Psychiatry, genocide and the National Socialist State: lessons learnt, ignored and forgotten.

Abstract

The genocide of European Jews perpetrated by the National Socialist (Nazi) regime in Germany and its satellites was a distinctly modern event. The bureaucratised and industrialised nature of the Nazi plan (the Endlösung or Final Solution) is generally considered the defining characteristic of the Nazi regime’s genocide. It placed that particular genocidal endeavour in a modernist context, unparalleled in human history. Prior to the establishment of extermination camps in Poland, the Nazi regime had perpetrated or fomented both sporadic massacres and a militarised program of executions in Eastern Europe, in what has been termed “Holocaust by bullets” (Desbois, 2008). Yet despite the murder of 1.5 million Jews by SS and police mobile killing squads (Einsatzgruppen), the defining symbol of the Holocaust was the industrialised killing centre at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Importantly, the gas chambers of the Reinhard camps (Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka II) and Auschwitz-Birkenau did not appear de novo for the purposes of killing Europe’s Jews (Friedlander, 1995). The medical profession, in collusion with Adolf Hitler’s Chancellery (KdF), had developed and refined a large scale, state-financed and well-concealed program of victim selection and mass transportation to dedicated killing centres with effective techniques of gassing and disposal of victims’ remains. The template for the Endlösung evolved as a medical procedure, developed primarily by psychiatrists (Burleigh M, 2002).