. The psychiatric extermination
program was not a hidden, secret shame of psychiatry - at least, not at the start. It was organized by leading professors of psychiatry and directors of mental hospitals through a series of national meetings and workshops. So-called euthanasia forms were circulated
to individual hospitals, and final approval of each death was then given in Berlin by a committee of the nation's outstanding psychiatrists. By January patients were being shipped to six special extermination centers staffed by psychiatrists. In late 1941, public outrage and lack of enthusiasm from Hitler pushed the program underground, but between 100,000 and 200,000 German mental patients had been killed. From then on,
individual institutions, such as that at Kaufbeuren,
continued to act on their own, even admitting new patients for the purpose of murdering them. At the end of the war, many large institutions
were entirely empty, and estimates from various war-crime tribunals,
including Nuremberg, estimate the number of dead to be between 250,000 and
300,000, mostly inmates of psychiatric hospitals and homes for the retarded.
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